here & now
What I D i d n’t L e arn i n A rc h i te c t u re S c h o ol “My father’s father drank himself to death when my father was eight years old. He’s been working to support his family ever since. This year he’ll turn 60 with no immediate plans to retire. Throughout the course of his life, my father took up many jobs and trades. One of his most successful jobs was being a carpenter. He was able to take this skill from Trinidad to Canada and make a living to support his children for as long as his body would allow.
my apartment. When the novel coronavirus hit New York, this counter moved to the bedroom to become a desk for my partner to work from home. My partner was probably as thrilled and annoyed as anyone else growing up in my childhood home— never really knowing what could be waiting for them when they walk through the door… The point I’m trying to make is that I grew up in a built environment that was as dynamic and flexible as me.
Growing up, there were always sheets of plywood and stacks of nominal lumber scattered around and inside the house. It felt like our home was always changing because my father saw how poorly it was designed and built and couldn’t help but do something about it. He would often ask his children to help him out, but he didn’t like when we asked questions. Helping my father renovate the house felt like a blind exercise of trust: 'Hold this,' 'mark here,' 'plug this in,' 'find this drillbit,' and suddenly, we’d have a newer, larger kitchen, or the stairs would be somewhere else in the house, or there would be an extra sink in the bathroom, or a custom floor-to-ceiling closet with the old doors that used to be in the downstairs foyer.
I went to architecture school because I was unsure what I’d learn in art school and I was afraid of what my career prospects might be with a BFA. As the only son and first Canadian-born child of my family, I felt pressured to pursue a career that was prestigious and less self-centered.
My father would pick up scrap wood wherever he found it and turned it into something useful and beautiful. When there wasn’t any material around, he would splice and remix parts of our house to better accommodate the demands of our daily lives. This type of behaviour encouraged me to see potential in every solid object around me and its ability to enhance my lived environment. I recently took apart a sofa and turned it into a countertop because there was inadequate counter space in 29
Like most naive high school students, I wanted an education that would allow me to be creative and technical, but the education I received was beyond anything I could have anticipated. I was one of the handful of brown students in a university with even fewer Black students. All of my professors were white. Most of them were heterosexual men. Despite this, I felt encouraged to be political in my doing of 'architecture'. But when I presented my architectural concepts for critique, I was almost always instructed to start over as if my budding ideas couldn’t be developed or were flatout wrong. The theories I presented in Design Studio were experimental and intimate, but in rationalizing them into buildings, my design proposals were deemed farfetched and/or underdeveloped. I thought I was a bad designer because my buildings had an emotional agenda instead of an aesthetic one. The spaces I designed were full of deliberate
