by Stephen A. Kliment, FAIA

Central to the advancement of the African-American architect is the architecture school. The architecture school is the environment where black students first come upon professional attitudes that they’ll encounter later on when in practice. It is also a venue where blacks are minimally represented. As noted in the first column in this series, the number of fulltime black students at the accredited schools declined from 1,332 to 1,268 between 1991 and 2003, and the number of graduates dropped from 214 to 156 in the same period.

The challenge is not even at heart one of finances. Majority schools are raising money to provide more scholarships for African-American students. Yet far more productive over the long haul in graduating a higher rate of black students is to find and admit a significant enough group to establish what Max Bond, Sharon Sutton, and others call a “cohort” whose members support each other.

On a par with slim student enrollments is the need to attract and promote black architecture faculty at the majority schools. This is on the premise that a higher black faculty ratio will provide black students a close up—for those who believe in the concept—of real, in-the-flesh role models. (The ratio of full-time black faculty has declined from 6.2 percent of the total to 5.2 percent between 1997 and 2003).

The long-term solution for getting more black faculty into the architecture schools is heavy recruitment, networking, and going out into the firms and the AIA committees with the message that teaching is an important and intellectually rewarding career option. Black architects and architecture graduates for their part should look more openly at a teaching career, instead of focusing single-mindedly on private practice. It is a two-way street: deans cannot be expected to create black teachers when there is no interest.

This month’s column features profiles of three prominent African-American educators—Professor Sharon Sutton at the University of Washington in Seattle, Professor Garrison McNeil at the City College of New York, and President Ted Landsmark of the Boston Architectural College. Each brings to the scene a unique insight.

William Garrison McNeil, RA, NOMA
McNeil, professor at the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture (SAUDLA) at The City College of New York, rose through a combination of personality, persistence, talent, and good timing. Born and raised in New York, McNeil graduated with a BArch from CCNY in 1965, then worked for two years at the New York firm of Lundquist & Stonehill and one year with Ulrich Franzen. In those firms he began to pick up the kind of hands-on business savvy that has made him one of the nation's most practice-oriented educators. (He teaches a required yet popular course on practice management—popular because he makes a point of tying each piece of the syllabus to its real-world significance.) Not for him the dry-as-bones professional practice class that students dread.

Beginning as an instructor at Columbia (co-teaching with Max Bond, FAIA), he moved to CCNY on a tenure track within two years. In practice as well for 30 years, McNeil has seen the difficulty of working within a system that has long kept black architects “above 110th Street.” The solution, he says, is in developing networks, working with U.S.-born black students and young architects to overcome what they have internalized over the years, and encouraging patrons—particularly wealthy black patrons—to recognize the talent and cultural insight of their fellow African Americans who are architects.

Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA
Sutton has been an architecture educator since 1975, having taught at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan, where she became the first African-American woman to be named a full professor of architecture. She is presently professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Washington, where she is also adjunct professor of social work and director of the Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies (CEEDS). First registered as an architect in New York City, she was in private practice there for eight years. Dr Sutton also has degrees in music, philosophy, and psychology.

Although hopeful of the future of diversity in the profession, as the population itself becomes more diverse, she targets the low earning power, social irrelevance, and regressive employment practices among all architects as a deterrent to minorities entering the profession. She looks back on her own experience, including an exemplary era of forward-moving institutional practices of the late 1960s and early ’70s, for inspiration. And she sees specialization as a key element to making architects professionally relevant, especially in the realm of environmental expertise. “Things can only improve,” she says.

Ted Landsmark, Assoc. AIA, NOMA
Landsmark, president of the Boston Architectural College and recipient of the 2006 AIA Whitney Young Award, has long championed the cause of diversity in the schools of architecture. Holder of doctorates in law and philosophy, he also has a master’s in environmental design and an honorary doctorate in fine arts.

“Until conversations engage a wider range of participants, including people outside the architecture profession and the architecture schools, we won't make much significant progress,” Landsmark says. “But until the moment we begin to talk more seriously with high schools, community colleges, and suppliers of architectural products, such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Loews, it's unlikely that we'll see much substantial change.” That, he says, will be how architecture reaches the mainstream awareness among the public enjoyed by professions such as medicine and law. Further, he says, a key to getting more diversity in the faculty of architecture schools, where there are few black doctoral graduates, is to turn to advanced-degree candidates from the related professions.

An example of the difficult situation of drawing and keeping black architects in academia, he points out, is the difficulty among Historic Black College and Universities of maintaining architecture programs. Tuskegee Institute, for example—historically one of the top educators of black architects—has recently lost its NAAB accreditation. Mostly because of a lack of the institution’s interest in the program, graduates of that venerated program are not eligible for state licensure. It is a time for other institutions and professionals to pay heed and offer help, he says.

“This is a moment when we need to take a really hard look at what we've done in the past and how it has failed,” Landsmark concludes overall, “and then adopt programs that are unified and focused on achieving real results.”

For more in-depth profiles of these educators, see the full-text version of this article.