Bryan C. Lee, Jr. is the founder and design principal at Colloqate, a New Orleans–based nonprofit firm focused on social, civic, and cultural spaces. In 2018, he was the driving force behind the Design Justice Summit, an AIA-sponsored event that recognized the need to dismantle existing power structures in architecture and bring design back to the community level. Today, Lee is heartened by the continued resonance of “design justice,” a term he coined after years of pondering, in his words, “what it might look like to practice in a field that has historically ignored the opinions of people like me.”
By the time we got to 2018, we were a decade into the thought process around what design justice looked like. There was already a grassroots effort to think about socially motivated practice. You started to hear a lot of similar terminologies: social impact design, public interest design. But those frameworks lacked a fervent or an adamant consideration for justice. Both of those intended to appease systems of power. And design justice actively didn’t, and does not, seek to appease institutional power or political power. It only seeks to engage in a people’s power, a community power.
Back in 2014, I left a firm that I truly loved, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple. Very soon after, I realized that you have so little connection to real people, the people your work impacts, when you are in an architecture practice. You’re just so far removed. The grind of that work doesn’t provide the opportunity to build real, cogent relationships. Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking that we’re making progress or having truthful relationships, just by participating in a 1% program or bringing young kids into the office. Now, those are great programs and everyone should do them; they’re just the bare minimum one can do.
It’s frightening for a profession that has such an outsize impact on the patterns of people in cities and towns across the world. It should be a warning sign to all of us. The more we are disconnected, the more negative ramifications will come from the spaces and places we design.
Because architects often don’t initiate projects themselves, we can become conduits for the power of developers and clients. Because our margins are so thin, because we rely on clients with cash to build but little connection to communities, we end up being complicit in harmful acts. And we spend a lot of time justifying them to put food on the table.
There is a tsunami coming; from the Northwest over, you are going to start to see the expectations for RFPs and RFQs subtly and then robustly change over the next five to 10 years. A lot of firms are going to lose out; they don’t have the sociability as a practice to be in the room anymore. And we’ll be better off for it; we’ll be able to make better decisions for our public spaces when we make them as a collective. — As told to Steve Cimino
