Germane Barnes is Gathering by Design

What makes the beauty salon or barbershop the cornerstone of a community? Why does the kitchen hold so much space in our collective memory? How does an architect center people—not buildings or objects—in a field known for its formalism and rigidity?

Germane Barnes thinks a lot about architecture’s social and political agency. Working at the intersection of social practice and storytelling, his projects are marked by the moments when communities take center stage.

Germane is the Principal of Studio Barnes and an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture, where he is also the Director of the Community Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL). His work has been included in The Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America and in the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He won the 2021 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, was a 2021–22 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and was a member of the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada.

His widely published project Griot was included in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, The Laboratory of the Future. In the same year, the public work Ukhamba was commissioned for Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) Pavilions, curated by Isabela Villanueva, at Miami-Dade College.

Germane is a 2024 Commissioner Artist.

Video filmed by Preguntas Studio. Special thanks to the entire team at MOAD for their generous support.