American architect Germane Barnes aims to illustrate aspects of the African Diaspora by reimagining the three classical columnar orders at the Columnar Disorder exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Named Columnar Disorder, the show comprises a series of models and drawings developed by Barnes around three aspects of the African experience during the Diaspora, especially concerning the slave trade that brought millions of people unwillingly to the United States and other colonies.
The work was informed by the centrality of the three classical columnar orders ? Doric, Ionic and Corinthian ? to architectural education and his experience of the erasure of African influence on classical architecture.
Germane Barnes has created an exhibition challenging the primary of classical architecture narratives "You have an education based on Western ideologies, like my undergrad and graduate architecture school work, where they never started with Egypt," Barnes told Dezeen. "We always start with Vitruvius."
"And so my idea was to create disorder in a field that always represents itself in a certain way, even if representation is not entirely true to the actual history of those components," he continued.
Barnes said he wanted to redesign the columns around three new orders ? migration, labour and identity ? to provide "alternative histories" through the lens of basic architectural components. 
Barnes created life-sized portions as well as s...