Excerpt #1: Freedom and the politics of space

The Voices of Plurality flashmob gathers to demand gender, racial and labor equity in architecture at the 2018 AIA convention in New York City, June 2018.

The following is an excerpt from ‘Freedom and the politics of space: organizing and convening for self-determination in the American citymaking professions’ presented at the Schools of Thought architectural education conference in Norman, Oklahoma, March 2020.

Revolt, reform, advocacy and apathy

As the civil rights revolution reshaped American life in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating with the legal deconstruction of Jim Crow by the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in 1964-65, Black citymakers contributed significantly to the early community design movement, sometimes called “the architectural arm of the civil rights movement”. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Black practitioners particularly created architectural and planning expressions of Black Power (1). A key example was the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem, or ARCH, founded in 1964. ARCH evolved along with Black politics, informed by the internationalist, postcolonial perspective of its post-1968 leader J. Max Bond. Bond brought his experiences and connections in Kwame Nkrumah’s independent Ghana to his teaching at Columbia in this period, a dramatic departure from the White European-American canon (2). Whitney Young’s June 1968 castigation of the AIA’s membership for its “thunderous silence and complete irrelevance on the cause of civil rights,” for having constructed a “White noose around the central city”, was not directed at the Black architects whose practice had been entwined with Black community development for nearly a century (3).

A few young White architects, including the Columbia, MIT, and Yale students who organized The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) from 1968 to 1970 received the message and applied it broadly. In campaigns against ‘Architecture and the Nuclear Arms Race’ and ‘Architecture and Racism’, condemning Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s contract to design the Carlton Centre in apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa, TAR argued that “architecture for racists is racist architecture.” TAR’s assertion that architecture had been reduced to an aesthetic and technical profession which ignored its ethical responsibility to the public echoed Young, and prefigured much criticism to come (4). Young’s speech represents a rare moment in which White architects in power were forced to consider themselves as White, a status that could have been be further reinforced by the foundation of NOMA, the National Organization of Minority Architects, following the AIA’s 1970 conference. But the silent, implied ‘White’ in ‘American Institute of Architects’ remained silent.

The twelve Black men who founded NOMA understood that the AIA did not exist to support their needs, and sought to create a self-sufficient infrastructure for their independent practices (5). In so doing, they expanded upon the work of earlier Black architects who had organized through the National Technical Organization, founded in 1926 and still supporting Black scientists and engineers, and the Council for the Advancement of Negroes in Architecture between 1951 and 1957 (6). NOMA elected its first woman president, Cheryl McAfee, in 1996, followed by Roberta Washington in 1997, Kathy Dixon in 2013, and Kimberly Dowdell in 2018. Local chapters are a base for their members’ political organizing and community design engagement, architectural education for primary and secondary-school students through the Project Pipeline mentoring program, its college affiliate NOMAS, and for responsible design practice (7).

The AIA’s commitment to establishment and, briefly, funding of community design centers (CDCs) represented a significant commitment to a more activist vision of practice by members within a White institution. But the revanchist conservatism of the Nixon era and the end of Great Society urban investment programs meant these efforts did not receive the support anticipated when they were orriginally planned. In 1977, AIA directories listed almost 90 public service architecture and planning practices; by 1987, a survey indicated that less than 20 remained (8). Those that survived were often affiliated with universities or became nonprofits, moves of necessity that also limited the degree of political radicalism possible within the much of the community design movement (9). The architectural-education manifestation of Harlem’s unrest, Columbia’s 1968-1973 Black power design and planning insurgency, was one of a number of antiracist movements within White architectural institutions around the country (10). Student activism nationwide was at a high point, motivated significantly by anti-Vietnam War protests. But the lack of a developed public-interest design profession, along the lines of activist and advocacy subfields in the legal profession, meant that community design was a fleeting interest for many White students who experienced it in college, and then moved on into traditional practice uninvolved with issues of racial justice, Black or poor communities (11).

One activist movements in architecture during the post-civil rights, neoliberal retrenchment of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era was Architects + Designers + Planners for Social Responsibility. ADPSR arose out of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and grew to include activists for human rights and against incarceration, promoting the Prison Design Boycott in architecture and planning beginning in 2004 (12). Environmental advocacy and activism, particularly focused on the contributions of architectural production to climate change, led to the creation of the popular Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard developed by the AIA and the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) in the 1990s and 2000s. Critics in the profession see the LEED standard as a success for corporate ‘greenwashing’ and advocate for further steps toward sustainable design (13).

Black and White women in architecture

The underrepresentation of Black women in the architecture, then as now, remained unaddressed by those in positions of power to challenge it (14). Black women practitioners organized themselves to build networks and organizations of support, to meet the needs of their communities, and to increase their numbers in the profession. In 1982, when there were approximately 16 Black women architects licensed in the United States, the five of these women who lived in New York City convened as the Association of Black Women Architects and Design Professionals, also known as the Association of Black Women in Architecture (ABWA).

ABWA was led by Garnett Covington, who had been a member of the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture in the 1950s, and Sandy Moore, who was among the first women to graduate from Tuskegee’s architecture school in 1967. A December 1983 conference on Black women architects organized by Renee Kemp-Rotan at Howard University in Washington, DC featured as its keynote Norma Merrick Sklarek, the third Black woman licensed architect (15). Though ABWA disbanded after Covington’s death from breast cancer in 1984, members became role models for future Black women architects (16). In 1991, a Baltimore and Washington, DC-based group led by Sharon Graeber, Alice Burley, Pamela Fountain, Sharon Richmond and Cherie Cooper-Harris organized Black Women in Architecture, a network which grew to include groups in Chicago and New York. Members discussed holding an annual symposium, which never came to fruition; BWA’s last official event was a program held in March 1994 in Washington, DC (17). After the group’s dissolution, sessions at conferences, Facebook groups and the archival efforts of Howard professor Barbara Laurie continued to convene Black women architects (18).

In 2014, inspired by their contributions to the Missing 32% Project blog, DC-area architects Katherine Williams and LaShae Ferguson organized a Black Women in Architecture Brunch (19). This event led Williams to re-form a DC-based Black Women Architecture network. The new BWA holds multiple annual meetup events in partnership and coordination with other organizations, including a 2018 brunch at the with BlackSpace at the AIA’s headquarters, the Octagon House, timed to welcome and celebrate attendees to the NMAAHC’s Shifting the Landscape symposium (20). The group has also created registration examination scholarships as a memorial to architect Desiree V. Cooper, which is administered by the NOMA Foundation (21).

White women and feminists created space for themselves within architecture’s academy as thousands entered schools in the 1970s and beyond. This increased representation led to the advancement of feminist design education and theory, exemplified by the Architectural League of New York’s 1977 exhibition Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective and by the organization of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, a gathering held annually on the campuses of educational institutions from 1974 to 1979, with a special conference held in 1981.

By the 2000s, a small number of White women elevated themselves to positions of prominence in the field, along with a much smaller number of Black women. Positions of power within educational institutions, practices, and professional organizations including both the AIA and NOMA remained mostly in male hands (22). Professional organizing by women in architecture through the AIA arose at the level of local chapters, exemplified by the Women’s Leadership Summit organized by the Boston Women’s Principals Group in 2009. This space was conceived as “an intimate setting to discuss the challenges and opportunities for women practicing architecture today.” The Women’s Leadership Summit, organized annually in different cities and now supported by the AIA’s national office, exemplifies the importance of organizational leadership in the creation of professional spaces. But without leadership interest in addressing overlapping oppressions faced by women of color, poor women, and queer women in the workplace and in the world, women’s spaces will remain White, cisheteronormative, and elite, a problem noted by WSPA members who broke off to form the Women’s Development Corporation, a feminist CDC, in Providence, Rhode Island in 1978 (23).

Queering practice?

The Stonewall Rebellion in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969 radicalized LGBT activists in the United States, igniting the queer liberation movement. Radical lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists, many of whom were Black and Latinx, some who were sex workers or living on the streets, demanded dignity and self-determination in the face of police brutality, entrapment, and harassment.

Queer theoretical approaches began to arise in architectural research and publication in the mid-1990s. The 1992 essay collection Sexuality and Space edited by feminist architecture theorist Beatriz Colomina and White cisgendered gay theorist Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space: Architecture and Same Sex Desire are landmarks. Within the context of a White, male and elite profession, and an LGBT movement which broadly reflects the assimilationist politics of wealthy cisgendered White gay men, these approaches show a narrow view of queer experience. As queer practitioners remain a small minority, conversations on queering architecture remain “sporadic and muted” (24).

Some gay architects created activist work in response to the AIDS epidemic (25). The crisis “devastated” the profession, particularly in New York, where the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers convened a conference in 1994 (26). AIDS, like homosexuality and queer identities themselves, shattered the glass houses in which some wealthy gay White architects lived:

"I came to New York with a whole group of people who are just no longer here," [architect Alan Wanzenberg] said. "Who are you going to grow old with? The memories and associations are lost. And that's profound."
Mr. Wanzenberg and his partner, Jed Johnson, an interior designer, more typically count the wealthy among their clients, not street dwellers whose already chaotic lives have been further shattered by AIDS.
But that is who will live in the 36-unit, five-story residence at Ninth Street and Avenue D that Mr. Wanzenberg designed for Housing Works, a private group that provides apartments for homeless people with AIDS or H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
"If opportunities are given to you, you have an obligation to give something back," Mr. Wanzenberg said, explaining why he accepted the assignment. "Much of the 80's, for us, was a diet of foie gras and Champagne," he said. "The image of the future and what the future became are very different. When the 80's ended, it was a decade of death. We came to the point where the work we did had to have more substance to it and had to be more deeply felt." (27)

Other powerful White gay male architects like Philip Johnson declined to speak out, choosing instead to remain publicly closeted in a manner accessible only to wealthy, powerful cisgendered White gay men (28). Johnson, born into wealth and living as an unmarried gay man, once quipped, “The first rule of architecture is to be born rich; the second rule is to marry wealthy.” The average cost of an architectural education is close to $30,000 a year in the United States for tuition alone, requiring many students to go deeply into debt (29). Architecture’s continued status as an economically elite profession and the conditions of poverty in which many queer youth of color live means that practitioners considering the material realities life at the intersections of Blackness, Latinidad and Asian-American, Indigenous, disabled, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, poor and working-class experiences remain vastly underrepresented (30). White supremacy, fat- and femme-phobia are endemic in queer communities, as noted by queer British designer and theorist Adam Nathaniel Furman, who noted in 2019 that “nowadays, you can be a gay architect, but you can’t do queer architecture” (31).

The prominence of national debates around transgender people’s access to public restrooms in the 2010s led queer architect Joel Sanders and transgender historian Susan Stryker to organized Stalled!, a research and advocacy project promoting the sex desegregation of restrooms. Stalled! emphasizes that intentional design for transgender people’s bathroom access is good not just for transgender people, but also for people of different ages, genders, religions and disabilities – putting into practice the disability justice movement’s principle of ‘design from the margins’, the same logic at work when curb cuts for wheelchair users benefit parents with strollers and workers carrying boxes. The project has attracted a broad range of supporters from the AIA New York’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, NOMA members, Yale, and Columbia, home of the queer architectural research organization QSPACE (32). QSPACE, founded in 2016 by Lauren Johnson and Ryan Day, originated from a student group, Queer Students of Architecture and Planning (QSAPP) at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning (33). Multiple sessions at NOMA’s 2018 conference addressed queer issues in architectural theory and practice, drawing significant interest from younger architects. At AIA’s 2019 conference four members of a panel, ‘The Silent Minority: LGBTQ+ Voices in Architecture’ discussed challenges of visibility, equity and diversity. Chicago architect Bradley Fritz, a part of AIA Chicago’s first-in-the-nation LGBTQI+ affinity group, noted that “LGBTQ diversity is not the only type of diversity that we are talking about” and acknowledged the lack of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in the profession as “problematic” (34).

2019, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, saw the debut of the BuildOut Alliance in New York City. BuildOut organized a public program on LGBTQ spaces for the WorldPride festival staged to commemorate Stonewall in June (35). A nonprofit promoting and advocating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people serving openly and with pride in all roles within the building design and construction industry, BuildOut is notable for its bridging of the architecture and construction fields, as well as for the statistical overrepresentation among its leadership of architects of color, notably South Asian architects, compared to the profession as a whole (36). However, the organization’s mission and initiatives make no specific mention of racial equity, representation of Black people or other people of color, or the specific needs of other underrepresented groups within the professions where it advocates (37). A BuildOut-organized panel was one of two seminars focused on queer theory and practice at NOMA 2019.

Sources

1) Goldstein, Brian. ‘The Search for New Forms: Black Power and the Making of the Postmodern City’, Journal of American History, Vol 103, Issue 2, September 2016

2) Sutton, Sharon E. ‘When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities.’

3) Young, ‘Keynote address’

4) Schuman, Anthony and Chris Barker. ‘The Architects’ Resistance.’ NOW WHAT?! Advocacy, Activism and
Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968, 30 November 2018 https://www.nowwhatarchitexx.org/articles/2018/11/27/the-architects-resistance

5) William Brown, Leroy Campbell, Wendell Campbell, John S. Chase, James C. Dodd, Kenneth B. Groggs, Nelson Harris, Jeh Johnson, E.H. McDowell, Robert J. Nash, Harold Williams, and Robert Wilson. In the 2010s, NOMA has made an effort to spotlight the contributions of their wives to the organization’s formation and survival, particularly in its early years.

6) Spurlock Wilson, Dreck, ed. African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945. New York: Routledge, 2004

7) Sablan, Pascale. ‘National Organization of Minority Architects.’ NOW WHAT?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968, 24 May 2018 https://www.nowwhat-architexx.org/articles/2018/5/24/nationalorganization-of-minority-architects?rq=noma

8) Blake, Sheri. ‘Defining/Redefining Community Design: A History of Community Design Centers’, p. 15

9) Sarnoff, Henry. ‘Origins of Community Design.’ Planners Network, 2 January 2006

10) Mock, Brentin. ‘Behind the Black Architectural Resistance.’ CityLab, 19 May 2017 https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/05/black-architectural-insurgency-in-the-trump-era/527316/

11) Richards, William E. Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy: Urban Renewal, Race, and the Rise of Design in the Public Interest. New York: Routledge, 2017.

12) ‘About’. ADPSR. https://www.adpsr.org/about

13) Barth, Brian J. ‘The past, present, and future of sustainable architecture.’ Pacific Standard, 13 June 2018 https://psmag.com/environment/past-present-and-future-of-sustainable-architecture

14) At the time of this writing, the Directory of African American Architects lists 477 Black women architects, who comprise approximately 0.3% of architects in the US. https://blackarch.uc.edu/

15) ‘Howard Conference a Rallying Cry for Black Female Architects.’ The Washington Post, 15 December 1983. Accessed online via the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

16) Washington, Roberta. ‘The Association of Black Women in Architecture.’ Now What?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968, 25 May 2018 https://www.nowwhatarchitexx.org/articles/2018/5/25/the-association-of-black-women-in-architecture
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17) Prigmore, Kathryn. ‘Black Women in Architecture.’ ’ Now What?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968, 27 November 2018

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20) Williams, Katherine. ‘BWA 2018 Brunch.’ Blog post, Black Women in Architecture Network. http://bwanetwork.com/2018/09/17/bwa-2018-brunch/

21) ‘DVC Memorial Scholarship.’ Black Women in Architecture Network. https://bwa-network.com/dvc-memorialscholarship/

22) Feminist Architecture Collaborative, ‘The Women, Young Men, and Other Buildings’, e-flux architecture, 28 February 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/280219/the-women-young-men-and-otherbuildings/

23) Zeiger, Mimi. ‘Building Sisterhood: How Feminists Sought to Make Architecture a Truly Collective Endeavor.’ Metropolis, 8 August 2019 https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/women-feminism-americanarchitecture/13

24) Stead, Naomi and Nicole Kalms. ‘Queering Architecture: Framing the conversation.’ Parlour, 23 February 2017. https://archiparlour.org/queering-architecture-framing-conversation/

25) Vallerand, Olivier. ‘Queer Space.’ Now What?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968, 24 May 2018 https://www.nowwhat-architexx.org/articles/2018/5/24/queer-theory?rq=queer%20space

26) Hu, A.L. ‘The Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects + Designers.’ Now What?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968.25 May 2018 https://www.nowwhatarchitexx.org/articles/2018/5/25/the-organization-of-lesbian-and-gay-architects-designers14

27) Dunlap, David W. ‘AIDS and the Practice of Architecture.’ The New York Times, 3 April 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/03/realestate/aids-and-the-practice-of-architecture.html

28) Lamster, ‘The Man in the Glass House’

29) Shah, Priyanka. ‘Rising Tuition Fees of Architecture Schools: Is Architecture for the Elite?’ Arch2o https://www.arch2o.com/rising-tuition-fees-of-architecture-schools-is-architecture-for-the-elite/

30) Chisholm, N. Jamiyla. ‘LGBTQ+ People of Color More Likely to Live in Poverty than Whites.’ Colorlines, 23
October 2019. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/lgbtq-people-color-more-likely-live-poverty-whites

31) Messina, Rab. ‘Nowadays you can be a gay architect, but you can’t do queer architecture.’ FRAME, 10 July 2019. https://www.frameweb.com/news/adam-nathaniel-furman-nagatacho-apartment-queer

32) ‘About.’ Stalled. https://www.stalled.online/59Miller, Molly. ‘Building the Resistance.’ The Columbia Spectator, 2 October 2017. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/the-eye/2017/04/25/building-the-resistance/

33) Miller, Molly. ‘Building the Resistance.’ The Columbia Spectator, 2 October 2017. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/the-eye/2017/04/25/building-the-resistance/

34) O’Donnell, Kathleen. ‘Raising LGBTQ+ voices in architecture.’ American Institute of Architects, 8 June 2019 https://www.aia.org/articles/6161023-raising-lgbtq-voices-in-architecture

35) City Pride: Creating LGBTQ Spaces.’ Calendar, AIA New York, 17 June 2019. https://calendar.aiany.org/2019/04/11/citypride-creating-lgbtq-spaces/

36) ‘Our Board.’ BuildOut Alliance. http://www.buildoutalliance.org/board

37) ‘Initiatives.’ BuildOut Alliance. http://www.buildoutalliance.org/initiatives