African American Museum and Research Library

The African American Museum and Research Library is a roughly 37,000-square-foot cultural campus on the historic Roosevelt High School site at 1601 North Tamarind Avenue in West Palm Beach's Coleman Park neighborhood, long the center of Black life in Palm Beach County. Led by the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties in partnership with the City of West Palm Beach, Palm Beach County and the School District of Palm Beach County, the project pairs restoration of the historic Roosevelt campus and its research library with a new two-story museum building. Bora Architecture & Interiors leads the design with STORYN Studio for Architecture, working alongside landscape architect Hood Design Studio, exhibit designer Local Projects and historian Dr. Nashid S. Madyun. The scheme is organized around a Connected Porches framework, a sequence of indoor and outdoor thresholds that carries the neighborhood's front-porch culture into exhibition galleries, a research library, oral history and education spaces, and community rooms for programming, scholarship and public dialogue.