What I Didn't Learn in Architecture School

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

contradictions but instead of trying to understand the value of the architectural moments I proposed, my instructors penalized me for a lack of clarity or feasibility. Implicitly, I learned which politics were acceptable in architecture; I learned that buildings that embodied whiteness were to be celebrated above all else.

Whiteness in architecture meant monumentality and efficiency. Buildings had to 'announce their presence' and have clear, sequential thresholds. Architecture of whiteness provided 'privileged views' that were only accessible to the people *inside* the building. The design of these buildings would be exhaustively iterated in order to make their prescribed functions as materially-efficient and marketable as possible.

I never understood the value of such resolved designs because the people I knew were always capable of modifying their environment to suit their ever-changing needs. Architecture of Whiteness designs for the dumbest, cheapest, and least intuitive inhabitant imaginable— someone who has no agency or relationship to their environment, so all their foreseeable problems must be resolved pre-emptively. A room’s function would be programmed and the success of that room would be evaluated by that room’s perceived ability to fulfill that program.

I was always resistant to this design approach because I believed that an architect could never anticipate nor control how an occupant will use a space. Who was I to assume that a bathroom could not be used as a meeting space? Or that a meeting room might one day have to accommodate a karaoke party? Such ambivalent considerations made designing a building an incredibly slow and difficult task for me. I would spend days trying to translate my design intentions into traditional architectural drawings (plan, section, elevation). The abstracted and prescriptive nature of these drawings stripped all personality and occupational ambiguity from the spaces I wanted to create. I would try to defend the walls and openings of my buildings, but, in actuality, they weren’t as important as the mode of dwelling I was trying to present…

Towards the end of my degree, I found that it was best to produce fewer orthogonal drawings and to design through perspectival renderings. Throughout my degree, I felt deeply engaged with architecture but disenfranchised from buildings. This paradox was never confronted in my education and it left me angry and unfulfilled. It left me to define architecture for myself in a way that I could practice and experience and defend…

Architecture is about human bodies. It controls where and how they move and the total sensory experience of that movement. Architecture affects the quality of sound, of light, of air… It creates a bodily sensation that can be experienced without instruction or consent. It imposes itself on the body while removing it from Nature. If unconsidered, architecture can threaten Spirit. If deliberate, architecture has the capacity to coalesce the material and immaterial realms of reality— architecture might reveal qualities of a body not previously acknowledged.

As a sexual and racial minority, I have an involuntarily peculiar understanding of what it means to have a body.

Being brown and queer (and now an immigrant, living in New York), I am in constant surveillance of my environment. This is a compulsive behaviour developed in my childhood to ensure my safety and wellbeing. I memorize the room: where I came in, where I’ll come out. If anything goes wrong, I must have my own escape route! (I must also be aware of others’ anticipated escape routes so I don’t get caught up in their unmediated panic!) I observe the people around me: do they understand me? If not, might they want to harm me? I therein analyze my body: how I speak, my body language, my proximity to others, etc. My body remains in constant flux as I react to the room, negotiating my identity until it splits.

In a room of white people, I am silent and observant. I refuse to be an ethnic spectacle. When someone asks me a question, I am succinct and poised. I use words like 'succinct' and 'poised'. I do not touch anyone.

In a room of coloured people, I am social and relaxed. More prone to speak before thinking and eager to share a sound, a smell, a taste, and a touch. When misogyny enters this room, I disappear (homophobia is misogyny).

In a room of straight people, I am prone to dissociation. My voice slows and deepens and I begin to occupy more space than I need. I fear loud men and avoid looking at women. I do not express myself or describe things in detail.

In a room of queer people, I am less in my head and more in my body. This is because I do not have to speak my secrets for them to be known. This coalescence remains until I become aware of my skin.

The architecture of a room controls my body just as much as the bodies in it. If I deny these bodies such control, my safety and belonging can be jeopardized. This negotiation between safety and authenticity is the curse of all queer people in a world dominated by whiteness, masculinity, capitalism, etc. So when I am asked to engage with the imposing practice of architecture, I consider all these conditions.

My body remains in constant flux as I react to the room, negotiating my identity until it splits.”

indecency' to unfold underfilled. It should have redundant circulation and egress in case a perpetrator is in the building— remember the Pulse nightclub shooting? Architecture should provide people with options for sitting, leaning, storage, etc. The standard dimensions in Neufert’s guide do not consider the nuance that others might have come to develop. Denying this nuance is as violent as it is disappointing. To me, architecture school offered the opportunity to create spaces where someone like me could have their inner motivations amplified and accelerated. Architecture school should have given me the tools to assert nuance and inconsistency in buildings in favour of giving occupants a tactile reminder of the importance of diversity, but instead, it tried to snuff it out.

In a recent episode of The Grapevine on YouTube, an out Black-trans woman spoke about the erasure of sexual and racial minorities in popular culture. She attributed the disproportionate violence against Black and trans women to the lack of exposure and education cisgender and heteronormative people encounter in regards to the lived experiences of racial and sexual minorities. She said, 'Do you see me when I’m not in the room?' (Rose, @DearMsBoogie). Against the deficit of representation of queer bodies and diasporatic identities, my praxis of architecture demands that the very fabric of such a room upholds this representation.

To me, architecture is an opportunity to give queerness and otherness a venue to exist, experiment, and collaborate. If not for the enlightenment of a binary-obsessed, heteronormative society, then for the uplifting and validation of the voices, bodies, and spirits of those who dare to feel more than they are given. If architecture can embody these qualities, then perhaps all the queers and foreigners can focus on living and improving the community they inhabit, instead of marching in public space —fighting for the freedom to occupy and move through space without the looming fear of a silent and invisible death.”