Pascale Sablan
Black architects have played and continue to play major roles in creating the urban identity of cities nationwide. This Black History Month, we’re featuring the faces and places that are #builtblack and represent the strides made by the black community within both the industry and our communities.
Meet Pascale Sablan, FAIA. Renowned for her efforts in amplifying the voices of women and diverse design professionals, Sablan received the 2021 AIA Whitney Young Jr. award. In the same year, she was also elevated to AIA College of Fellows, a distinction only 3% of architects have been given and of that 3%, less than 100 living Black Fellows have received. Early in her career, she helped to construct the models for New York City’s African Burial Ground National Monument, from schematic design to design development. Today, the results of her activism within the profession have broadened the awareness of social inequities within the field and enhanced the profession overall.
Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason
This husband-and-wife duo serves as the head of @aphrochic, a design firm founded in 2007 that specializes in interior design, product design, fashion, and publishing. Mason and Hays started AphroChic as a blog dedicated to celebrating the culture, creativity, design, arts, science and technology of modern design and global culture across diverse populations. This quickly developed into a firm that now performs a wide range of work from product design to interior design and even film. Since opening AphroChic, the couple has released five collections of home décor inspired by the cultures of the African Disapora.
Port Morris located in South Bronx New York
"In seeking to correct this lack of representation, which should not be confused with a lack of presence, AphroChic has continually worked to design rooms that tell a unique cultural story."- Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason
To learn more about AphroChic Visit their website at https://www.aphrochic.com/
Mariam Issoufou Kamara
Mariam Issoufou Kamara is the founder of Niger-based architecture studio Atelier Masomi. In an interview with Dezeen, she expresses her frustration on the lack of global representation she discovered in architectural education. “…it almost feels like nothing happened before the renaissance… There was Rome and Greece a little bit and Egypt a little bit and then, boom the Renaissance, nothing in between.” This void in her education presented a challenge to disrupt the Eurocentric approach to design and prompted her to present an alternative way of thinking about the architectural design process entirely.
“For me, this has been really an exercise of trying to figure out how to free myself from all this and how to really develop a language and a process more specifically that allows me to actually make designs that almost ignore a lot of what I was taught but that get to the truth of a place, to what a place really needs,” says Kamara in an interview with Dezeen.
Francis Kéré
This Berlin-based architect is known for combining traditional building materials and techniques with modern engineering methods. The connection to the environment in his upbringing is also a common thread throughout his pieces. In 2019, his work was featured at the Coachella music festival.
Sarbalé Ke at the 2019 Coachella Festival
The installation, Sarbalé Ke, was a collection of colorful cone-like towers in reference to the Baobab tree, a prominent figure in his native West African village of Gando, Burkina Faso.
“in my culture, the baobab is the most important tree,’ explains Kéré. ‘it’s giant, and it has multiple uses as food and medicine. it’s the place where you get together, celebrate, and discuss. it also attracts animals. it is spiritual. naturally you will walk toward it.”
Learn about Francis Kere and his inspiration behind this piece in the video below.
Samantha Josephat
Meet Samantha Josephat. The name of her architecture firm, Studio 397, is a reference to the lack of diversity currently found in the architecture industry. Just .3% of registered architects are Black women, and Josephat is only the 397th living black female to achieve licensure in architecture.
Outside of running her own firm, Josephat is dedicated to helping increase the presence of both women and people of color in the industry in a variety of roles. As the current President of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Minority (NOMA), she champions diversity by promoting excellence, community engagement, and professional development. In her position as a professor at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, she provides tools in a hands-on space to help develop future design professionals.
To learn more, check out her feature in a Dwell article “9 Brilliant Black Designers and Architects You Should Know” https://www.dwell.com/article/top-black-designers-architects-df6781bd
Christopher Paul Jordan
Christopher Paul Jordan is a Seattle-based artist whose work has been showcased in many locations throughout the US. His installation “andimgonnamisseverybody” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill serves as the centerpiece of the AIDS Memorial Pathway (AMP). The AMP is a collection of art installations that memorializes the HIV/ AIDS epidemic and the devastating impact it had on the local community.
In this work, and in all his pieces, Jordan strives to integrate virtual and physical public space to create infrastructures that start a meaningful dialogue and promote self-determination among dislocated people.
“andimgonnamisseverybody” at the AIDS Memorial Pathway's Central Plaza
To learn more about his inspiration behind this installation, check out this article https://crosscut.com/culture/2021/06/aids-memorial-rises-seattle-40-years-after-start-epidemicctghe