Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association. The book won the Joe William Trotter Jr. Prize for Best First Book in Urban History and received an honorable mention for the inaugural Alison Isenberg Prize for Best Book on Urban Placemaking.
Amber Wiley’s Model Schools in the Model City examines how school architecture reflects Black history, activism and community formation in Washington, D.C. Drawing on photographs, family stories, school records, maps, statistical data, architectural plans, litigation and community organization records, Wiley traces the history of Black education and school architecture from the antebellum era through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, white flight, self-segregated school formation and contemporary gentrification. The book connects architectural history with racial activism, education, urban planning, preservation and Black political struggle.
Wiley’s book examines how Black Washingtonians made education a cornerstone in the struggle for racial equality and how they built and shaped a public education system amid changing politics, city governance and persistent racial inequality. The book explores schools ranging from ornate designs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the Brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, while highlighting the educators, politicians, activists, community leaders, citizens and architects who shaped these spaces and Washington, D.C.
The Urban History Association (UHA) was founded in Cincinnati in 1988 to stimulate interest and research in the history of cities across periods and geographic areas. The organization promotes interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the urban experience and includes historians, geographers, sociologists, planners and public history professionals.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association.
Research initiated by Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture alumna Naila Hasan during her master’s studies at the University of Oklahoma has continued through faculty collaboration and resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce Esther Thorp, Tyler Boydstun and Chukwuma Nwokoye as the winners of the 2026 Construction Innovation Translation Hub (CIThub) Student Ideas Competition.
