Each architect is reduced to a simply structured transparent sign.  Each is codified by a name, printed in bold uppercase characters, denoting a no-nonsense factual presence in the fashionable typographical garb of a traditionally architectural font.  Below the name is a photograph (or series of up to three photographs), each reflecting the square shape of the cover, as well as the implied square inscribed symmetrically within it.  The shape, placement, and dimensions of each photograph reference a thematically pure and highly stable cartesian geometry that both constructs and parallels the apparent composure, dignity, and stable yet approachable self-assurance of the figures contained within it.  This geometricization brings a "civilizing" power to ethnicity; the "other" posing behind the reductive mask of the same. 

The photographed face, constructed both before the camera and within the photograph, brings a particular authenticated reality into being by its duplication. The seduction of this duplication resides in its assumed transparency (the truth of its exact  duplication and correlation with the world), rather than in its hidden fabrication (the reality of its repetition and the difference between the original and its duplication); it is a myth in demand of perpetual renewal.  The photograph becomes here a particular sign of the highly groomed and the respectable, standing alone against an uncluttered ground, yet locked within the rationality and repetition of its cartesian structure.  These photographs thus rely on a particular structure of differential identity (the name, the face, its isolation, its movement off-center) combined with a normative rationality, each face replacing the one before it in exactly the same position.  The repetition of names and photographs is working within the same logic of a signifying repetition as those complementary stories of struggle and success.  This collective of individuals is displayed as a mechanical series with neither beginning nor end; it is filled with the expectation of a particular type of continuity, yet one that maintains its highly normative repetition. 

To the right of the photographs a third code is introduced, which establishes a relation between the name and signifying face of the individual to the left with the name of the architectural firm that this individual singularly represents and either partially or wholly is understood to own.  The power and prestige of the individual is now guaranteed by his or her relation to this official title, while credibility is established by the listing of achievements (various institutional awards) below it.  We are asked to invest in these institutions (it is expected that we already subscribe to the validity of their myths) and recognize this as the legitimizing structure of success of the status quo.  Below each of these photographs is an autobiographical statement documenting each individual's (or each group's) architectural experience, a process meant to "humanize" the apparently neutral codes.  And although each story is different—fulfilling our desire to see each person individualized—they follow for the most part a parallel pattern.  Each person reveals individual struggles against oppression throughout his or her life, education, or professional career, and each shows how such obstacles were overcome by hard work, optimism, and endurance.  Their pictures, titles, and achievements are intended to show proof of their success as "professional" architects while legitimizing the stated formula. 

The quality and nature of the architectural work displayed on the page(s) opposite becomes entirely secondary to this equation; in fact it is almost evaded.  First, we are not to view the work as a particular African-American architectural manifestation: the book presents itself as being about African-American architects, not African-American architecture—as if the seemingly insurmountable gap between them (temporal as well as geographic) justified their absolute separation, a logic that in itself already pretends to support the neutrality of architectural conventions and values.  Vincent Scully's comments supporting the right of black architects' individualism cannot be disputed, yet the problem with this approach is that it is often simply a tactic used to diffuse the potency and cohesion of a particular community's challenge to a given (architectural) norm and defer its potential for institutionalized change.  In his essay, Scully consistently appeals to the "truth" of the canon as a regulating body, which consistently conceals both the self-serving aims that engender these so-called truths, while disguising the nature of what is being regulated and for whom.  His calls for a return to particular architectural traditions within this country (which has historically ignored its increasing minority populations) amount to a continual enslavement of particular bodies seeking emancipation from the histories that these traditions invoke.  Whereas Scully claims that "truth demands that these architects and others be known because of what they do, not because they are black" (p.11), I would argue that this book proves the opposite, showing how such logic has ingested its own contradiction.  In this text, "what these architects do" has without a doubt been neatly subsumed by the fact that they are black.