Above: Architecture Student Roundtable hosted by AIA New York and the Center for Architecture on February 26, 2022

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.”

Anna Lim
University of Pennsylvania
March, 2022

Anna Ji-Eun Lim is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a Master of Architecture Degree and a Certificate in Real Estate Design & Development. She is also a retired co-president of the student council at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design. She is passionate about architecture that enables social, economic, and environmental progress.

Congratulations on graduating! As you reflect on your experience in school, what were some big themes for you, either academically or socially?

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.

As you move into your professional life, are there areas you wish you’d learned more about or want experience in?

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.

Danyel Hueyopan
Spitzer School of Architecture at City College
Fifth-year BA student, 2023

Danyel D. Hueyopan is a fifth-year student at the Spitzer School of Architecture. He is the president of the AIAS at CCNY, leader of the APT PETC design build competition, and teaching assistant for a core design studio.

What kind of design are you particularly interested in?

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.

Looking ahead to your last year of school, what are you excited to learn more about or focus on?

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.

Sydne Nance
New Jersey Institute of Technology
BA graduate, 2022

Sydne Nance studied architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and was the past president of NJIT’s AIAS chapter. Outside of architecture, Sydne Nance took pride in competing for NJIT’s track and field team and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She is passionate about work-life balance, community engagement, and mentorship.

Architecture school can be so intense, especially during a pandemic. What kept you inspired or motivated?

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.

Now that you’re starting your professional life, is there anything you wish you knew more about, or that you’re looking forward to learning?

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.

Nia Gwaltney
Boston School of Architecture
Fifth-year MA student, Fall 2022

Nia E. Gwaltney is a fifth-year student at Boston Architectural College (BAC), former chapter president of BACNOMAS and a recipient of the Margulies Perruzzi Diversity in Design Scholarship. She’s from Brooklyn, NY, and woke up around 5:30 every morning just to read comics before she started her day.

What inspired you to study architecture?

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?

Are there certain themes that—since you’ve been in school and been working—you’re thinking about?

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.

Is there more support you would like from your school or elsewhere?

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.

Nicole Bass
Spitzer School of Architecture at City College
BA graduate, 2022

Nicole Bass is a graduate of CUNY City College of New York. She was vice president of the AIAS CCNY Chapter, vice president of Future Architects of the Middle East, and chair of the Student Advisory Committee. Bass is the vice president-elect of the 2022–2023 AIAS ⁠Board of Directors.

Congratulations on graduating! Your new job is at AIAS; does that mean that you’re less interested in pursuing a traditional architecture job?

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.

What experiences throughout your school years have really stuck with you? Any big takeaways?

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.

Studio Playlists

We asked interviewees what songs kept them going through late nights ahead of deadlines.


Anna Lim: “Oh yeah, we—and I say ‘we’ because I’m thinking about my corner of the studio space—there’s a song by Gwen Stefani called ‘4 in the Morning,’ but we’d play it whenever.”


Danyel Hueyopan: “Oh man, there are so many. There’s a band called Muse, and there isn’t a particular song—I just put all their songs from one album in a playlist and kept listening to it.”


Sydne Nance: “One of my classmates made this hip-hop playlist, and he shared it with everybody in our studio. This was a couple years ago, but I still like to play it. It was called ‘Hip Hop Revival,’ and he has all these different old school hip-hop songs on it, like NAS songs and Tribe Called Quest and Notorious BIG.”


Nia Gwaltney: “Right now I have a playlist for each day of the week, so it’s like ‘Motivation Monday’ or ‘Tune-in Tuesday.’”


Nichole Bass: “I’m a sucker for Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody.’”

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