J. Max Bond Jr.

James Max Bond Jr. was born on the seventeenth of July 1935 at Louisville, Kentucky, the son of J. Max Bond Sr. — a sociologist and the president of the Fort Valley State College in Georgia and subsequently the United States Information Agency director — and Ruth Clement Bond, a writer. He was raised in the academic Black middle-class household of his father’s university appointments — at the Atlanta University, the Tuskegee Institute, and the Dillard University at New Orleans — and educated at the Atlanta University Laboratory School.

He enrolled at fifteen in 1951 at the Harvard College and completed the Bachelor of Arts in 1955 in art history. He took the Master of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1958 under Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius.

He was hired in 1958 by the firm of Pedro Ramírez Vázquez at Mexico City and worked the Mexican Museum of Anthropology (1958–1962). He moved in 1964 to the Republic of Ghana to teach at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology at Kumasi.

He returned to New York in 1967 and entered partnership in 1969 with Donald Ryder in the firm of Bond Ryder Associates at Harlem — the principal Black-owned architectural firm of New York City of the 1970s. He merged the firm in 1990 into Davis Brody Bond.

He designed during the Bond Ryder partnership and the Davis Brody Bond partnership the Studio Museum in Harlem on West 125th Street (1982), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Lenox Avenue at Harlem (1980), the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change at Atlanta (1982), the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute at Birmingham, Alabama (1992), and the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center site (completed 2011, posthumous).

He taught architecture at the Columbia University School of Architecture and the City College of New York Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture from 1980 to 2009 and was dean of the City College school from 1985 to 1991.

He died at New York on the eighteenth of February 2009 of pancreatic cancer, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the architect of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.