Dedication to the Memory of J. Max Bond, Jr.

Callaloo • Art 2015 is dedicated to the memory of J. MAX BOND, JR. American Architect

(July 17, 1935–February 18, 2009)

Courtesy of Davis Brody Bond, LLP

Max saw architecture as a collaborative art form; the product of many voices. He once used the analogy that the design of the NMAAHC is akin to a jazz performance in which individual artists inspire each other in a dynamic unscripted fashion, as opposed to a performance in which a single leader directs his musicians.

—Robert Anderson

J. Max Bond, Jr., architect and educator, was born on July 17, 1935, in Louisville, Kentucky. On February 18, 2009, he died of cancer at his home in New York City, and is survived by his wife Jean Carey Bond and their children, Ruth M. Bond and Carey Julian Bond, and two grandchildren, Jane Clement Bond and George Clement Bond, sister and brother. J. Max Bond, Jr., is the son of Ruth E. Clement Bond and J. Max Bond, Sr., whose father is James M. Bond, the grandfather of Julian Bond, son of Horace Mann Bond. J. Max Bond, Jr., grew up in a family of achievers as far back as his grandfather. Mr. Bond’s grandfather, James M. Bond, who was a two-year-old enslaved child when the Civil War began, became a Congregational minister with a superior education he earned at Berea and Oberlin colleges, receiving a Bachelor of Divinity in 1896 from the latter and thus establishing superior education and very high achievements as family markers. As Roger M. Williams demonstrates in The Bonds: An American Family (1971), this widely known black family, with roots in Kentucky, was resolute in its affirmation of the high examples of education and achievements, which James M. Bond, the ex-slave, epitomized. J. Max Bond, Sr., his son, received the PhD in sociology and economics from the University of Southern California in 1937, and later became President of the University of Liberia. Randy Kennedy reported in International New York Times (April 1, 2009) that J. Max Bond, Jr., speaking of his father, J. Max Bond, Sr., said, “We had a funny relationship. . . . It was a good relationship particularly in terms of these high expectations. . . . But the difficult side is you’re always expected to do better.” Throughout the generations, the Bonds always expected high aspirations among and exceptional achievements from their children and grandchildren. Those demands and expectations were in no way lost on J. Max Bond, Jr., the architect. Here is a family that brooked no mediocrity.

In 1955, J. Max Bond, Jr., graduated from Harvard College with a BA degree, and in 1958 he was awarded the MA degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. With the support of a Fulbright fellowship in 1958, he left the USA to study architecture in Paris with Le Corbusier studio, where he worked under the aegis of André Wogenscky, a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, who was revered worldwide as a modernist architect. During the 1960s, J. Max Bond, Jr., went south of Europe to Tunisia in North Africa and to Ghana in West Africa. In Ghana, he taught at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and designed a number of buildings, the most recognized being Ghana’s Bolgatanga Regional Library, a four building structure with special roof ventilation that requires no electric air conditioning. Before leaving Africa and returning home to the United States, he traveled in Tunisia studying its indigenous architecture, one feature of a regional African structural design that interested him as early as his student days at Harvard University.

Shortly after he returned to the United States from Africa in 1969, J. Max Bond, Jr., went to California to work and study with the distinguished Paul R. Williams, the first black person to be admitted to the American Institute of Architects (1923). Before Max Bond left the USA during the early 1960s, he had encountered difficulty finding employment as an architect with a firm, a common white racist practice against...