A new book, Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class, sets out to tell the life story of its namesake.
Per MIT Press, Meredith’s “bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity.”
Born and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, Meredith was a top student in her class when she graduated high school. She went on to Virginia State University, formerly known as Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute.
In the following years, Meredith “enrolled in the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, New York where she majored in fine arts. There she received a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1930 and a master’s degree in 1934.”
Despite having no formal training in architecture, Meredith designed and built her home, named “Azurest South,” which was believed to be “‘one of the most advanced residential designs in the state in its day’ and a bold investigation of the International Style, a style that espoused a complete break with architectural traditions,” the Virginia State University Alumni profile posits.
Author Jacqueline Taylor told ESSENCE, “What originally drew me to the topic was the house. As a historian of architecture, I’m very interested in buildings of the modern era, their stylistic qualities as well as the social and political connotations of something entirely new and free from historical reference.”
“Azurest South was a uniquely modern house. As a designed object, the building was neither monumental nor exquisitely beautiful, but it had a certain charm, an allure, that was irresistible. Once I began to discover the story of the building’s designer, I was captivated,” continued Taylor.
“Here was a woman, a Black woman, and a lesbian, determined to enter the white male dominant profession of architecture and build herself into history, creating a place that could be a refuge, hiding in plain sight, for herself and her lover,” Taylor said.
Echoing Taylor’s sentiments, despite never being registered as an architect, at the time Meredith was only one out of a very small number of Black architects, and even smaller considering the dearth of Black female architects at the time.
Over the course of her life, Meredith designed for “friends and family in Virginia, Texas, and Sag Harbor, a Long Island (NY) resort for wealthy whites, including the Roosevelt family, where she and her sister, Maude Kenney Meredith Terry, worked together to create an enclave of vacation homes for middle-class blacks they named ‘Azurest North.’”
Taylor’s work shines a light on this trailblazing figure in history, highlighting how Black women were “at the forefront of culture in early twentieth-century America, caught between expectation and ambition, responsibility and desire.”