NOMA Celebrates its 40th year too

The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) celebrated 40 years in 2012, headquartered in Washington DC, they published an online 40th year celebration of their founding with a beautiful magazine full of award winning projects and articles from past and present leaders. One highlight was the announcement of the 2013 president, Kathy Denise Dixon, the third woman to lead the national organization, and she proudly shouts out to women to participate.

The magazine mentions the San Francisco Chapter (SFNOMA) celebration of Black History Month this year with a special lecture by Shelley Davis, an architectural designer and project manager who also serves as one of two SFNOMA vice-presidents. On February 27, 2013, I attended her presentation and was captivated by the well-researched lecture entitled The Evolution of African American Architects with slides of over 25 architects spanning from 1846 to the present. The presentation, according to Ms. Davis, “traces the historic achievements of black master builders and tradesmen who despite the atrocities of slavery, would find opportunity in learning construction trades as slave laborers and spawn a legacy of skilled African American Architects.”

Using portraits, quotes of the architects and their signature buildings, “the presentation underscored the key terms of history, culture, perception perspective and identity to weave a story of pioneering black architects who through sheer determination and persistence battled the false perception of black professionals due to racism and gradually created a new perspective for following generations to establish an identity not just as black architects but as well respected architects.” Davis’s lecture was part of a series of lectures SFNOMA has created to bring awareness and appreciation to underrepresented cultures in architecture. The presentation, Asian American Architects was co-presented by SFNOMA’s Rod Henmi, FAIA, Director of Design at HKIT Architects and Architect Annette Diniz on April 24, 2013, and The New Vernacular and Future Politics, Latin American Architects in the U.S is planned for September.

NOMA’s mission is to champion diversity within the design profession by promoting excellence, active community engagement and supporting professional development of the members. The San Francisco chapter typically holds its lectures and summer camp at the California College of the Arts and Architecture on 1111 Eighth Street in San Francisco. This summer, SFNOMA’s forth-annual Architecture Summer Camp for middle school students will take place as part of the NOMA national Project Pipeline program introducing architecture, as a career option, to minority youth. It serves as a unique, valuable, and critical component to diversify the profession.

Shelley Davis set the backdrop with “the concerted efforts of organizations like NOMA to bring awareness to the low percentage of African Americans in the field as well as other minority groups with the goal of fostering a collective effort to increase the low representation of many minorities including African American architects, at less than 2 percent,” compared to 13.6 percent of those identifying themselves as African Americans in our country (2010 Census). “Currently there are only 1589 male African American Architects and 289 female African American architects out of the total of 105,596 registered architects (2012 NCARB Survey) in the United States,” Davis reported. I imagine many more have graduated from architectural schools and are not licensed as many women (and some men) too may not select to get licensed but continue on to work in architecture or in related fields.

The long history of contributions to architecture and building started with plantation slaves in the south. One particularly compelling story Davis told was "that of Moses Mckissak (1790-1865), a slave tradesman and builder in Tennessee, who passed on his knowledge of the construction trade to his son. His two grandsons would later establish the architecture firm McKissak and McKissack, in 1905. One hundred years later McKissack and MCKissack is still going strong and a leader in the construction industry led by Deryl McKissack who is not only the 5th generation of her family to run the business, but also a woman who is well known for her strong leadership and business skills."

Ms Davis introduced other success stories such as Horace King (1807-1885) who used the money he earned designing and building covered bridges to pay for his way out of slavery. She gives quick but equal time to Robert Taylor (1868-1942), who fought his way to be the first African American to attend MIT, Paul R Williams (1884-1980), first African American member of the AIA, who designed over 3000 buildings, many in Southern California, was also the first African American male to become a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Beverly Loraine Green (1915-1957) licensed in Illinois in 1942 and noted as the first African American woman architect, Barbara Laurie, AIA, NOMA (1942-2013) a partner with Deverouax and Purnell Architects, became an associate professor of architecture at Howard University and began the 200+ program which promotes visibility for African American women in architecture. Dr. Sharon E. Sutton FAIA, the first African American woman in the US promoted to full professor in an accredited professional architectural program, Allison Williams FAIA, NOMA, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard (1987) and Design Director at Perkins and Will from 1997-2012, Jack Travis FAIA, NOMAC, architect and professor interested in cultural integration, and Deanna Van Buren current Loeb Fellow (2013) focused on creating new markets within the field and principal of FOURM design+studio in Oakland.

At the end of Shelley Davis’ presentation, my gut reaction was that the challenging circumstances these architects and most architects of color face was understated because of my reading of Victoria Kaplan's Social Inequality: Black Architects in the United States (Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), explaining how discrimination and difficulty is structurally unequaled in the profession. I would add that this structural disadvantage applies to gender as well as to race with some variations.

My heartfelt thanks go to Shelley Davis for sharing her research notes, knowledge and writing that I pieced together for this article.

I surfed the web to learn more about a few of the architects she introduced ( but there are many more), I include snippets of what I found and added some of what I learned from Sutton and Davis in the hope to inspire readers to explore beyond their own identities and to push for a wider view and increased cultural values in in our profession.

Horace King (September 8, 1807 – May 28, 1885) was an American architect, engineer, and bridge builder.[1*] King is considered the most respected bridge builder of the 19th century Deep South, constructing dozens of bridges in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.[2*] Born into slavery in South Carolina in 1807, King became a prominent bridge architect and construction manager in the Chattahoochee River Valley region of Alabama and Georgia before purchasing his freedom in 1846 (*Wikipedia website).

Robert Robinson Taylor was a key faculty addition to Tuskegee Institute after his graduation in 1892 "placing the school at the forefront of the Black architectural educational enclave, the emerging Historically Black Colleges and Universities" according to Davis in 2003 nac-q AIA publication.

Beverly Loraine Greene, (1915-1957) believed to be the first African American woman architect in the United States, was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 4, 1915. She grew up in Chicago and was raised by her father, James A. Greene, a lawyer, and her mother, Vera Greene, a homemaker. Greene earned a Bachelor of Science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois in 1936. One year later she earned a Master's of Science degree in city planning and housing from the same university. On December 28, 1942, at the age of twenty-seven, Greene was registered in the State of Illinois as an architect.
After completing her third degree at Columbia, Greene returned to her hometown and initially worked for the Chicago Housing Authority. Greene was one of the first African Americans in the agency. Despite her education and her official recognition as an architect, Greene found it difficult to obtain jobs in the profession. Greene accepted a scholarship at Columbia University where she would study urban planning. She received a Master's Degree in Architecture from Columbia on June 5, 1945.

Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Adjunct Professor of Social Work, and Director of CEEDS (Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies) at the University of Washington. She has been an architecture educator since 1975, having held positions at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan where she became the first African American woman in the United States to be promoted to full professor of architecture. Sutton teaches community-based undergraduate and graduate design studios and offers graduate seminars in professional practice and architecture research methods. She is the author of Weaving a Tapestry of Resistance: The Places, Power, and Poetry of a Sustainable Society (Bergin & Garvey, 1996)derived from a K-12 urban design program she founded while at the University of Michigan and she and Susan P. Kemp edited The Paradox of Urban Space: Inequality and Transformation in Marginalized Communities (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Currently, she is completing When Ivory Towers Were Black a book documenting the country's most audacious effort to recruit ethnic minority architects and urban planners, which occurred at Columbia University during the national Black Campus Movement, 1965-1972.

Jack Travis, FAIA, NOMA, is owner and principal of Jack Travis Architects, a firm that works to effect urban and environmental design concepts from a black perspective. Among his firm’s clients are Spike Lee, Wesley Snipes, and John Saunders of ABC Sports. In 1992, Travis edited African American Architects: In Current Practice, the first publication to profile the work of black architects practicing in the U.S. In 1994, he founded the Studio for Afri-Culturalism in Architecture and Design, a nonprofit organization that collects, documents, and disseminates information on African Americans and African-American culture. Travis is a professor at Pratt Institute and the Fashion Institute of Technology. (From arch+ black website.) He sees himself as extending his creative direction with his purpose to enrich the American cultural palette in interior design and architecture considering and connecting to the positive aspects of living one's identity. He is interested in and has written about the history of African American architects in detail for the AIA National Associates Committee Quarterly, Hidden in Plain View I recommend for those who want to learn more than this one hour presentation that got my attention. He speaks out at conferences around the world, in 2010 he was an Invited speaker at the Africa World Festival of Arts, Dakar, Senegal and there is a 3 min video from the Museum where he talks about culture and design.

Deanna VanBuren recently launched a design practice, FOURM design+studio in Oakland, California, to develop two new markets in architecture. She is exploring how designing environments for the electronic gaming industry can have an impact on the public’s appreciation of good design and on its demand for better quality in physical places. She is also applying design to alternative systems to incarceration, in order to create new spaces for justice that are reparative and support innovative policies in probation, incarceration and adjudication. While at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard as a 2013 Loeb scholar, she addressed the paucity of research and design theory in these areas and explored the impacts of art and design within the public realm. (Summarized from Loeb website)