Underrepresented Minorities in Architecture Symposium proposal by SoCA - Social Change and Activism - a GSD student group November 28, 2007
The complexion of America’s architects has been a subject of introspection and discussion since at least 1968, when Whitney Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League, chastised attendees at the AIA’s national convention for the scarcity of African-American and women practitioners... Dennis Mann, co-director of the Directory of African-American Architects, says that his directory currently includes 1,578 licensed African-American architects. That figure accounts for 1.5 percent of all licensed professionals in the nation, a percentage virtually unchanged since Young’s powerful speech. Architectural Record, 25 April 2007
Framework Less than two percent of registered architects in the United States are African-American. Schools of architecture have similarly low levels of faculty and student diversity; the GSD has never had a black tenured professor and in recent years each incoming MArch I class includes just one black student. This extreme underrepresentation is uniquely problematic: many black, Hispanic and Native American communities are those most underserved by the design professions. Forty percent of licensed African-American architects graduate from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, according to the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA). How can the HBCU network together with schools of architecture nation-wide accelerate integration within the architecture profession? The GSD is currently partnering with Tuskegee School of Architecture, first in the country to train black architects, to begin answering this question. Despite architecture’s cycles of critical reinvention throughout the 20th-century, the discipline remains constrained by its lack of diversity. For example: Derek Ham, MArch I ‘03 has pointed out that research for Learning from Las Vegas, one of the seminal works of modern architecture, was conducted by a group of white male students from Yale and one woman. Their conclusion that architecture as “legible” sign and symbol is more important than monument overlooks the city’s gross segregation. What alternate critiques might students from other backgrounds have formulated? What are the implications today when architects and planners attempt to revise failed urban experiments, such as inner-city public housing, that are outside their own life experience? Given that “blackness” and the black perspective are near-absent from the discourse of architecture, what are implications for the profession today? More than questions of “what is black community,” a more productive conversation emerges through discussion of the interface between problems implicit to marginalized built environments and potential strategies for design intervention. This symposium explores the relationship between (schools of) architecture, black architects and the black community through the coupled questions: How specifically does black underrepresentation within architecture impact the design professions? What strategies are most operative toward increasing the discipline’s diversity? While focusing on the black case, the forum seeks to generate new ideas and energy with respect to minority recruiting in architecture more generally. 1