Azurest South: The Virginia Home Where a Pioneering Queer Black Architect’s Legacy Lives

Just off the campus of Virginia State University—a historically Black land-grant university south of Richmond—sits a little white house. Called Azurest South, the five room, single-story cottage is crafted of concrete blocks coated in stucco with a flat roof and curved metal coping. Glass blocks make up the long, horizontal windows at two of the home’s rounded corners, and bright-blue accents pop off the mostly white exterior. It’s a lauded example of International Style architecture (more today than when completed), and though it could still use some interior repairs to get it to where it once was, it’s a lovely house. 

It’s also an important one, given its creator and longtime inhabitant. One of the country’s earliest Black female architects, Amaza Lee Meredith was also an artist, photographer, and the founder of VSU’s fine arts department. The product of a then-illegal interracial marriage, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1895, Meredith fell in love with design and craftsmanship via her father, Samuel, a white craftsman and carpenter who designed and built their family home. After high school, though, when Meredith expressed an interest in becoming an architect, her father refused to give his approval, knowing the pressures and discrimination his daughter would face as a woman of color entering a field that was almost exclusively dominated by white men. (The first Black architect in Virginia, Charles Thaddeus Russell, had only just received his license in 1909.) 

Higher education for Black people was also extremely restrictive in the South, with most being forced to head north to pursue any sort of advanced degree. Combined, those pressures and limitations are probably what led Meredith to first pursue a career as a school teacher, then as an art educator and professor. (While working on her thesis at Columbia Teachers College in New York—where she was during the Harlem Renaissance, to her delight—Meredith began to develop a curriculum about how and why to teach African art history, which she thought should encompass the creation of everything from ceremonial masks to utensils.)

A passionate advocate for her field, Meredith’s life and work blazed trails in the architecture world, but her contributions are often unknown or under-heralded compared to her white male modernist counterparts. A new MIT Press book hopes to change all that, though. Penned by Jacqueline Taylor, a writer who tends to focus on the intersection of art and race and gender, Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern uses Azurest South as a lens through which to see Meredith’s life and development, all of which Taylor argues must be seen within the context of her experience as a queer, mixed-race woman living in the segregated South.

Take, for instance, Petersburg, Virginia, where, in 1939, Meredith completed Azurest South on a plot of land she purchased for $500. The plot Meredith bought, which borders two former plantations, sits surrounded by homes and buildings built in the Colonial Revival style—a style that pays homage to an era that, for many including Meredith, symbolizes only oppression. Is it really any wonder that for the first home she designed—a building where she’d finally get to move in with her longtime partner, Edna Meade Colson, also a Black educator and activist—she’d opt for an architectural style that signals a fresh, clean step away from existing design traditions and their baggage?

Despite legal discrimination against Black and queer partnerships at the time, Meredith and Colson lived together in Azurest South for 45 years, using it as both a residence and workplace. There’s no primary bedroom in the home—just two identical bedrooms, suggesting the pair’s equal partnership—and the kitchen sits just off the garage and carport, a move that both signifies the importance of the automobile in modern life but that also reminds that, for Black women at the time in the Jim Crow South, having a car meant having (generally) safe passage between work and home, especially at night. As Taylor suggests in the book, for Meredith and Colson, the construction of the Azurest "was a more certain way of finding true security and stability in a life otherwise tormented by the dangers of discrimination, segregation, and racism."

That’s also why Meredith built a studio and workspace for the pair in the home, which she outfitted with a unique, curvilinear fireplace, built-in window seats, and lots of storage space and shelving. At home, Meredith and Colson could live in their own world and reality, away from whatever hateful eyes might be on them in the outside world. Late writer and activist bell hooks once wrote that in the Black community, being able to create or own a home has long been a bit of a political statement, stating that in a world of "radical apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist."

For Meredith, Azurest South seems to have been that and more, offering the educator not only sanctuary, but also a place to express and explore her passions. As a believer in Arthur Wesley Dow’s "Composition" theory and a lover of photography, Meredith used her home as a testing ground for her design theories. She loved the interplay of light and dark around the home, and the creation of positive and negative space, believing as Dow did that, as he once put it, "The beauty of simple spacing is found in things great and small, from a cathedral tower to a cupboard shelf."

She also owned a copy of The 1938 Book of Small Houses: A New Authoritative Guide Book for Prospective Home Builders, which was released by the editors of Architectural Forum and featured works like Richard Neutra’s Plywood House and the V.M.S. Kaufmann House in Minneapolis, which—not unlike Azurest North—used a wall of glass block to get light into the home. Meredith was inspired by the use of sustainable and affordable materials by the designers in the book and put that knowledge to use in her own home.

What’s interesting—or tragic, really—is that while Meredith’s home stands as such an exceptional example of early International Style, with its streamlined aesthetic and modernist elements, her work was (and still is) often overlooked in favor of her white male counterparts. People like George Fred Keck, Kenneth Day, and Walter Gropius were hailed for their use of steel, glass block, and industrial windows in publications like Architectural Forum and amongst their peers at architectural conferences, all while Meredith toiled away at Virginia State, where she focused on enriching the lives of her students rather than pursuing the recognition that was probably always just out of reach.

Though Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern isn’t a comprehensive look at the work of the trailblazing architect, it’s an interesting one. (Meredith never actually wrote about her work, though she did design other homes in Texas and Sag Harbor, New York, where she helped develop Azurest North, a plot of vacation homes bought and held by middle-class Black Americans.) While it’s a joy to look back at Meredith’s world through the book’s photos and her architectural drawings, what’s more interesting and more productive is using the late architect’s story as a reminder of the segregated and unsympathetic world that Meredith was born into and went on to inhabit, in all her complexity, intelligence, and passion. No work, no matter how important, is created in a vacuum, and it’s only by examining the wholeness of Meredith’s life that we can really start to appreciate how important she really was. 

Top photo of Amaza Lee Meredith driving circa 1920 courtesy of Virginia State University Special Collections and Archives; published in Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern by Jacqueline Taylor (The MIT Press)

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