Archinect - Features

The AIA Praised Trump and Biden's Infrastructure Plans But Lacks Political Vision to Draw Connections to Structural Racism

2021-06-08T08:01:00-04:00

In November 2016, the Executive Vice President and CEO, of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Robert Ivy, issued a statement congratulating President-elect Trump and the new Congress. Speaking for the organization’s 95,000 members, Ivy said they were “ready to work” with Trump to improve America’s infrastructure. Within liberal and progressive circles, the backlash was swift, given the divisive nature of Trump’s infrastructure plans, which included significant expansion of the southern border wall with Mexico and more coal power plants.

Architecture in the Trump Era: A Report from Columbia GSAPP by A.L. Hu

2017-02-16T12:11:00-05:00

A week after taking to the streets for the Women’s March in New York City and two weeks into the spring semester, I felt restless and helpless as the barrage of outrageous news took its toll. It’s difficult to sit still in studio when it seems as if the world is beginning to morph into a reality that is at once unrecognizable in its incredulousness and intensely familiar—the beginnings of history repeating itself.

Trump's Travel Ban: Architects and Educators Respond

2017-02-03T13:40:00-05:00

Last Friday, President Trump issued a highly controversial executive order that temporarily bans citizens and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. According to an attorney for the government, 100,000 visas have been revoked already. Almost immediately after it was announced, architects and architecture schools decried the order. Some made reference to the fact that notable architects, like the late Dame Zaha Hadid, would not be allowed to enter the United States according to the restrictions. Universities felt an immediate effect, as faculty members and students were stranded abroad, unable to return to their classes.

Deans List Special: How Architecture School Leaders are Responding to Trump

2016-12-06T12:11:00-05:00

As seen in the recent #NotMyAIA shake-up, the election of Donald Trump provoked a heated response within the architecture community. Many architects felt that now, more than ever, they had to voice their concerns over the president-elect's policies that threatened their professional values—chief among them, the leveraging of architecture to perpetuate xenophobic rhetoric, through one of Trump's loudest campaign promises, the U.S./Mexico border wall.

Many in architecture schools also felt the responsibility to organize and speak out, perhaps especially because of their position to influence the next generation of architects. Since the election, we've been reaching out to academic leaders from across the U.S. to hear how they were handling Trump's presidency—and what they were telling their students. We've gathered their responses here.