Student Excerpts

▉“During our 2A trip to New York, I was with an 1 adjunct trying to find our way to a site. We were lost and I was worried about missing my prayers since it was getting late, and so I asked if I could make a quick stop to pray somewhere quiet. Instead, the adjunct told me to pray out in the open, right there on the sidewalk where we were standing. So I did.”

█ “A student asked our global urbanism prof why the name of his course referred to ‘global urbanism’. He was confused. She explained that most material presented in the lectures was still overwhelmingly western, and the non-western examples were almost always presented in comparison to western standards. He became very defensive and claimed that there were not enough sources available to make his course global. After a somewhat heated argument with our class, he told us the material for future students would be more ‘exotic’. Many of the individual case studies assigned in cities outside Europe and North America were by foreign Europeans imposing master plans abroad (e.g. Henri Prost’s Casablanca Master Plan). Why is it so hard for non-western forms of urbanism to be respected as valid precedents in their own right?”

“Why is it so hard for non-western forms of urbanism to be respected as valid precedents in their ?”

█ “When I was in 1B, they added a single additional reading about mosques to the cultural history course to make it ‘more diverse’. We never got to it. At least our class was never forced to read the Bible like so many of those before us.”

█ “It pisses me off that 3A studio adjuncts and 4 guest critics are always so quick to liken unsuccessful student proposals to housing projects and ‘ghettos’. Why is the assumption always that shitty spaces belong to low-income residents and why is it so hard to imagine successfully designed spaces as having the potential to be inclusive?”

“...why is it so hard to imagine successfully designed spaces as having the potential to be ?”

█ “[I] tried to work with precedents outside of the western canon in 2A studio (2018). This resulted in every desk crit becoming an argument regarding the merit of my culture’s architecture and attempts to steer my work towards western precedents instead. When I resisted I was told that my project ‘would not work in Toronto’, which was irrelevant as we were told this project had no real site other than ‘the city of today, tomorrow.’ Students shouldn’t face barriers when attempting to explore architecture outside of the western canon, and faculty should not be questioning the merit of a culture’s architecture which they know nothing about.”

█ “During studio, a prof once started speaking to 6 me about a project I didn’t know. I let him know I hadn’t heard of it before and he realised I was a different student than the one he had previously spoken to. He said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry! You all look the same!’ and I laughed it off.”

█ “I’ve never had a Black professor, adjunct or 7 guest critic.”

█ “I almost chose to drop out of UWSA before 2A, 8 because after a year at the school I couldn’t imagine one day creating spaces that would benefit my own community. Even then it was clear that the design industry is largely for the wealthy and privileged.”

“How can we be engaged in the broad spectrum of society?”

█ “As a Black student, I find a lot of other students feel tempted to touch my hair too often. When I told one of my friends that this is a microaggression, he said ‘that’s not a real thing’.”

█ “I always seem to let out a deep exhale at the 10 end of each school term. Not necessarily because the deadlines and late nights are over, but because it always marks a return to a time where I can once again swap out Corbusier’s Towers in the Park for Robinson’s Langston Terrace Dwellings, Maurice Hawlbwachs for Carter G. Woodson, and Hannah Arendt for Ella Baker. Sometimes I’ll catch myself yearning for my final term to come and go, for this final exhale, for a permanent state in which the celebration of great Black thinkers has an everlasting place.”