Duvall Decker Architects combine greater agency and public outreach to benefit Mississippi (and the profession at large)

2017-02-21T18:12:00-05:00

Since they founded Duvall Decker nearly 20 years ago, the Deckers, as they’re known, have focused mostly on neglected corners in and around Jackson, Mississippi’s capital. To pay the bills, the two have redefined for themselves the ambit of a small architectural practice. They have become developers and even branched into building maintenance: a soup-to-nuts strategy that has allowed them more than just financial breathing room.

Helping impoverished Mississippi communities? Check. Making money while creating a business model that empowers you with the decision-making powers of developers? Check. Being notable and effective enough to earn your own profile in The New York Times by Michael Kimmelman? Done, done, and done for Duvall Decker Architects, which also was named one of 2017's Emerging Voices by the Architectural League of New York. What's especially enheartening about this profile is how by virtue of increasing the quality of their own professional lives, the architects have also vastly increased the well-being of their community.

An architect helps transform dangerous alleys into cultural hotspots

2015-08-27T14:26:00-04:00

It soon became apparent that the alley was not a great place to be: Further down the way was a cardboard box used as a makeshift toilet. Once, he saw a pool of blood and the apparent weapon, a pointy umbrella... Vogel asked an architect friend what he should do. “She said the answer was simple: All I needed to do was put people in it [the alley],” said Vogel.

Although the traditional civic approach to dangerous alley behavior (violence, drug use, impromptu toilets) is to block off public access and turn them into garbage-only collection points, director of the International Sustainability Institute in Seattle Todd Vogel decided on the opposite approach: put the public back into them, en masse. Poetry readings, World Cup viewings, circus acts, and neighborhood-maintained planters soon transformed the alleys into destination points and greatly enriched the city's civic life. Crucially, the initial idea for all of this came from an architect, of course.

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Duvall Decker Architects combine greater agency and public outreach to benefit Mississippi (and the profession at large)

An architect helps transform dangerous alleys into cultural hotspots