MEETING OF THE MINDS

An inspired conversation about social equity in architecture between Toshiko Mori and Pascale Sablan.

Written and edited for length and clarity by Michael Wilson

To the casual observer, architects Toshiko Mori and Pascale Sablan seem to occupy different realms of the architectural world. Mori has four decades of influential projects under her belt—her innovative use of new materials and technologies is underpinned by a thoroughgoing attention to historical context and design tradition. Her eponymous New York–based firm has worked across a broad range of cultural, institutional, and residential contexts, and it recently produced master plans for major clients including the Brooklyn Public Library and the Buffalo Botanical Gardens. Past projects include a school building in Senegal designed in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and its sibling nonprofit Le Korsa, and Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake’s first freestanding boutique in the United States.

At just 38, Sablan is one of only 315 licensed female Black architects in the United States today. She joined Adjaye Associates this year, having previously designed at FXFOWLE Architects and S9 Architecture. Working closely with the National Organization of Minority Architects, she combines her architectural practice with advocacy work, paying particular attention to issues faced by women architects and architects of color, and prioritizing teaching and mentorship.

Although Mori and Sablan have diverse backgrounds and belong to different generations, they share a fierce commitment to understanding and engaging with the communities in which they work. Often, this involves taking a critical look at the assumptions, conventions, priorities, and lingering biases of their profession and insisting—sometimes in the face of stubborn resistance—that it must change with the times.

From Sablan’s curation (in collaboration with AIA New York’s Center for Architecture) of the 2017 exhibition SAY IT LOUD, in which she showcased the work of 20 minority architects, to Mori’s longstanding advocacy for female architects (in 1995, she became the first woman to earn tenure at the Harvard Graduate School of Design), each woman’s contributions to the field combine a deep passion for people with the skill of placemaking to produce spaces that are the epitome of human-centric design. In this, longevity—achieved not only through functional design and solid construction, but also through consideration of the social, economic, and environmental impacts of their work—is a central consideration.

GRAY paired up these two industry powerhouses, and a passionate and wide-ranging exchange ensued, in which Sablan posed some characteristically searching questions to Mori to tease out some of the ways in which architects might better listen and give voice to the needs and concerns of those they serve and, in doing so, transcend what she describes as their “villainous” reputation. »

FROM LEFT: Pascale Sablan is one of only 315 licensed female Black architects in the United States today. Originally from Japan, Toshiko Mori, the founding principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, has been practicing architecture for four decades.

PASCALE SABLAN: Growing up, I loved my name, Pascale Sablan (SaintLouis), because it didn’t reveal my gender or my race, but last year I realized how problematic that was. Now, I often introduce myself as “an African American female architect.” In discussions of diversity in the profession, many words have been used to describe us: minority, BIPOC, diverse. What language do you use to define and introduce yourself?

TOSHIKO MORI: I come from an earlier generation, but my name is like yours in that no one can figure out my gender from it. And because of my profession—architect—and my position at Harvard—professor—I’ve often been called “Mister Mori.” I’m still a rarity in a largely white, male, wealthy, and elite profession, but I never thought about it like that as a young person who just wanted to do what she wanted to do. There’s a danger in my generation, as a woman especially, that one is labeled. All I wanted to do was disrupt that, so I never chose to identify myself until recently. Marginalized communities have such rich cultures that we miss out on a lot by excluding them. Diversity is essential for longevity.

PS: But diversity alone won’t solve all the injustices within the profession. I know many architects of color working in large firms who do highend work. But inclusivity is also about economic background.

TM: The idea of social sustainability that you’re working on and my interest in architectural tradition are both about involving people. We need to think about how to teach students to involve communities in their work.

PS: I’ve said that projects that ignore community in favor of aesthetics become sculptures rather than works of architecture. They’re statements from a point of view that disregards reality, or they become part of the built environment that’s oppressive. What is our definition of success? Are we thinking only about aesthetics, or also about the process and what it represents? When we talk about which projects are winning awards, are they all evaluated according to profit margins, or do they use architecture to heal rather than to harm?

Sometimes advocacy feels like philanthropy, like you’re making a sacrifice, when in actuality you’re trying to enhance the profession.

TM: Yes, the value system has to change. An architect’s clients are the people who use a building, not just the people who pay for it or profit from it. So when we design a school, for example, it’s little kids who are the clients, and you have to listen closely to them to find out what kind of environment would make them want to study. Architects are fairly neutral in that sense, so we’re in a position to bring up voices that aren’t otherwise heard.

PS: I remember going to one studio crit[ique]: The students presented their site investigation research and I asked them what they’d learned about the community. They couldn’t answer. I told them they’d be surprised to hear how willing the community would be to engage with them, but also that architecture is an exclusive language, and when you don’t speak a language, you can’t participate in the conversation. We have a responsibility to translate that language so it’s not out of reach.

Little kids of color know what architecture is, and it’s generally a negative. It’s the person who comes in and designs a project “for” a community that generates construction, debris, detours, problems. And then, when the project’s revealed, it’s a signifier that they and their families can no longer afford to live there. Why would a young kid aspire to be part of that villainous system? We need to start making architecture that’s reflective and aspirational.

TM: I take students to places they haven’t been before to get them out of their comfort zone. They have to understand those places by speaking to people and understanding how they live. To break away from stereotypes, it helps to bring them to different communities, different geographies, different economic situations. We can build a new typology but we have to train the next generation so they don’t fall into the same traps. »

RIGHT: Sablan interned at Aarris Architects while the firm worked on the design for the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City. BELOW: The Brooklyn Children’s Museum rooftop pavilion, designed by Mori.

PS: That leads into my next question. “For every injustice in this world, there is an architecture that has been designed to facilitate and perpetuate it.” This quote from architect and activist Bryan Lee Jr. led me to reflect on my responsibility for the creation of architecture that hurts and oppresses. It also inspires me to now take a stance against participating in the design and construction of certain typologies. Was there a time when you were asked to do something in direct opposition to your values? How did you work through that?

TM: Oh, I refuse to design prisons. Absolutely. I don’t think we have a right to judge, punish, or criminalize another person. What if that person tried to judge you? Why don’t they have that right? There’s an inequality built into the system, and it’s so harmful. Prisons make people commit more crimes. The architecture of the prison is absolutely a wrong typology and a wrong social system. We can come up with an alternative system, but society has to change.

PS: I take a similar stance. I leveraged my position on the AIA New York board to help draft a statement asking the profession to step away from designing any place with a cage, and to lean into new typologies like restorative justice. The expansion of prisons is a method of creating a slave workforce—every time you build a prison, you’re creating an opportunity for groups to lobby for new rules and new offenses. Committees that specialize in jails— “justice committees”—talk about introducing more natural light, better materials, brighter colors, and so on, but when it gets down to construction, most of those beautifications get value engineered out. These changes don’t address the oppressive nature of the typology at its root. And in New York we have borough-based jails, planned with the idea that families wouldn’t have to travel so far to visit, but that’s not justice. It’s a typology that’s against my values, and it’s part of the profession’s responsibility to explain why we need alternatives.

TM: The funny thing about architects is that, by and large, we are still a profession with a conscience! But we do have to speak up. PS: There’s also an argument that has been made about police becoming involved in territorial disputes. In the past, if you and a neighbor had a problem, you had to work it out. But then that became part of the purview of the police, and they began deciding which bodies were allowed in which spaces. That allowed more opportunities for the police to say, “You don’t look like you belong here.”

I was an intern at Aarris Architects when they won the African Burial Ground National Monument competition. During the excavation of the site for yet another federal building, the remains of African descendants were discovered. The Howard University team came in, carefully extracted the remains, and studied them off site while the city commissioned the monument design competition. There are an estimated 20,000 African remains in the Manhattan area (a map is inscribed on the side of the monument to show the extent), which means that when the excavations were done to accommodate the foundations of federal buildings, remains were likely discovered, but the structures were built there anyway. The city was literally built on the backs and the bones of our ancestors.

So, when I think about architecture that harms, it’s also about the neglect of milestones in the history of a space. Like, what is this space where Trayvon Martin was murdered? What is that now? Is there a plaque? Is there something that holds the history and the hurt that happened there? Or where George Floyd was murdered? Are we supposed to just walk past as if nothing happened?

TM: The same thing’s happened with indigenous communities, with Chinese laborers. The [United States] has a short but extraordinary history of oppression—and it’s still occurring now. One recent case was around the tenure of Nikole Hannah-Jones [an investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States] at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which the board tried to not approve.

PS: The design profession has a long history of disregarding diverse people and their spaces. How do you see the role of BIPOC designers, “ARCHITECTURE

IS AN EXCLUSIVE

LANGUAGE, AND

WHEN YOU DON’T

SPEAK A LANGUAGE,

YOU CAN’T

PARTICIPATE IN THE

CONVERSATION.

WE HAVE A

RESPONSIBILITY

TO TRANSLATE

THAT LANGUAGE

SO IT’S NOT OUT

OF REACH.”

—PASCALE SABLAN, ADJAYE ASSOCIATES

community groups, and practitioners in changing this narrative? How can the design profession at large support the change, and where does the ultimate responsibility lie?

TM: What’s so wrong is that this responsibility is handed back to the BIPOC community and becomes a burden. It should be the responsibility of the majority white community, and of larger institutions. You can’t just “empower” marginalized communities and have them clean up the mess you’ve made! Educated communities tend to think that they aren’t racist, but there’s extensive unconscious bias.

PS: There’s also an awareness of privilege and an unwillingness to let go of that. While I appreciate that those who’ve been marginalized now have a voice, the responsibility [for them] to then solve all the problems is where I feel like we’ve tasked them with too much. Adjaye Associates told me that advocacy was part of my day job; I’d never even realized that was a possibility before.

TM: We have enjoyed privilege at the expense of others and often it’s unearned. It breaks your heart when you think about this country and how it’s been built on the blood, sweat, and tears of populations.

PS: [Architecture firm] Concordia in New Orleans hires community fellows; the paid position allows someone from the community a seat at the table while design decisions are being made. As a professor, can you describe your process of community engagement and how you teach it to your students? If you imagine equity in communities that are underserved, what does that future look like?

TM: I teach students who are assessing a site to analyze from the point of view of potential: to ask who the community members are, what the demography is, and who they’re designing for— it’s not the people who are making the money, but the people who will be using the building. And there’s the question of how you design to engage the community in terms even of the location of entry. One of my students [Rachel Coulomb] did an interesting project about back doors. She had realized that in all these institutions, it was the back door that faced the community; the front door faced nothing and just became an image of power. These are the kinds of questions that the current generation is really interested in.

An important job for architects is to educate communities and clients so they are informed and can participate in making the right decisions together to improve the quality of lives.

PS: Renee Kemp-Rotan, an urban planner in Alabama, talks about community engagement as not just surveys or inviting people to board meetings, but as an opportunity to offer resources to the communities we are impacting. She also emphasized the importance of trust-building; therefore whatever their responses may be, those answers are valid and should be addressed and handled with care. As a profession, we’re thoughtleaders, problem-solvers, and synthesizers of complex information, and these are all things that we can offer the community. Community engagement should be about longevity, from concept development through documentation, construction, and post-occupancy.

TM: The question is, how can we break up the bureaucracy so that a community’s voices can be heard more directly? The process is subtle, but eventually, a community should feel “this is ours.” This is where we have to push it—toward a sense of pride and a sense of ownership. h