Witness

Witness braids together text and image to tell the story of Duvall Decker, an architecture office rooted in Mississippi and committed to a practice in search of the public good. Spanning from the firm’s early beginnings to the completion of the Greenville Federal Courthouse, the book illuminates ten milestone projects that reveal the breadth and depth of their built work. Seven critical essays offer textured readings of the firm’s ethos, placing their work in cultural 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, regional identity, tectonics, and orchestration in architectural practice. Visual and textual marginalia thread through the book, standing on their own while 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 to Foundations, Witness is both a deep dive into Duvall Decker’s work and a broader meditation on what it means to practice architecture as witness in and from the American South.