This NYSID Faculty Member, Who Designed Homes for Spike Lee & Wesley Snipes, Defined His Aesthetic During a Trip to South Africa

By 1992, architect and designer Jack Travis had already traveled through much of Europe and journeyed to Senegal. But it was his trip to South Africa that year that changed the way he sees the world. His journey was in the midst of the “One Man, One Vote” movement led by Nelson Mandela, just before a new South African constitution that enfranchised Blacks and other racial groups was adopted in 1993. When Travis arrived at the airport in Johannesburg, he and the one other Black man on the plane were separated from the whites and told to go to a different line for admission into the country. Later, his friend and colleague, the architect Peter Malefane, picked him up and took him to an upscale restaurant where he found the tables were totally segregated. Travis was outraged as he noticed, “It was the people themselves, conditioned, who were carrying on policies that had already been legally abolished.” 

His friend told him he planned to take him to Soweto, the largest Black township of the City of Johannesburg. Soweto, forged by the political and physical segregation of the Apartheid government, was known primarily as a place of shantytowns and slums inhabited by the working poor. It’s also the site of the Soweto Uprising, which sparked an international outcry against Apartheid. Says Travis, “I noticed that there was one entrance in and out of Soweto, and that this was a way of maintaining control over the Blacks.” So Travis was quite shocked when the part of Soweto he was escorted to was an eighteen-hole golf course! He and his friend were visiting the three-story home of one of the country’s top ophthalmologists, a Black South African. Remembers Travis, “The family was proud of their home, but the house was just a big box. There was no real architecture from my standpoint, no philosophy. It was an imitation of what the white people had: a McMansion.” 

Later, he traveled to the villages in rural areas outside Johannesburg where he was able to observe the surfacing of Ndebele tribe houses. He says, “I saw Black people who were not architects or designers painting mud houses made out of the soil they walk on. The men make the bricks from the earth. The women paint the houses in patterns and colors that reference family history like a coat of arms. I spoke to a woman who sourced the green color of her house from a field but then the orange color from the local equivalent of a 7-Eleven nearby. This was the first time I grasped the African concept of the ‘imperfect perfect,’ making of beauty from what is flawed and available and comes from the earth. Nobody studies this formally. It is handed down. This made a deep impression on me.” 

This concept became central to Travis’ design ethos. “I have been digging for three decades to find that ‘imperfect perfect,’” he says, “Design can evolve from something that is natural and cultural and can speak to a tradition that is other than Western. There are problems, yes, but in Africa there are people who travel on airplanes across the globe yet still others who follow the herds and the rhythm of the seasons. I have been trying to find this harmony between modern life and connectedness to the land and nature in all of my work.” 

Jack Travis, the owner and co-principal of Jack Travis Architect, has designed multimillion-dollar homes for celebrities such as Spike Lee, Wesley Snipes, and the late John Saunders. However, the work he is proudest of is a relatively modest Harlem apartment he and his business partner, Bernadette Berry, produced for the African American chef Michael Gittens in the late 2000s. The budget for the project was tight, and the team made a choice to leave parts of the space unfinished, an encapsulation of that “imperfect perfect.” “Michael is a dark-skinned Black man with a good, strong sense of self and the desire to entertain people in his home. He had a beautiful collection of African and African American art and photography. I cleaned up the Eurocentric envelope and raised the kitchen two steps and opened up the wall so he could see his guests in the dining area. I left the cookery out for display. We used his art and we played on a foundation of his identity. We were ok with leaving parts unfinished, imperfect. We didn’t refinish the wood flooring. Something about this space said, We live in a place that’s not complete for us, but we still find ways to take control of our lives. To me, the space was about American identity from a Black perspective.” Jack Travis teaches Thesis and Thesis Preparation at NYSID, and he often uses the Gittens residence as a lecture subject in his classes. 

Travis believes the great power of travel for designers is in helping them “identify a ‘point of departure’ in their work.” Travis explains, “All designers have a ‘point of beginning,’ when they decide they want to become a designer (helping reshape the Westside community in Las Vegas where I grew up was mine). Next, they find a ‘point of reference,’ something that grabs them as a focus in their initial study of design. (For me, it was Modernism.) Finally, there is the ‘point of departure’,” what makes you the individual designer.” He adds, “For me, that’s the exploration of a Black aesthetic that is around us and hiding in plain view. Traveling continues to help me identify it.” 

Indeed, Travis has traveled to Japan, China, Korea, and Ghana in recent years. Travel is essential to the development of all designers, even those who already have deep expertise and experience.