Huff + Gooden Architects is a collaborative architecture practice dedicated to the design and exploration of architecture and its relationships to culture and knowledge. The firm’s approach to design is taken as an interpretation and translation of each project’s cultural and geographical situations. At a fundamental level, the necessity of architecture in the firm’s works is about the experience of architecture to engage intellectually, spatially, and spiritually.
Huff + Gooden and the firm’s design for the Virginia Key Beach Park Museum is included in the American architectural history textbook, USA: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, 2008) by Gwendolyn Wright. In chapter seven, “Disjunctures and Alternatives, 1985 to the Present” Wright states:
“Significant architecture helps us confront contentious topics. Huff+Gooden, an African- American firm based in Charleston, South Carolina, have designed a small museum for the Virginia Key Beach Park (2005–8) that underscores the ambiguities of racial pride and segregation….The structure and the larger landscape by Walter Hood continue the theme of multiplicities and changes overtime…This new sensibility in American modern architecture encourages visitors to contemplate multiple dimensions of the past and the future, buildings and their surroundings.”