School of Architecture and Planning

Fall 2009 Lecture Series

Race, Identity and Architecture

The goal of this series is create an opportunity to broaden and deepen the School of Architecture and Planning’s commitment to stewardship and preparing our students to ‘assume a personal responsibility for the welfare of the world’ by providing a framework for the creation of a more equitably designed environment. Specifically, we raise the following for consideration: with the election of President Obama, pundits in the popular press mused that America had arrived at a post-racial moment. Obama, as a multi-racial individual, transcends the traditional dichotomy of racial politics which posits White and Black identities in a struggle for primacy. However, even a cursory examination of American cities in general, and Washington, D.C., in particular, reveals that racial divisions still manifest themselves in our urban and architectural environment. The goal of this lecture series will be to expose several questions for deeper examination:

• How does our built environment engender racism, race stereotypes and/or race divisions at both the urban and architectural scales?
• Is a potential ‘post-racial’ architecture a good thing or might it produce a homogeneity which eradicates cultural diversity?
   

As a discipline, what are the potentially new ways that we, as designers, can respond to these and other traditional race divisions in order to create a more equitable built environment in the future?

Speakers and Exhibition Schedule:

• Monday, October 26
  Yolande Daniels, STUDIO SUMO Architects, New York
  accompanying exhibit, October 19th - November 30th.
  
  
• Monday, November 16
  Craig Wilkens, University of Michigan
  
  
• Monday, November 23 — NEW DATE!
  Milton Curry, Cornell Architecture
  
  
• TBA
  Teddy Cruz, Estudio Cruz & University of California San Diego

Lecturer Bios:

Yolande Daniels

STUDIO SUMO Architects, New York

• Winner of Architectural Record’s 2006 Design Vanguard Award, 2006 and an adjunct professor at Columbia University GSAPP, her projects including ‘Black City’ investigate the overlay of cultural and racial identities in the urban environment.
   

Craig Wilkens, Ph.D., AIA, ARA

Director, Detroit Community Design Center, University of Michigan

• His recent book, The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture and Music, lays a framework for moving past the static state of architectural discourse which he views as inherently racist to a more fluid state which changes with the demands of a multicultural society.  He is also Director of the Detroit Community Design Center.
  

Milton Curry

• Mr. Curry engages in multi-disciplinary work that includes architecture and design, urbanism, industrial design, cultural theory and real estate development. His critical interpretations of the intersections between urbanism and race, economic behavior and public policy, and commerce and identity, require fundamental consideration of the formation of capitalism and concepts of class difference, as well as racial difference in the context of architectural and urban space. In his work with OrbitMCAdesignstudio and Orbit Development Group, linking architecture and urbanism, he seeks to utilize urban real estate development as the platform from which to create innovative and experimental urban space.
  

Teddy Cruz

• Teddy Cruz’ work dwells at the border between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. Teddy Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He is a recipent the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome and has recently received the 2004-05 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize.