Archinect - News

Segregation by Design: Using visual data and spatial analysis to highlight the racist legacy of urban renewal

2022-08-29T15:12:00-04:00

What started as a self-funded project from New York-based architect Adam Paul Susaneck is gaining attention over its unique ability to paint a picture of the effects of racial segregation in the 180 American cities included in the controversial Federal Highway Act of 1956.

Inspired by Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Susaneck launched his Segregation by Design project in early 2021 to "reveal the extent to which the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race."

Susaneck is in league with others who have been calling on the Biden Administration to dismantle the legacy of race-based discrimination laden in America’s aging highway network and says the trifold goal of the project is to: 1. Create an "Atlas of Urban Renewal" in book form; 2. Create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion; and 3. Continue to grow the followership of Segregation by Design’s social media channels (which to date number some 132,000).

Related on Archinect: St....

Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) details the push behind its new name

2022-08-19T18:27:00-04:00

Concerns about the university’s association with and commemoration of Ryerson had been voiced by its Indigenous students, staff and faculty for years. How the university addressed those concerns with statements on its website or revised plaques placed next to Egerton Ryerson’s statue fell short of the steps necessary to speak to his legacy or the continued harm it was causing

Egerton Ryerson’s name is inextricably linked to the legacy of murder and abuse within Canada’s residential schools, as he is often cited as the system’s principal designer through his role as the country’s first Chief Superintendent of Education starting in 1844. This relation made the university a target of a nationwide protest movement which eventually took down a statue of the educator in a well-publicized June 2021 kerfuffle.

The rebranding was the product of a working group called Standing Strong (or Mash Koh Wee Kah Pooh Win) that convened with a 22-strong list of recommendations a year ago. Over 2,000 unique names (including the temporary 'X University' moniker) were considered in a public consultation. Dr. Eva Jewell, an Indigenous faculty member who detailed her own past experiences with racism at the school, tells University Affairs it "signals a willingness to listen and an attentiveness to the issues of our time."

Related on Archinect: National Gallery of Canada establi...

Former students complain of racism and sexism at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture

2021-06-02T11:47:00-04:00

21 former students of UCL (University College London) have voiced complaints over alleged sexism and racism at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The complaints, first reported by The Guardian, stretch back over a decade. The ex-students' complaints include inappropriate comments on race and appearance, which they describe as “systemic” within the school.

The stories of the 21 ex-students were compiled into a dossier by former student Eleni Kyriacou and shared with the Guardian, who subsequently spoke to several recent graduates. Stories told by the graduates include one who said staff were “damaging primarily female students.” The graduate, of south Asian descent, claims that a staff member told a fellow student he could not tell that the graduate was “brown” as “she acted and spoke like a white person.”

Previously on Archinect: NOMA leadership echoes the need to 'fight all systems of bias, oppression, and prejudice' following the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial

Another st...

More Than 'Insensitive': The architecture community responds to the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields' job post

2021-02-18T17:40:00-05:00

On February 13, 2021, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields posted a job listing searching for a new director. While their goal was to find potential applicants for hire, what resulted was another glimpse of marginalization within the hiring process. What made this job description so volatile was their search for an individual who would help maintain "the Museum's traditional, core, white audience." I first learned of this news while scrolling through my Twitter feed and seeing a tweet made by long-time Archinector and Archinect Sessions podcast co-host Donna Sink.

Donna provided a screenshot of the listing and followed up with an updated image of the job post with "corrections" made by the museum a few hours after her tweet was posted. Sure, edits were made, but the damage was already done. Seeing a job description like this was disappointing and stomach-turning, to say the least, but does it shock me? Not entirely.

9am Saturday 13 February 2021 Newfields is still actively s...

Houston realtors retire use of "master bedroom"

2020-06-30T12:15:00-04:00

The Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) will no longer use the term "master" to describe the primary bedroom of a home on their housing listings. The term "master" has roots in slavery, and HAR says the topic of removing it from realty terminology has been debated for years. Now, the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) platform that HAR uses for listings, will use "primary bedroom" and "primary bath," HAR said in a statement to CBS News.

"The origin of the terms is debated, and we are not saying they are rooted in slavery. Others didn't personally view them as sexist or racist but believed we should change the terms for anyone else who might find them objectionable. The consensus was that Primary describes the rooms equally as well as Master while avoiding any possible misperceptions," a statement by HAR reads as reported by CBS News.

Architecture and design community creates "pencils down protest" in solidarity with Movement for Black Lives

2020-06-10T13:09:00-04:00

An unaffiliated group of architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, teachers, students, and built environment workers have joined together to spearhead a "pencils down protest" as an expression of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. "This moment demands a direct confrontation with architecture and design's participation in systemic racism," the group writes.

The group sees the act of withholding labor as a form of protest. On their website pencilsdownprotest.com, those who desire to participate can pledge the amount of hours they are "willing and able" to withhold. Pledgers are encouraged to take action during their pencils down time. The group provides a google doc link to resources for those who need guidance.

The protest takes place as a national #ShutDownSTEM engages in a university and STEM-focused strike in support of the movement, as well.

Unequal Scenes: drone images reveal Cape Town's "architecture of apartheid"

2016-06-03T18:54:00-04:00

In any city, space is a commodity. In South African cities space is historical and emotional. A new photo series by an American living in Cape Town captures the dramatic inequality of South Africa’s most beloved city. From an aerial view, Cape Town’s scenic beauty gives way to a stark reminder of the country’s past and the continued racial segregation. [...] “Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge,” he writes on his website.

On his website, Unequal Scenes, the creator of the aerial imagery, Johnny Miller, writes:

"Discrepancies in how people live are sometimes hard to see from the ground. The beauty of being able to fly is to see things from a new perspective - to see things as they really are. Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge. Some communities have been expressly designed with separation in mind, and some have grown more or less organically."

"During apartheid, segregation of urban spaces was instituted as policy. Roads, rivers, “buffer zones” of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate. 22 years after the end of apartheid, many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist. Oftentimes, communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings."

"My desire with this project is to portray the most Unequal Scenes in ...

America has an infrastructure problem – and it's getting critical

2016-02-10T19:54:00-05:00

It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband... The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

Elizabeth Drew considers several recent books on American infrastructure, with an eye to both the material reality and the political system producing it. She concludes that fixing our infrastructural systems "may require even more widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and perhaps a revolt in parts of the country that have inadequate broadband."

"In other words, we may well need to incur more chaos and ruin and even deaths before we come to our senses," she writes.

Unfortunately, in the US, while infrastructure is falling apart everywhere, certain contingencies bear the brunt of this more heavily. The ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan brings into sharp focus the socioeconomic and racial undercurrents of infrastructural collapse.

Interested in related issues? Check out these links:

The crisis in Flint and why architects should care about decentralizing our water systems

2016-02-10T18:02:00-05:00

...centralized urban water systems throughout the world are now under significant stress from increasing population density, water-resource competition, changing precipitation patterns, and new sources of pollutants, such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Even without these pressures, centralized water is, by design, a fracture-critical system—one that is susceptible “to complete and sudden collapse should any part of it fail,” writes Thomas Fisher, Assoc. AIA...

"Faced with an excessive price tag, municipalities may welcome decentralized water as the only feasible choice for future water delivery. Architects should therefore develop more expertise related to these net-zero water systems, as they will have direct implications for building design, construction, and operation."

For more on health issues related to the ecology of urban environments, check out these articles:

So Far to Go, So Much to Gain – discussing diversity with Elsie Owusu on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #9

2016-02-01T19:36:00-05:00

Based in London, Elsie Owusu OBE runs her own firm (Elsie Owusu Architects), is a national council member at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and is vice chair at the London School of Architecture. But it’s likely that many Archinectors hadn’t heard of Owusu until December of last year, when we reported on claims of institutional racism and sexism she had made against RIBA, alleging that they had rigged an election she was up for in favor of another candidate, who wasn’t an elected council member.

In my correspondence with Owusu to arrange our interview, she analogized the issue this way (paraphrased here): an African-American or minority ethnic female actor (her) being nominated for an Oscar, only to have a white actor who hasn't even made a film "parachuted in" and given an award for Best Supporting Actor.

I wanted to speak with Owusu about her work alongside issues of diversity and exclusion in practice generally, and also at the institutional level of RIBA. We discuss th...