Witness braids text and image to tell the story of Duvall Decker, an AIA Firm Award-winning architecture office rooted in Mississippi and committed to a practice in search of the public good. Spanning the firm’s early beginnings through the completion of the Greenville Federal Courthouse, the book illustrates ten milestone projects that reveal the breadth and depth of their built work. Seven critical essays offer textured readings of the firm’s ethos, situating their practice within its cultural, social, and temporal context. Written from the perspective of an attuned witness who shares a love for the South and its people, the essays explore themes of kinship, resistance, place, tectonics, and orchestration in architectural practice. Visual and textual marginalia thread through the book, standing on their own while also enriching the primary essays and project narratives. Observational voices from those who have collaborated with or been shaped by the firm provide rare and intimate insights. A sister volume to Foundations, Witness is both a close study of Duvall Decker’s architecture and a broader meditation on what it means to practice architecture as an act of witness in and from the American South.
