As the United States continues to face a reckoning over its historic and current oppression and marginalization of people of color, schools of architecture are no different from other institutions in their need to confront the structures that have privileged whiteness and maleness for centuries.
In fact, schools of architecture may have even more of a need. At a 2019 event, then-AIA President William Bates, FAIA, noted that the percentage of Black students in architecture programs is “not that different from what it was 50 years ago.” The latest demographic findings from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards support Bates’s statement, demonstrating that recent growth in racial and ethnic diversity in the profession is mainly among Asian and Latinx individuals, with no increase for the Black population. Even with modest growth for certain races and some progress for women, NCARB states that “women and people of color remain underrepresented within the profession.”
Many architecture school administrators are trying to remedy this problem through a variety of strategies, and some have seen significant increases in the enrollment and retention of students of color. But, even those who have fostered growth acknowledge there is still a long way to go.
Charlton Lewis, assistant dean for student affairs at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, says that though his school has been moving in the right direction—in 2019, at least 36% of its undergraduates were students of color—“I don’t want to paint a rosier picture than what actually exists.”
Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati Edward Mitchell notes that though the school’s population is growing more diverse—the percentage of undergraduate students of color more than doubled between 2010 and 2020, from around 6% to at least 14%—“it’s not as diverse as we would like.”
Christian Dagg is the head of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University, whose latest statistics show an undergraduate population in which almost a quarter of students are students of color. He adds that the field itself makes increasing diversity difficult. “There are aspects of architectural education—the length and cost of study, for instance—that actively discourage first generation college students and students of color from selecting architecture as a major,” he says. “We’ve done a good job of making ourselves exclusive.”
Diversity initiatives at architecture schools can only do so much, however, as long as structural inequality remains in society at large. At the same time, university policies can go hand-in-hand with larger societal shifts—or at least provide support while the struggle for fundamental change continues.
What strategies have UT Austin, Cincinnati, and Auburn implemented that have seen results? And what are these schools looking to do more of in the coming years as they strive to make their student populations not only more diverse, but more inclusive?
Reaching Out to Youth
It’s clear that recruiting young people who may not otherwise consider pursuing an architecture degree due to limited resources or a lack of personal connection to the profession is key to diversifying architecture schools’ student populations. Cincinnati runs summer camps for area middle and high school students and makes a point to recruit kids of color, with the idea that they are then more likely to apply to the program.
Auburn and UT Austin are similarly concerned with recruiting talented students of color: “It’s about making them aware that we’re interested in them and accessible to them,” Lewis says, adding that UT runs summer outreach programs. For almost 10 years, Auburn dedicated a staff member to recruiting such students. While the college has redirected those resources to overall recruitment, it continues with many of the strategies developed during that time, including significant involvement with the National Organization of Minority Architects.
Once students of color enter an architecture program, it’s equally important to support them so that they will stay, succeed, and graduate. If a student doesn’t come from a family that can assist them through the long years of study, which often involve expensive materials and all-nighters, they can easily fail to finish.
The University of Cincinnati has, in part, solved this issue by making its program one in which students work and study at the same time. “We have classes year ‘round,” Mitchell says, “and the students go into the workforce approximately every third semester, allowing them to pay off tuition and earn living expenses.”
“It’s an extraordinarily expensive education,” Lewis says. “The university may pay full tuition for some students in need, but we can’t ignore the fact that they still have financial constraints.” Lewis’s office and the school’s dean have encouraged faculty, for example, to require less expensive or alternative materials for building models and delivering content.
Hiring Faculty of Color
Of course, support is more than monetary assistance; mentorship is also critical. At Cincinnati, Mitchell is working to build a better mentorship program in which older students of color mentor first-year students of color.
But mentorship also means having full-time faculty of color with whom students can emulate and work with. However, while the number of architecture students of color has generally increased, the dearth of faculty of color has persisted. Students of color may be less likely to seek a program where there are few or no minority professors.
At UT Austin, Lewis and his colleagues have secured two new positions—a tenure-track professorship and an annual fellow—for scholars whose work focuses on diversity, inclusion, gender, and race. One previous fellow’s work, for instance, looked at a site in New Orleans where Confederate monuments were being taken down. Students in her studio researched the layers of history of the space and potential ways to transform it.
Diversifying Curricula
Yet it is not only who you find at an architecture school that is important; it’s also what is studied. As renowned Black architect Mabel O. Wilson described her own education in a 2017 Curbed article, “the content of what I was learning was very Eurocentric—the histories, the methodologies, all of the references. You’re in this space of whiteness.” Wilson called on the profession to change its body of knowledge.
Lewis notes that discomfort seems to be the main reason professors balk at change, as they don’t feel at ease teaching something in which they don’t have expertise. “As we push them to embrace vulnerability, we also need to support them,” he says. “If they haven’t heard of or seen, say, an indigenous approach to landscape architecture in Bolivia, the university needs to be willing to support their research and perhaps even send them there.”
A Moral and Practical Imperative
Not only is it ethically vital for schools of architecture to put policies in place that foster more diverse student populations; such efforts also make for better design thinking and a more robust profession.
Dagg notes, for example, that Auburn has had recent success in the development of several affordable housing prototypes through its Rural Studio. “It’s clear that this research has benefited from a varied team of students working on this problem with different life experiences and points of view,” he says. “We have a much better chance of getting at the underlying issues with diverse voices at the table.”
