definitely blacks.

It's commonly known that black women make up an absolutely miniscule number of architects, while blacks in general are underrepresented.

Also, assuming you're talking about the US here, and not global?

Globally, hispanic peoples (however you want to define that) are very well represented in the field; in the US, not so much, unfortunately.

Republicans.

Pragmatists.

the sane.

i'm colorblind.

sane-insane is particularly funny and interesting.

but what's not funny is the number of black students in architecture schools in california. los angeles as a metropolis with a large black population and at least five architecture schools, supports a very low number of black architecture students.
i find this exteremely pathetic because the black comunities are definetly in need of better architectural and planning voice and input. i know for a fact that black communities are tired of not having a professional(s) who come from their own neighborhood in community design efforts.
this is a real problem.

i see a lot of hispanic and asian students. many hispanic students are from here, but many asian students are from overseas or recently emigrated.

mantaray,
interestingly enough, i was pretty close to total of four black architecture students (two of them representing the total number in one school), three of them being female and black. what i also noticed that they were all aware of their rarity and this put some, and not always positive, spins and pressures on their studies.

racial and religious representations in architectural schools is a very interesting statistical study to clue-in to bigger subjects in communities, cities and in the profession. it is kind of a special interest for me each time i hear it.

There are lots of conservatives / republicans in this profession. You don't see them as much in particular types of offices in particular cities, or on this particular website, but I wouldn't be surprised if the profession as a whole actually had a 50/50 bi-party split...

That's sad and interesting about the women you knew, Orhan. I can imagine what a pressure it would be -- as if arch school isn't pressure enough!

one interesting difficulty on one of my friends was that she got a lot of discouraging crits for doing form-expressive projects as she was always asked to do the socio-political 'right thing.' in fact, all she wanted to do was these beautiful double helix forms and she was good at it.
it was like as if she was not expected to do what she wanted to do the most.
when people were doing post-modern baths and poetic cemeteries, she was expected to do a low income housing or something.
she had to deal with these conditions each semester and get distracted by them and not be able to finish many of her ideas, including the ones she always entertained on the side with passion, and the other half assed one she was pushed by her instructors who themselves didn't do low income anything.
they didn't seem to meet her where she was comfortable and confidant.
she was working with floating curves other than corbu's 'bean' curve and doing very conscience insertions of african art corbu himself tried to make via picasso's editions.
stuff like that wasn't very popular in the thick of pomo either.
i always believed and supported her with few others, thinking she was going to be able to continue doing her stuff into the real world and stay in the league.
eventually she resented the whole experience. that was the saddest. she didn't become an architect.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe most African Americans simply are not interested in being architects therefore making them a so-called minority.

While I agree in equality, should we really force people into the profession who may not be interested in it just so that can have a "mixed-racial" office environment fulfilling some sociopolitical checklist?

Commence opposing arguments.

._. .._ _._. _._



I feel that you made some very racist and rude comments for shock value..anyway...I am a black woman...with my B.S in Arch and will receive my M. Arch next semester.

Yes there are very few Black women in the profession. The fact that people assume that "African Americans simply are not interested in being architects therefore making them a so-called minority" is complete crap.

-Blacks are minorities...we make up 12% of the US population
-Women are also " minorities" are also in architecture profession..no news there
-Black female architects make up 0.2% of the population, so
link read the article in Architect Magazine


It is not my fault that I grew up never knowing anyone that was architect. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth working for "Daddy's XYZ firm" but I busted my butt to make things happen...so here I am on my way to becoming an architect.


It is sad in this profession how truly ignorant some of my teachers, classmates, and clients have been assuming that I know nothing about architecture because I am a Black female.

Race and gender are two subjects that can be really nasty discussions because when people start to say some really crazy stuff because of how they were raised.


It is sad but sometimes I would have to go into the bathroom and cry because of how people would treat me. They would not shake my hand or talk to me like I was dumb. After that I would go back outside and continue my work.


When people say racist or sexist stuff to me I just assume that they DO NOT KNOW ANY BETTER and continue towards my goals. Nine times out of time I will be there boss one day :-)


I see I will have to blog about this one...

.._. .._ _._. _._ & gyrlusocute005 : the comment is not racist. Although I wonder about your comments as you seem to have issues of thinking everybody else is a racist. In my class there is a guy from africa, nobody questions his skill or talent, as he works very hard and is a good student.

My problems lies with the opposite of this discussion "positive discrimination" which is giving opportunities to people just because they fall in a minority.

if you have three kids, two are talented and the third is from a low income area and is of a different race, the school is only able to accept two kids, it will accept one talented kid and the low the income area kid, so that they can justify to the world that they are equal opportunity and not racist. They will then tell this at all public relations and publish it their annual and on the website as you can find on the GSD website and i presume all the other architecture schools. The old idea that selection was based on merit is not so true anymore, still relevant, but I wonder which of the above holds more weight.

I always wonder what happened to all those talented kids who simply were not minority's, therefore didn't get accepted. Of course people who are from a minority can also be talented, but our admissions process is accepting them based on their minority status, not their talent.

I recently applied to something, wasn't a school as such, they said it was determined on academic merit. In reality, I discovered they determined based on accepting as varied collection of applicants as they could, and nothing to do with hard work and merit. If I had wanted to get accepted, i should of focused on getting a passport of a country nobody has every heard of, because skill and talent had nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately j'aime, I come across a lot of people like you that are in denial about how people are treated in this field just because you are apart of the majority. Being a minority versus someone that is a minority AND a international student has to be discussed separately and not together.

So what if there is a guy in your class is from Africa? What does that have to do with anything? It is the equivalent to saying, " I am not racist! I have Black friends!" LOL Not all minorities are low income...that is another bad assumption that will also get you into trouble too.

There is still White resentment and assumption that if minorities are among the very few "we somehow don't deserve to be there" or I got there based on affirmative action is again...complete crap.

Just because schools or firms hire minorities means little. All schools are not the same. It is not about goodwill, it is the understanding the the US and the rest of the world is globalized that you will be at a disadvantage if you have no diversity at all. That can range from race and religion to national origin.

Jennifer Newsom, a graduate student at Yale was sitting in class and was told by here professor that Blacks have not contributed in any way to Architecture caused her to launch a conference about race and Architecture at Yale, in order to have an open dialogue about the issue.

link

If you look at me, I am not and probably never be what people consider at "typical architect" i.e. White male is, and I will never will be.


I do applaud the AIA and many schools making strides in attempting to make this profession more diverse. But I am also a member of (NOMA) the National Organization of Minority Architects, which was founded in the early 1970's based 2 Black AIA members felt that the so few minority architects need a place to have open discourse about the profession.

link

I have been a member of the AIAS for 7 years (including being vice-president and secretary) and a member of NOMAS for 7 years too.

People will always have different perspectives, so I will no longer respond to this particular post anymore...

So if are you at Harvard or Yale or Columbia because your dad went there, or your family is some type of alumni? Or people get into school just because their parents are rich? Are people at ivy leagues really smart or they got in just because? That is stereotyping, just like you assume that all minorities are low income....its just dumb----It doesn't make sense and it is ignorant thinking...

Oh yeah....its minorities NOT minoritiy's like you spelled it above.

thanks gyrlusocute005 for assuming I come from a rich family with a lineage of architects, ivy league graduates and an easy path into whatever graduate school I choose.

hello pot, my name is kettle.

yes, I may be a white male but I am the first person in my family to even go to graduate school. I live in a state where being (and speaking English) is actually a minority. I went through undergrad on scholarship because I worked hard in high school. I went through grad school on loans that I will be paying for the rest of my life (or at least until I turn 50). I wasn't brought up in a rich family of architects or even working professionals; my dad was in the military (which is not a well paying job, p.s.) and my mom stayed at home because we couldn't afford child care. So while I may fit the "architect" mold as being a white, male I would say I am far from what you consider "typical".

For the record, in my graduate class of 36 students, 10 were white, US born, men. That's less than half. 22 students were not from the US (or even North America for that matter).

Well by the time I graduate next spring, I will have almost $200,000 in student loans.

So I guess that makes us even.

Wow, looks like I sparked quite a debate here.

So the straightforward answer, I assume, is anyone non-pure-white?

Non-pure-white?

when i taught first year a few years back, the few black students we had struggled hard, not only because they were a minority but because they had very little prior exposure to much of what the rest of the entering class took as natural/obvious cultural experience. they didn't have that experience to draw from and their own experiences were hard to apply to the things the foundation curriculum requires of them.

their different points-of-view may have manifested in a wonderfully different way of pursuing design in their third- and fourth-year classes but very few made it through foundation year because they couldn't keep up, despite the faculty's best efforts to lead them along and adapt the projects to accommodate their different sets of values and experiences. (i'd report on the success/failure of those who did make it, but i didn't stay in that part of the program to see it.)

one of the craziest things for me to learn/accept was that these students flat-out could not accept the requirement that they pretend - that these things we were asking of them, requiring a lot of very hard work, were basically fictions. it was a huge barrier, and didn't seem to affect only those from lesser means, as i might have expected.

on top of their difficulties in first year, i understand that prior to these foundation curriculum challenges these kids had already fought to be there - to know they wanted to be in architecture and to have really committed themselves to getting in.
- 1st: there is very little in high school that prepares many black kids to believe that architecture is a career option.

- 2nd: when they learn enough about architecture to think that it IS something they want, they are often discouraged from it.

some of you will know that i have taught summer intros to architecture for high school kids (10th/11th graders) since 2004. we seldom get more than a couple of black applicants. when we do, they have so little art background and so little experience in questioning what they're told that what we see are products of a rote learning curriculum.

we have tried outreach programs, going to guidance counselors, various recruitment techniques. in 2006 we got one kid with a facility for graffitti art and a healthy, humorous cynicism and snatched him up. he was one of our best that year - the sad part being that he was such an exception and that what set him apart was almost accidental (at least as far as his education was concerned). he had MADE himself into that person with very little encouragement from those around him.

re: our outreach. if a guidance counselor finds a smart kid, they steer him/her toward medicine or business or other. that was a dead end because guidance counselors don't typically see architecture as a positive option. they've also heard how hard it is and pre-judge that their kids will get discouraged. (unfortunately, this is not wrong. see above). and they're sort of just proxies for parents, many of whom make similar judgments.

ultimately, unless a kid has parents with a liberal (and/or) arts education and those parents see value in their children making the effort to get a relatively expensive education, with lots of hard work doing lots of crazy non-product-oriented pretending, it's going to be hard for that kid to find a supportive environment from which to spring into architectural education.

there are black students who do come from a supportive background, who do get a taste of arts, design, and critical thinking when they're young and can thrive in the design school environment. their are others who - somehow, from somewhere - know that they want it and go after it. but these are few enough so far that neither group have really shifted the primary narrative of black students' entrance and performance in architecture school and in the profession.

so is this a race problem? yes, of course, but more because of the legacy of how race issues have developed into stratifications of education, expectation, and ambition than because of anything architecture schools are doing/can do.

i don't think it's racism. i think it's part of how to overcome a whole host of conditions that set these kids on a certain trajectory - a pre-assumed path - and finding a way to figure out when it is or isn't appropriate to knock them off of that track and onto a different one. and it's probably NOT apppropriate in a lot of cases. how do you identify the ones with aptitude and desire when they don't have enough information to self-identify?

sorry, i'm all over the place. but it's a tough problem, i think.

I think Steven nailed it.