by Dr. Dams Up Water

A dwelling is never just a structure. It is an argument about what matters.

When IBé Crawley began constructing dwellings in the style of southern shotgun houses in 2013, she was not merely reviving an architectural form; she was invoking a lineage. The shotgun house—linear, efficient, intimate—has long been associated with Black Southern life, with survival under constraint, with the sacred choreography of moving forward because there is nowhere else to go. Crawley’s early dwellings, followed by the studio addition to her own residence that same year, functioned as both shelter and proposition: that art-making, living, and spirit need not be separated by walls thicker than necessity.

By 2016, when she built a standalone studio at the rear of her investment property, the pattern had become clear. Crawley’s architecture was iterative, devotional. Each structure refined a question she had been asking since her departure from the Pentecostal church of her upbringing: Where does the Holy Spirit live, once it is no longer confined to sanctioned doctrine?

Her separation from Pentecostalism was not a rejection of spirit but a relocation of it. In turning toward an African-centered religious practice, Crawley aligned belief with ancestry, ritual with memory, and space with intention. The buildings followed. They were not churches, but they were not secular. They were working spaces—sites of making—that acknowledged the presence of something more than the maker.

The acquisition of a historic 1830 building in 2021 marked another turn. To practice her craft inside a structure that had already lived multiple lives was to enter into conversation with time itself. Historic buildings are never neutral; they carry residue. Crawley’s presence within such a space suggests a theology of repair rather than erasure—of inhabiting history without submitting to it.

What is striking is how this spatial theology extended generationally.

Her son, Antarah Crawley, grew up within these constructed philosophies. It is therefore no surprise that he, too, built a dwelling—though his took the form of a temple. Hand-built of concrete masonry units behind the studio in historic Anacostia, the structure is materially heavier than his mother’s shotgun-inspired works. Concrete block does not glide; it anchors. It insists.

Antarah’s religious path diverged as well. Developing faith in the Most High God, he dedicated the temple in part to his stillborn daughter, Ala. In this act, the building becomes more than a place of worship; it becomes a vessel for grief, remembrance, and continuity. Where life could not dwell, meaning would. The temple stands not as a monument to loss, but as a refusal to let absence be the final word.

Together, these acts—mother and son, studio and temple—suggest that the Holy Spirit is not housed by institution but invited by intention. It arrives where hands work honestly, where memory is honored, where loss is spoken aloud and given form. The Spirit, in this telling, is architectural. It requires framing. It asks for care.

In a time when housing is treated as commodity and faith as brand, the Crawleys offer another model: dwelling as devotion. Their buildings do not preach. They listen. And in that listening, they make room—for art, for ancestry, for the dead, for the unborn, and for the living breath that moves quietly among concrete blocks and narrow halls.

A dwelling for the Holy Spirit, then, is not a finished structure. It is an ongoing practice.

Composed with artificial intelligence.