MIT Architecture

The MIT NOMAS Lecture: Curry J. Hackett

The MIT NOMAS lecture featured transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and NYU professor Curry J. Hackett, who interrogates Black relationships to land, media, and memory through a practice he calls Wayside. Hackett frames land acknowledgments as a starting point for probing the “black sense of place” described by Katherine McKittrick, using the metaphor of “channels” to move across disciplines—architecture, sound, AI, and speculative fiction—to expose hidden narratives of enclosure, redlining, and the Middle Passage. He illustrated these ideas with the “Hold” installation in Harvard’s Radcliffe Yard, a soundscape blending Charles River recordings and a personal baptism story, and cited Bell Hooks’s Appalachian Elegy and Cadia Hartman’s notion of chorus as an “enclosed dance” that informs the work’s choreography of space. By marrying critical Black studies with design tools, Hackett proposes a generative form of enclosure that rewrites historical records and offers new visual‑media strategies for reparative architecture, signaling a shift toward more inclusive, place‑based curricula in academia and practice.