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Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden ‘90 MArch is Professor of Professional Practice, Director of the MArch Program, Sequence Director for Advanced Architecture Studios, and Co-Director of the Global Africa Lab at Columbia GSAPP, an innovative research initiative that explores the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. Gooden is also the Director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design, a transdisciplinary practice dedicated to the design and exploration of architecture and its relationships to culture and knowledge. His practice merges architectural design with landscape, urbanism, history, cultural production and performance. Gooden graduated magna cum laude from Clemson University in 1987 with a B.S. in Design and received a Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1990 and is a recipient of the McKim Prize.

Gooden is the recipient numerous design awards, citations, and recognitions and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the International Exhibition of Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy; Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen; the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi); Storefront for Art and Architecture; the National Building Museum in Washington, DC; and the Municipal Arts Society in New York. His work has also been featured in journals and publications including ARTFORUM International Magazine, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Wallpaper, Architecture & Urbanism (A+U), and The New York Times. Gooden’s installation work entitled The Refusal of Space was featured in the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Refusal of Space is an interdisciplinary multi-media protest machine incorporating sound, video, and projected photography that explores the spatial choreographies of liberation from the post-Reconstruction era to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matters Movement of today through enacting the spatial action of protests, marches, and sit-ins in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design seeks to overhaul the underlying epistemologies and logics of space-making which dominate Western thought, politics, cultural imagination, and everyday spatial praxes. His performance works include The Motion of Light in Water (2018), Working on Water (2019), Blackground: Dispossession and Inheritance (2019) and Black Holes Ain’t So Black (2021 - 2022). Gooden is a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a 2019 recipient of a National Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production. Gooden is also a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, formed by a group of Black architects, artists, designers, and scholars, the BRC aims to amplify knowledge production and spatial practices by individuals and organizations that further the reconstruction project.

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RECENT PUBLICATIONS

“Jimmy Robert: Imitation of Lives.” On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016-2021. Edited by Charles Aubin. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co. 2022.

“Towards and Afro-Imaginary.” Theorising Architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Perspectives, Questions and Concepts. Edited by Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2021.

“Monuments, Memorials’ and Purgatory.” A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention. Edited by Giovanna Borasi. Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2021.

“Black Anterior: What can black dada do for architecture.” Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen. Edited by Alec Mapes-Francis. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021. “Scanning Modernity: Sondra Perry and the Dark Side of Progress.” Sondra Perry: A Terrible Thing. Edited by Will Brown. New York: Hatje Cantz. 2021.

“Sculpture of the (Dis)Tempered Environment.” Woody de Othello Monograph. New York: Karma Books, 2021.

“Appearances and (Non)Erasures: Mapping Confederate Monuments and the Racial Conditionedness of Liberation,” …And Other Such Stories. Chicago Architecture Biennial, New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. 2019.

“Re-Mastry: Paul R. Williams and the Architecture of Housing and Race.” Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening. Edited by Sandra Jackson-Dumont. New York: The Museum of Metropolitan Art. 2018.

Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. 2016.

“Image City Spectacles: Imagining a World Class African City” with Mabel Wilson in Entr’acte: Performing Publics, Media and Architecture. Edited by Jordan Geiger, series “Avante Gardes in Performance/Radical Acts” co-edited Sarah Bay-Cheng and Martin Harries. London: Palgrave, 2015.

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“Sculpture of the (Dis)Tempered Environment.” Woody de Othello Monograph. New York: Karma Books, 2021.

Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. 2016.

Courses

Course	Semester	Title	Instructor	Requirements & Sequence	Location & Time	Session & Points	Call No.
A4005‑1	Fall 2025	Advanced Studio V	Mario Gooden, Lydia Kallipoliti	Architecture Studio AAD Studio Architecture Required	113 AVERY (W ONLY) M + TH 1:30 - 6:30 , W 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM	FULL SEMESTER 9 Points	10629
A4105‑8	Fall 2025	Advanced Studio V	Mario Gooden	Architecture Studio AAD Studio Architecture Required	600 + 700 AVERY	FULL SEMESTER	10637
A4006‑1	Spring 2025	Advanced Studio VI	Mario Gooden, Lydia Kallipoliti	Architecture Studio AAD Studio	113 AVERY M+TH(1:30 PM- 6:30 PM), W (1:30 PM - 3:30 PM)	FULL SEMESTER 9 Points	10994