Feature

The Graduates: Interviews with The Next Generation Of ARCHITECTS

by Clara Gross

This past February, AIA New York Chapter held a student roundtable that brought together leaders in student government, American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), and National Organization of Minority Architects Students (NOMAS) from over a dozen Northeastern schools of architecture. The 18 students shared their thoughts about the issues affecting them, including race, gender, equity, disruptions, and labor. Now that summer has arrived and the semester is over, I caught up with a handful of these students, who are either entering their last year of school or freshly graduated, and asked them to reflect on their experiences.

These young practitioners are entering the field at a unique moment in time, having gone through architecture school during the early COVID-19 shutdown, political and social unrest, and worsening climate conditions. The pandemic hit at a particularly formative moment for these students, as they were halfway through their educational journey and already looking towards the future when classes went online. They shared the sentiment that the pandemic was profoundly challenging, but provided an opportunity to consider alternative ways of operating—whether that meant more flexibility toward online classes, shifts in the culture of work, or an approach that prioritized sustainability. Most of all, the students emphasized the importance of community and personal connection among their peers, through architectural organizations or with their future design constituents.

Nicole Bass, recent Spitzer School of Architecture graduate and AIAS CCNY Chapter vice president, captured the sentiment when she said, “If it’s not us who’s going to celebrate, if it’s not us who’s going to complain, if it’s not us who’s going to advocate for what we need at certain times, it’s going to be no one else.”

I think COVID has opened a lot of new conversations in the social realm, and it’s proved that architecture is a great industry to continue those conversations in a productive and critical way. We can’t talk about issues of race or class in a field like engineering, maybe, but we can definitely talk about that in architecture. I think the role of the narrative has grown in the past two years in architecture, at least in academia. Projects will try to take on some sort of social cause and pair it with the design of the building. It’s been apparent in my peers’ projects that students are more and more motivated to pursue briefs that marry those ideas together.

Part of my motivation to go to graduate school for architecture was because I felt there are things missing that I should learn more about, and I've definitely gained a lot more design skills. I also did a real estate certificate at Penn and a business degree in undergrad. Those things aren’t necessarily taught at all architecture schools, and it would be useful for students to learn more about the business end of things.

At the roundtable, I appreciate the dialogue around the disconnect between school and professional work life. We individually should set personal work-life boundaries, but the current industry doesn’t make it easy for us to do that. One thing I wish we had a chance to talk more about is the topic of labor unions. For some smaller firms, it’s not needed to organize in that way, but I think in a larger firm maybe it would be useful, and it’s unfortunate that some firms are against it from the get-go. They’re not open to considering whether it might be productive for both groups at the end of the day.

That is a tough one; I’ve been running around that question. I will say that designing buildings has been something I’ve been straying away from more and more. I don’t think we need more buildings anymore, especially in New York City where there’s just no space to be considering building a whole new structure. I’ve been following this methodology of reusing, redoing, or reincorporation of things. I am completely hyper-focusing right now on things like gardening. I’m from the Lower East Side, so I see these gardens and their impacts on the community and in the area as a whole.

Something I’m missing a lot in school is, I feel like I don’t know who I’m designing for or where it’s going. I would like to build something, even have it realized, in some way, shape, or form in my last year. I think there’s something about hitting a wall in architecture—hitting the restriction of code or a community telling you, “This is not what I want.” I feel like it’s more of a lesson than going out and realizing the entire building from detail to detail. It’s something I would want to experience before exiting school.

The community that the architecture field has over other career paths is what keeps me inspired and motivated. Throughout college, I was a part of the AIAS, and after COVID happened we moved all our AIAS conferences to online. I was really disappointed for a while—I didn’t want to do this from my bedroom. But being at those conferences, especially our national forum with students from across the country and the world all online in one setting, and seeing that we all have very similar goals and mindsets, was a really big positive. It actually took down a lot of barriers because I wasn’t able to attend the in-person conference due to financial issues. I couldn’t afford to travel to Toronto, where they had the conference before. So I would say, not everything with COVID was bad.

This is gonna sound weird, but we didn’t work much in a team within our school. I love working with an entire team and having ideas from everyone, and not just relying on myself for everything. I really love that about the professional field—also, the wealth of knowledge I'm getting from everyone. I’m not great with details at the moment, so seeing actual professionals who know details and are willing to teach me is really helpful.

I got into architecture primarily because I want to help people, but there’s so much more to it. It’s helping the environment, but not just helping the environment but helping people prosper in the areas you are building something in. You have all of these situations and all these problems going on in countries like mine—which is Haiti, and it’s also happening in the Dominican Republic—where you have all these ethical problems that have been repeated throughout history. How do we solve these problems and make sure we include the people who are there in it?

Right now what I’m thinking about is not in terms of architecture but in terms of self. In architecture school, to be honest with you, there’s no such thing as a bad student. It seems like there’s a time management problem, but in reality we say yes to too many things. All in all, it’s extremely tough to go to work and go to school at once, and try to maintain a certain level of self-care. We have this really bad habit in architecture schools where we stay overnight to work on stuff, and that’s not a healthy thing to do.

It was a lot harder during the pandemic because a lot of us were alone, but one good moment was getting our school reestablished as a chapter for NOMAS. That was an extremely good thing because it helped people connect a lot more.

Hopefully we can keep connecting with people from different parts of the world and different universities. That would be extremely cool. The motivation to actually create the group was mainly networking connections and then learning about each other. It’s a small world where you just know what you learned about in school or in books, but it gets a lot bigger when you’re networking with people who are experiencing the environment, the culture, and just overall life in different places.

I actually always wanted to get my license; I just thought it was so cool to officially be called an architect. In high school, I had a very naive understanding that you just do a few things and then you get to be an architect and lead projects. In college I got to know the actual process, and I realized there’s a lot of inequality and not great representation of female architects, architects who are biracial, architects who are first generation, and the list of identities goes on. That really pushed me to not just want it for the name, but to add to the statistics.

There have been a lot of curriculum changes, especially with Black Lives Matter, and the idea of not having a Eurocentric education system. There also hasn’t been much taught to us about climate change and adaptive reuse, learning programs, and being Passivhaus certified. There’s a class here and there, but there isn’t the working knowledge, and there isn’t a systematic way to make sure we know these things. I’m mindful that you can only learn so much in 13 weeks. A professor also only knows so much, and when you have 17 students in a studio trying to learn how to turn an existing building into a new one without getting too technically heavy, but heavy enough to understand it, you’re asking for a lot. I wish I had learned more. I wish it was just more embedded.