Birmingham, AL
Telling the story of one of the first professionally trained African American architects in the country.
Wallace A. Rayfield was the second formally educated practicing African American architect in the United States. Trained at Howard University, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, he moved to Birmingham in 1907 and spent more than three decades shaping the physical landscape of Black life in the Jim Crow South, designing churches, schools, fraternal lodges, and homes for a community denied access to white architects.
Encore worked with Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to create the Wallace A. Rayfield Museum, which opened in 2022 inside the church he himself designed. Encore provided research, content development, and full exhibit design services, building an experience that traces Rayfield's biography, his body of work, and his enduring role in the creation of what historians call "Black Birmingham."
The museum occupies a wing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the same building Rayfield designed in 1911, which survived the 1963 bombing and stands today as a National Historic Landmark. The interpretive program honors both the architect and the century of history his building has witnessed.
