by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Brandy Brooks is the director of the Community Design Resource Center of Boston (CDRC). Prior to her work with CDRC, Brooks was the director of marketing and communications for Loheed Design Partnership in Somerville, Mass. A passionate advocate for socially conscious and community-focused design, Brooks is a member of the Boston Faith and Justice Network, a group of Boston-area Christians committed to social action and justice. She also was an AIA150 champion this past year and speaker and panel moderator at the Design Corps 2006 Structures for Inclusion conference.

Education: I graduated from Boston Architectural College (BAC) with my bachelor’s in design studies in 2006. This was the second school for me. I came back as an older student after attending two years at Harvard University. There were about six years between that where I worked in a variety of fields, including architecture but also financial services and IT support. At Harvard, I started out in the visual environmental studies program in the graphic design track, eventually looking toward going into the Graduate School of Design. After my sophomore year, I had to leave the school for personal reasons, but it was a good thing for me.

When I came back to the BAC, I had a much stronger sense of who I was and what I wanted out of my career. That was the thing I liked about being an older student: I knew what I wanted to get involved in and I had a much stronger vision. I was really solid in it at that point and focused. It made school the second time around much easier.

A social architect: When I was a teenager, I thought that architecture was the job that I was going to do because I really liked buildings. I believed my social efforts were going to come from tutoring, teaching, writing, and speaking, but I didn’t really connect it to architecture. The first place I saw that connection was at Harvard in an architecture history course where I heard about what some of the early Modernists were doing. They talked about what the folks in Bauhaus and Corbusier were trying to do, and there was this strong underlying sense of how all this plays into shaping and meeting the needs of society.

Their ideas about what should happen in response to those needs and the way that they played out later in the 20th century did not work so well for us, but what I loved is that they were sitting there seriously thinking about worker housing and what they needed to have in a housing environment to meet their social, environmental, and other needs. There was a strong sense of social consciousness in the work that they were doing, which I loved. It was the first time I saw this connection between architecture and the social efforts that were a part of my faith and my home growing up. That got me really excited, but it wasn’t until probably 10 years after that—when I got to the BAC—that I began to see how that could play out in my professional career.

Involvement with CDRC: I helped to start the CDRC back in 2005. I first heard people talking about the idea when I was president of the student government at the BAC. Before that, when I was vice president, I had been head of this outreach committee that was looking to find ways for students to do community service that hopefully would connect with the things they were studying in design.

Folks at the BSA and the BAC had been having this series of conversations about starting a community design center and what would it mean. I first heard about those conversations at the end of 2004 and then started joining them at the beginning of 2005. It was amazing. I went to that first meeting, and the light bulb went off. I realized that I had just found exactly the thing that I wanted to be doing with my career, but didn’t know that it specifically existed until I went to that meeting. I had always been excited about the possibilities for architecture, not necessarily as form and aesthetics—although I truly appreciate beautiful buildings—but this idea that all those things could be accessible to everyday people and that good design was about being comfortable and able to do exactly what you wanted to do in whatever building you are in.

The community design movement was focused on making sure that everyone in the community has access to design services and understanding that will allow them to obtain and advocate for themselves spaces that are healthy, inspirational, engaging, and truly functional for what they want to do. The opportunity to talk about how architecture is important to everyone—not because it’s a high art form but because we’re in buildings all the time and it matters the kind of light you have and the way your space is configured and how well you’re able to move about—that was exciting to me.

As director of the Boston CDRC: One of the things I’ve been learning over the last year—and they should tell this to every architecture student—is that running a design business is mostly about the business and not as much about the design as you’d like, but it’s an interesting set of new skills. What I do here ranges from basic administrative stuff like running the office, making sure the bills get paid, overseeing the equipment, and managing my staff, to developing our programs and overseeing the different projects that we do with volunteer architects and students, to going out and doing public speaking and teaching at conferences and the BAC and the Harvard Graduate School of Design and other schools.

It involves going out to community organizations and talking to them about what our services are and how they might match up with some of the needs that those organizations are finding for their built spaces. It involves talking to a lot of different design firms and explaining why having communities involved in the design process is really important, and why we do pro bono design work to make design services more accessible to the population.

Personal inspiration: Well, everyone always says their mom, but my mom actually is a strong source of inspiration for me in terms of the values that she instilled in our family. I’m a strong Christian and that plays into how I try to approach my career and … the importance of having to give back and care for other people around you, not just focusing on what you’re doing and your particular needs are at the time.

Professional inspiration: I also have to say that one of my professional mentors has been Ted Landsmark, who’s the president here at the BAC. It’s very interesting for me to see someone who, like me, went into architecture to study, but didn’t come out being a licensed architect, yet [he] has had a tremendous influence on the profession. He’s been a strong voice for change and diversity in the profession, so that’s been encouraging to see that even though I didn’t find traditional architecture to be the path I wanted to go, there still are ways to be deeply involved in the profession and where it is going.

There are a lot of folks here at the school who don’t know [about] his long term involvement with the City of Boston and especially some of the things that happened to him during the busing era. There’s a famous photo of a guy getting speared with an American flag at City Hall Plaza. It was a symbol of the apex of this busing crisis, and the guy getting speared was Ted Landsmark. What’s tremendous to me is that you have this guy who, in the middle of this crisis, nearly lost his life [yet] chose to stay in the city where that happened and to work [to better it]. That’s a tremendous thing. A lot of people would flee from that, but that was not his reaction at all. He’s been here and he’s been a really important civic leader in Boston for a long time. That is very inspirational.

On architecture education: I think architecture students are not being taught enough that there are a whole bunch of other people critical to the process of getting buildings done. They need to know how to communicate and how to be in a collaborative relationship with those people. Here at the BAC, we have four different programs: Architecture, Interior Design, Design Studies, and Landscape Architecture, and there is so little cross-over between those programs even though we’re one of the few schools that have all of them. There’s not much understanding of the policy piece or the business and marketing side to running a design firm.

There’s a lack of awareness of the context in which architecture sits. I think that starts to make the profession increasingly irrelevant, because it doesn’t know how to relate to all of the other things that are going on around it.

I think the students who will eventually emerge and form the next generation of built environment practice are going to be those who understand how to make those connections, how to be collaborative and recognize the broad team of people who are making what they do happen, and who are able to draw in folks from different, interesting places because they know they need them. There are going to be all sorts of different people with unexpected skills who will be needed in the next generation of built environment firms, and right now, students have to make up that understanding on their own, if they’re attuned to it at all.

Advice to recently graduated architects: Make sure that you are hanging out with a lot of people who don’t necessarily do what you do. Find ways to connect and learn about how architecture is related to all these other things that your friends and family are interested in. Try to put yourself in places where you have to learn from other people, and maybe be a little bit uncomfortable for a while. Be where you have to learn to get that sense of who the people are around you. Figure out how to be a stronger communicator and relate to the people around you to learn their language and the things that they think are important—and what you do can help to meet their needs.