McGill’s official Black History Month programming kicked off this Feb. 6 with their Black History Month Opening Ceremony and Keynote, featuring architect Shane Laptiste as the keynote speaker. Laptiste, who holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Architecture from McGill, spoke on the importance of reimagining architecture to centre Black voices and create inclusive spaces for Black communities in contemporary architecture.

Lynda Bulimo, an Equity Education Advisor at McGill and host of the ceremony, delivered the opening remarks. 

“Though we celebrate Black History Month institutionally for the ninth year, we know that Black people have long been here, celebrating, resisting, organizing and innovating in so many ways,” Bulimo said. “I want to credit and thank all the Black people who came before us and who made way for this present moment.”

She introduced Robert Spade, assistant professor at the Schulich School of Music and Senior Cultural Advisor at McGill, who officially opened the ceremony with a speech emphasizing tolerance and curiosity.

“The world is mysterious. It’s a wondrous place. If somebody has a way that you don’t understand, it’s okay,” Spade said. “When I was 18, you see, I knew everything. Now that I’m a little older, I feel like I know less and less.”

Spade closed his introduction with a song before passing the microphone to Tynan Jarrett, Director of Equity and Diversity in the Office of the Provost and Dami Bali, President of the McGill chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. After Bali, Claire Mabia, Black Affairs Commissioner of the Student Society of McGill University, spoke about her work overseeing programs like the Black Equity Fund. Finally, David Theodore, Director of McGill’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, introduced the keynote speaker. 

Laptiste began his keynote with a story about his great-grandmother, who came to Montreal in 1922 from Grenada. 

“She came to Montreal as a domestic worker, leaving behind my one-year-old grandfather, and she spent nearly five decades in Montreal living in a range of housing, mostly adjacent to the St. Antoine neighbourhood, now known as Little Burgundy,” Laptiste said in his talk. “Through mostly unwritten rules, it was also the one area that, as a single Black woman, she would have been able to obtain housing in Montreal.”

This personal history drew Laptiste’s attention to the ways Black communities have been systematically pushed to the margins in North American cities through discriminatory housing practices, both legally enforced and informal. 

His interest in architecture began young, and he remained committed to pursuing it despite the barriers he faced in his education. 

“After seeing a Black architect on TV, I was inspired to become an architect and enrolled at McGill School of Architecture,” Laptiste said. “Being one of the few Black students, I encountered a certain invisibility of Black agency and the shaping of space, as well as a lack of recognition of the architecture of Black cultures and communities.”

Since graduating from McGill, Laptiste has co-founded the Toronto-based architecture firm Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA) with Tura Cousins Wilson. Among his ongoing projects, Laptiste described a public fountain in Toronto designed to honour Black residents of 19th-century Toronto, whose names they had found in old city directory books, and an interpretive centre for the Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church built in Oro, Ontario in 1849 by Black veterans of the War of 1812. 

Laptiste is also in the process of designing a memorial dedicated to Samuel Adams, a Black ironworker who came to Canada through the Underground Railroad and invented a popular tool used to excavate gravel from riverbeds for use in reinforced concrete. The memorial incorporates stones from Adams’ original house, repurposing them to create a space for reflection and learning.

In addition to these projects, Laptiste runs workshops, collaborates with researchers studying Black spaces and histories, and engages in discussions with communities about how best to support their needs through architectural projects. 

“There’s the balance of social, aesthetic, functional, economic, cultural, and environmental considerations that are key to the process, and it’s impossible for that to be done from a singular viewpoint,” Laptiste said.