by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Steven Lewis, AIA, is the incoming president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and a former Loeb Fellow. He was a founding principal with the Los Angeles-based firm RAW International, which has been in practice more than 24 years. He recently completed four years as liaison to NOMA with the U.S. General Services Administration in the Office of the Chief Architect. Lewis will take the presidential mantle at NOMA in October.

Education: I’m a graduate of Syracuse University School of Architecture in 1979. I did not pursue a graduate degree, but last year did complete the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard.

Area of study during Loeb Fellowship: I dedicated my fellowship year to the subject of race and architecture. Specifically, looking at the structural inequalities within the profession of architecture based on race, starting with the spectrum of interest in the profession among graduating high school seniors to the academic experience of people in the academy to winding up in practice. My work product for that year was a symposium on the issue called “Forced Perspective: Widening the Frame Through Which Architecture Views Itself.”

Professional background: In 1984, I established a practice in Los Angeles with two great architect designers, which we called RAW Architecture. It later became RAW International, and it still exists. After our 20th anniversary together in 2004, I left to join the office of the Chief Architect of GSA in Washington, D.C., and became part of the Design Excellence program under Ed Feiner, FAIA. I came on in one of their unique hiring mechanisms called an industrial hire, which meant that I came in for a specified amount of time, and my four years just ticked off a few weeks ago. Now, I’m going to join the Parsons Corporation as principal/project manager. They’re headquartered in Pasadena.

Priority as incoming president of NOMA: I’m calling my platform “Connecting the Dots: Strategic Partnerships.” NOMA’s strongest asset will never be its membership numbers, simply because there are only 1,620—or thereabouts—licensed black architects in America. The other ethnic minority groups, who have a really strong presence in the organization as students through their NOMAS chapters, still have not elected as licensed professionals to enter the organization and play a part in its constituency or in its leadership. Further, even if we had 100 percent participation among black architects today, the strength of the organization could not rest merely on its numbers. Instead, it relies on the leadership of the organization.

NOMA has reduced its mission right now to three primary agendas. One of those is cultivating interests within the ranks of middle-school and high-school kids and introducing architecture as a viable professional career. We’re trying to do that through a program of summer camps for students.

Out of the 122 accredited programs in North America, seven of those reside in historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs. Those seven schools are responsible for producing 40 percent of all licensed black architects. Each one of the seven is different in its experience, status, and resources, but on balance we feel strongly that with that much responsibility falling on the shoulders of those institutions that NOMA must play a role in supporting those programs, so that is the second of the three primary agenda items for the national organization. NOMA plans to support them in a couple of different ways: financially—such as through scholarships for their students—and through supporting particular programs within the schools. Beyond financial support, we are rallying to create a roster of members who are available to serve as lecturers, visiting critics, and jurors.

The third agenda item is establishing a meaningful presence in the Gulf region, specifically New Orleans, where NOMA has an active component trying to assist in the recovery.

You have spoken before about the importance of getting more mainstream press for black architects. Do you feel that the amount of media coverage is below their percentage in the profession? Maybe not our percentage in the profession, but certainly our percentage in the society and the country. I think that if all things were equal or if we were tracking at a commensurate percentage level with our percentage in the profession, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue. But I think the issue is the relative invisibility until recently.

I think there is a surge that’s going on for a number of reasons. Steve Kliment, FAIA, and the online [AIArchitect] series that he just concluded was really helpful. There are publications like Metropolis and a few others that are seemingly making a conscious effort to feature African-American architects in greater numbers. We’re starting to see some of our members get recognition in the mainstream press. But, still, we would like to see more. That’s why my stepping in as editor and art director of the NOMA magazine is very important: to escalate the quality level so that it’s a respectable piece that sits on the table next to the other ones and can very much hold its own.

What can the AIA do to bring the two organizations closer together? I was recently appointed to the Board-level subgroup on diversity that’s being led by George Miller, FAIA, and I can say that there’s a genuine and sincere search for answers on how to make diversity one of the biggest value-added pieces of the profession and of the AIA’s mission. One way that they’re demonstrating it is through outreach to find members to participate at a national level of leadership. Then, drilling down to the chapter level, I would say through our partnerships, outreach, and programming with high schools. NOMA just had a board meeting at Tuskeegee University, and improving partnerships with the AIA was part of the agenda. Many of our board members serve at leadership levels within the AIA as well.

What is NOMA doing right, and what can it be doing better? Because we’re all-volunteer, our ability to be effective has resided with the ability of the board members as individuals to work and do service. One of the things that we’ve been successful at in the last four or five years is improving the quality of how the organization is perceived, both in its design component as well as the service component to the communities. Now, the board has to harness the strength of its growing numbers of membership—increase the quality of membership involvement—so that members are assigned and take responsibility for specific initiatives and push those forward and demonstrate as ambassadors for the organization what the membership is capable of offering back to the profession and the community. So the short answer would be: NOMA is trying to empower its members to be a further extension of what the leadership of the organization is about.

What we could be doing better is delegating responsibility beyond the board so that the mission of the organization can gain greater traction through a larger resource pool.

Reading material: I’m currently reading a book by Craig Wilkins titled The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music, and that’s a tough one. I wasn’t a reader until I went to the Loeb Fellowship, and now I’m never without a book, so it’s a good thing. As far as my activism books, I just finished reading Victoria Kaplan’s Structural Inequality: Black Architects in the United States—it’s a companion to Craig’s book; Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama; and Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King.

Hobbies: My passion is photography. During our Loeb trip to South Africa, I took more than 2,000 photographs in two weeks. I’m happy that a number of them have been published. My photos are all taken with an architectural eye, right down to the composition of the people pictures. I’d also like to say that mentoring is a hobby because you touch a lot of young people. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s what matters most.