Emilie Taylor Welty, Director of Architecture; Favrott II Professor of Practice; and Design-Build Manager at the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. Image courtesy of Tulane School of Architecture.

"School is this great place where you can turn research into action, and that testing ground fosters creative, collaborative professionals who can implement positive change in the world," Emilie Taylor Welty shared during our recent Zoom call. 

An architect, educator, and multi-disciplinarian specializing in public-interest design, materials, and detailing, her approach to practice and academia is rooted in collaboration and fabrication. As Tulane School of Architecture's new Director of Architecture, her extensive background in social design practices and equity building positions Taylor Welty as another exciting key figure in Tulane's academic leadership. 

My conversation with Taylor Welty was thought-provoking and rooted in fostering an open dialog about the current state of architecture school and how to engage students in real-world applications. We discussed her journey as a teacher and leader in design-build pedagogy, her take on who architects work for, and her expanded view of what architects do. Admitting that she "took the long route to architecture," the Southern Louisiana native illustrated her path to the profession and her ties to the school, being both a student and teacher. 

After receiving her B.S. in Architectural Engineering Technology from the University of Southern Mississippi, her work at Tulane School of Architecture started long before she became a member of its faculty. "In 2003, I started at Tulane as a graduate student," Taylor Welty explained. After graduating in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she stayed in town to teach and practice. "With this storm and levee failures that followed, many economic and racial disparities were laid bare. For many of my colleagues and me and fellow New Orleanians, the challenge was one of building more equitable systems, buildings, and processes." Taylor Welty added, "we have moved beyond recovery long ago but are far from solving these complex issues — part of our work at Tulane in both research and action is to continue innovating and adapting approaches as we face a quickly changing climate and the social, economic, and environmental challenges connected with those approaches."

What are your thoughts on architectural education right now?

I’ve been encouraged to see the change and rethinking of curriculum in schools these last few years. Despite all the social, political, and environmental challenges we’re facing, I’m optimistic. At Tulane, we’re equipping students with the skills and knowledge to synthesize information, collaborate with others, and create a responsible and adaptive built environment.

When we go through school, we get a snapshot of architectural education. As a student, architectural education seems static and slow to change. Yet what’s been interesting to me, being a part of a teaching team for the last 15–20 years, is seeing how fluid methods of teaching are and how much impact an individual can have. I've been reading about the groundbreaking community-focused planning and architecture initiatives of educators in the '60s and '70s, and I see echoes and offspring of those efforts gaining wider acceptance in our current time. 

...with a longer lens on how we teach design, you start to see how fluid architectural education is, and it gives me great hope as to how we’ll grow and change and continue crafting education.

If you think of design-build pedagogy, it’s something built into U.S. education as early as the late 1800s at Tuskegee University's Architecture program, and for the next 100 years, goes in and out of fashion as different methods of educating an architect washed over American academies. Once our friends at Rural Studio fused the learning-by-doing method with not just innovative approaches to material but also the ethics of practice and expansion of who has access to design — then we see an explosion of schools starting design-build programs. So in just 30 years or so, we’ve gone from a handful of design-build programs in the U.S. to a moment where over half of North American Architecture Schools have design-build projects and studios.

All that to say, with a longer lens on how we teach design, you start to see how fluid architectural education is, and it gives me great hope as to how we’ll grow and change and continue crafting education. There is also something great about the pent-up frustration of students and faculty who are challenging and questioning how we teach and what we teach because that’s an energy that can be channeled into meaningful change. This is a process of continual betterment as we work to educate the next generation of folks who are prepared to take on the complexities of our world. I’m optimistic about where we’re all headed.

The term sustainability has been used so frequently across the industry that many projects, designers, and groups are often criticized for "greenwashing." How do the work and teachings coming out of Tulane provide some hope and solace that good work is being done?

I think we all recognize the urgency of the moment we’re in, and greenwashing is a tactic that introduces a veneer of sustainability over a core of inaction. What we’re doing at Tulane School of Architecture is recognizing the urgency of the moment and meeting that with research and action. As in many schools of architecture these days, we have the necessary coursework of active, innovative, and passive building strategies and the software and technologies that go hand-in-hand with assessing those strategies and making informed decisions. In addition to this core knowledge, we have incredible opportunities, such as our Mintz Global Research Studios, where students can take a deep dive into such issues and unpack how they are connected to the ecologies and economics of a place. For instance, recent studios have traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Jaipur, India, to understand the rapid urbanization issues of these river cities and propose sustainable infrastructures, and an upcoming studio that will visit an ecological preserve in the cloud forest of Ecuador to evaluate and develop sustainable strategies for our partners there. 

I’m also excited about our elective classes by thought leaders in this area, such as Z Smith, FAIA, who has been leading the charge when it comes to Net Zero buildings and policy. His class is a real call to action and grounded in data and precedents that help our students understand how to make real change in practice.

There's also a sustainability aspect that has to do with the profession and our ability to pull more people into architecture and design professions. I think that it's clear that our firms and our cities/communities benefit from having a plurality of voices and perspectives in designing our places. 

Engaging the "bigger questions" in design 

You've been the Design-Build Manager at the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design (Small Center) for some time at Tulane. Can you talk more about your role and what type of work is developed at the Center?

As the community design center of the Tulane School of Architecture, Small Center brings together faculty and projects on community-driven projects in the New Orleans area. Through the design center, we work with non-profits on planning, visioning, and design-build projects. 

Altogether, it’s very grounding for students to work with a partner and to develop projects that weave research and action together and also have a budget and deadline and specific programmatic needs. Design-build projects provide students with a chance to see something from an idea to a reality. And for our partners, it produces tangible results which build trust and pull people along for longer conversations about our city and the designs and policies that shape it. My Small Center colleagues and I have been developing these processes of engagement, advocacy, and collective impact over the last 17 years, and it has been a joy to work with our partners and students on this work. 

Design build projects provide students with a chance to see something from an idea to a reality. And for our partners, it produces tangible results which build trust and pull people along for longer conversations about our city and the designs and policies that shape it.

When it comes to teaching students the importance of designing for and with a community, how important is teaching the skills of thoughtful collaboration?

So much of Small Center's work is based on thoughtful engagement and collaboration amongst the range of project stakeholders to tackle the wicked problems that intersect with them. I think if we’re going to make some headway, we have to think both large and small (incremental levels). Radical incrementalism. I’m only one person, or one studio's worth of people — working with one community partner. I often think, how can these little acts move and aggregate and become more? I don’t think it’s one or the other; both of these things work in concert. In some ways, I think of education as a sea change. 

You completed a collaborative project with fellow School of Architecture faculty member Tiffany Lin and Tulane Department of Psychology faculty member Dr. Lisa Molix called "Public Space and Scrutiny: Examining Urban Monuments Through Social Psychology." That project won the 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize. Congratulations again! Could you walk me through that collaborative experience?

Yes, it was a proposal we put together, and received a grant from the SOM Foundation. Tiffany and I teamed up with Dr. Molix and her research lab, which explores the effects of bias on health outcomes. As a group of friends, we were talking and thinking about how her research techniques could start to reform public spaces, specifically monuments and public spaces. We learned a great deal from Dr. Molix's approach as a social psychologist, and applying those methods to inform design was challenging, and interesting, and frustrating in so many ways.

We recently wrapped up that project and are working on a final report of that data and the outcomes of the research. It’s been an exciting and very humbling experience to go through, to learn through that interdisciplinary team and all the collaborators and people working on these issues. One thing that has been apparent is that while we’re conducting this research and design work on a local site with local partners, it also has relevance and resonance with what’s going on around the nation and the world. More on that as we and our students wrap up the final report!

What does academic leadership mean?

Looking back at my conversation with Taylor Welty, her responses and anecdotes of her time at Tulane echoed the importance of humanity within architecture. Her comments on architectural academia being a "sea of change" ring true. Within the past two years, we've seen plenty of changes in academic leadership across the nation. As she continues to lead in her new position as Director of Architecture, I can see her take on academic leadership deeply tied to her commitment to action-oriented collaboration.

Learn more about Tulane's School of Architecture department and the exciting work taking place there here. Read about the institution's latest graduate school expansion in downtown New Orleans here.