Over the past few months, we’ve added a few new members to our team. Meet, Pim, Shweta, Kaylah and Miles. We’ve asked them a few questions to help us get to know them and here’s what they had to say:
Pim
Shweta
Kaylah
Miles
To learn more about their professional experience, check out their bios on our Staff Page.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
“The Capitol Hill EcoDistrict is a community-driven effort that promotes a socially equitable, environmentally resilient, and culturally vibrant neighborhood.”
Whether it’s our work on affordable housing, disaster preparedness and resilience efforts, or the millions of people that Grace’s TED Talk has reached on the idea of building community, this is how we show up. Living, working, learning, and playing on Capitol Hill, in the EcoDistrict.
As a co-chair of the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict (CHED) Steering Committee along with Neelima Shah of the Bullitt Foundation from 2012-2019, and now as an active committee member, Mike Mariano championed a holistic and comprehensive vision for what the neighborhood could be: one that places social & cultural issues at the same high-level of importance and aspiration as environmental ones. The EcoDistrict combines a sense of place and identity with the tremendous opportunity to improve livability for all though connecting on a social and cultural level on environmental stewardship.
Grace and Mike took it upon themselves to find a way to live in what they saw as possibly ideal (or close to it): inspired by other cohousing communities, hill towns, and villages around the world, but grounded in everything that makes the Pacific Northwest such a special place. Audacious, idealistic, challenging, ultimately successful, and admittedly still a work in progress – like all of us. Just as our cohousing community sets a standard for sustainability and social cohesion, the CHED provides the opportunity to be an exemplar of social equity, environmental resilience, and cultural vibrance at the scale of our entire neighborhood.
It has been thoroughly energizing for us to live in such an intense community of social interaction among 27 people across our nine families, set within the Capitol Hill neighborhood of 25,000 residents. While our cohousing community is only a tiny percentage of the total residents, we see certification of the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict as an affirmation of our work at home, in community. We sincerely appreciate local developer Liz Dunn for convening and leading the forming group, and to Community Roots Housing in their ongoing leadership, support, and organizational resources committed to the CHED.
Congratulations to all in Capitol Hill for this milestone of recognition as one of the first in the nation to achieve the EcoDistricts Protocol, and commitment in moving forward!
Learn how you can get involved with the CHED by visiting https://www.capitolhillecodistrict.org/ .
“No homogenous room, of homogenous height, can serve a group of people well. To have a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in ones and twos in the same space. This problem is felt most acutely in the common rooms of a house.”
While this pattern may be easier to accommodate in a house, the Common House should be considered in a similar fashion. The common dining room is large enough to accommodate the whole community, but the primary function of dining often discourages people from lingering at their tables to have an after-dinner conversation. It’s easier for people to simply go home rather than seek out other parts of the Common House.
There are often rooms in the Common House for adults (TV lounge, seating group) that are designated but due to their isolation from the main functions, these rooms are underutilized because if a single person wanted to be isolated in a room, then it’s just as easy to be in their own home. But imagine if a teen wanted to do homework in the company of others and could sit in a small nook that was out of the way of the dinner set-up/clean-up crew. Or a small group of young kids could play a board game in the dining while parents converse nearby in a seating nook while another person sat reading the evening paper by the fire. These disparate activities could co-exist and allow residents to feel connected but not alone. Provide small-scaled, intimate spaces adjacent to the dining room within the Common House. This pattern was not evident in any of the Common Houses visited. This pattern is closely linked to Pattern No.23 Spatial Hierarchy.
This pattern can be seen at two scales within a cohousing community - the larger scale of site planning as well as the smaller scale of Common House design. As described in the patterns of Activity Node, Local Town Hall, and Central Location, the Common House is at the center of the community and should allow people to naturally pass through or by it during the course of the day.
In the context of space planning for the Common House, the dining room should serve as the common area at the heart. The room should be located such “that people naturally pass through it on their way into and out of the house”. It should be along a common path which people use every day but located to one side so residents are not forced to stop. If they want, they can stop to see what’s happening; and if they desire, they can come right in and settle down. Incorporating the pattern of Alcoves will increase the likelihood of residents to stop because there will be a wider diversity of informal and unprogrammed activities that might occur in the dining room throughout the course of the day.
