Liz Ogbu defines her design philosophy as being in direct contrast to the transactional “box-checking” approach that typically characterizes how architects work with communities. She returns to one question again and again: “How do you engage people who don’t have a seat at the table and think about them as co-designers in the process?”
It’s a difficult question. Ogbu says she often feels like she has two clients—the one paying and the one using the space she’s helping design. “In most of my projects, it’s the wrong problem outlined in the brief,” Ogbu says. “You can only right-fit it by talking to people.”
Ogbu first studied architecture at Wellesley College in the mid-’90s, where architectural historian Alice Friedman encouraged her to design her own major. In addition to taking studio courses at MIT, Ogbu studied sociology and economics. She completed her master’s in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and then worked for a couple of nonprofits—Public Architecture and Ideo.org— before launching her own practice in 2012.
She tends to partner with other design firms to facilitate intense, long-term collaborations between residents and clients. “Liz Ogbu uniquely and bravely uses design to do the hard work of community healing, by acknowledging buried pain and trauma that is too often overlooked,” says John Cary, author of Design for Good.
Ogbu is currently part of a team that’s reimagining a 32-acre stretch of concrete in a historically working-class, African-American community in San Francisco, left empty when Pacific Gas and Electric Co. dismantled a power plant. Ogbu oversaw a series of in-depth conversations with residents, over multiple years, that led to the design of a temporary event space on the site and the creation of a new public shoreline trail.
Ogbu hopes her work will spur other architects to re-evaluate how they work with local communities. “When architects look at me, they say, ‘She’s the community engagement person, she can lead a good community meeting,’ ” Ogbu says with a knowing weariness. “But the engagement I do is really a means to an end. We can create better design.”
The Hunters Point project
Ogbu's TED talk
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