“It’s not simply about the ways individuals hold onto ideology, but it is more so about the way individuals embed their ideology into the spaces and places we all frequent. For us the Paper Monuments project is still rooted in the fact that these symbols of oppression need to be countered by symbols of those people who’ve fought against that oppression.”

Bryan C. Lee Jr., a New Orleans-based architect, has been working on increasing representation in the field and fighting the inequalities that architecture perpetuates because of that lack of diversity. Formerly the director of place and civic design at the Art Council of New Orleans, Lee formed his own design-firm-cum-nonprofit Colloqate Design to coalesce his efforts to fight the racism embedded in the built environment. In addition to that, Lee started a local chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects in NO and another one at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he received his masters degree in architecture. 

Today, he’s a national board member and runs a youth program called Project Pipeline that offers an affordable architecture camps for young people of color, something he wasn’t able to experience as a kid. At the Art Council of New Orleans, he ran a youth education program focused on giving young people design skills that will help them improve their communities. Each spring and summer the program pays 5 to 15 students to design and build projects that will impact the public space of their community in some way.

Another project of his is Design Justice Platform, a work-in-progress, crowdsourced code of ethics that launched in late 2016 and incorporates how the built environment perpetuates injustice. The idea is to include justice as part of the health, safety, and welfare credo that is already part of architecture practice, making it almost like a Hippocratic oath for architects.