The USC School of Architecture is excited to announce the inaugural Paul R. Williams Archive Fellow, Malcolm John Rio.  

Rio is a doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University, working under the guidance of committee chair Mabel O. Wilson. Their dissertation explores the architectural contributions of Haiti at various world’s fairs, focusing on how discussions surrounding these contributions shaped racial and national identities. By examining how key figures from Haiti and the African diaspora navigated the intertwined relationship between race and nation, Rio’s dissertation addresses how these figures used the symbolic and material aspects of architecture to realize their various aspirations. 

Among the works Rio’s dissertation considers are a series of hotels built to support a tourism boom inaugurated by the 1949–1950 Bicentennial International Exposition of Port-au-Prince, including a speculative hotel and casino design by Paul R. Williams and A. Quincy Jones. As a fellow at the USC School of Architecture, Rio plans to situate this “Casino & Hotel in Haiti” project within the historiography of Haitian tourism and postwar architectural production.  

Rio states, “As a queer person of color and child of a Haitian immigrant, my research and identity are inherently linked, and have been informed by the experience that one-size fits all solutions rarely address the complexities of the world. I therefore strive to be an articulate voice and critical thinker whose teaching and scholarship reflect a sensitivity to an increasingly diverse, global, and technological environment.”              

Rio will seek to understand how Paul R. Williams’ own racial identity and his larger globalized practice might be mapped onto racial mythologies within the African diaspora relative to the introduction of multiple new tourist zones throughout the Caribbean and the larger global south in the immediate postwar period.  

An aim of this research is to understand how "blackness" might appear against the archival records of architectural works, how structural bias may be concealed through the technical aspects of architectural practices, and how certain categorizations might position a figure like Paul R. Williams within the legacies of American professional practice, the African Diaspora, and the Pan-American political economy. For Rio, this work will directly contribute to understanding of how architecture facilitates national and racial recognition, determinations of economic value and political legitimacy, as well as distinctions of racial ability and rank.  

Extrapolating from the specifics of Haiti and Paul R. Williams, Rio hopes that this research will articulate the value of architectural knowledge to historical research and vice versa, providing a practical and conceptual framework for engaging contemporary practices so that similar systems might be identified and critically engaged. The point of identifying these patterns is so that Rio and others are better equipped to reckon with the ways in which we are subject to and agents of categorization, typification, and definition within our built environment. 

Rio currently holds a Master of Philosophy from Columbia University, a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design as well as a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy from Towson University. Prior to joining USC, they previously taught at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Columbia University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). 

To learn more about the Paul R. Williams Architecture Archive, visit: https://arch.usc.edu/paul-r-williams-archive. The archive was acquired by USC and the Getty Research Institute from the Paul R. Williams Estate in 2020. Funding for this new fellowship program has been generously provided by an institutional “Humanities in Place” grant from The Mellon Foundation.