Confessions of a Rebel Architect
Confession: I am an architect.
Architects are skilled at approaching issues from different angles. We have the ability to research a problem and the tools to design a solution that meets a specific problem. In this way, architecture has an amazing potential to contribute to society.
Yet too often the daily realities of the profession result in days full of long meetings picking apart trivial details and reducing the conceptual aspirations of design to shallow one-liners. Architects are often only invited to the project after investors, developers, and other stakeholders outside of the community have established project outcomes based on profit models and resale potential. These realities leave me feeling that as a profession, we are somehow missing the point.
Outside the profession, the term “architect” denotes the idea of a mastermind, a strategic inventor who thinks in big, broad strokes and establishes an impactful plan or course of action. However, inside the profession, the architect’s scope is most often relegated only to the building and the immediate needs of the physical components in the space. We allow ourselves to reduce our impact by only considering design at a building scale. We too often ignore our responsibility to define the built environment at an urban scale, as part of the larger context that imagines the future of how society might convene, collaborate, protest, and thrive.
As an architecture student, I was trained how to generate an idea, how to iterate options for that idea, and how to present and adapt that idea based on feedback. While these tools can be applied to the physical realm of architecture, they are similar to the tools used by community leaders and grassroots activists working at an urban scale. Architects are trained in the skills needed to approach society’s most adaptive challenges.
I recently left an innovative architectural office known for its integration of design with social needs because I had grown frustrated with the limited voice we architects allowed ourselves in the larger discussions around hard topics most affecting our cities and towns. After joining the Goldin Institute, I came to realize the tools the Institute works to instill in grassroots leaders and encourage policy makers to adopt are the very tools that, as architects, we are trained to wield. Focusing only on beauty and form is an irresponsible application of our skills. The role of the architect demands that we understand the legacy of a place, of a people, and translate it into the built environment that holds the next chapter.
It’s time to rebel against the building-scale-only convention of architecture and recapture the holistic legacy of the title. It’s time to train up Rebel Architects who can imagine a more desirable future as a vanguard of new social solutions!
Last year, I partnered with Erin Sterling Lewis, 2017 president of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute for Architects (AIA) and co-founder of the Raleigh-based architecture firm in situ studio, to create an initiative that seeks to create conversations centered around a community-driven process leading to responsive design and responsible development that would authentically consider place, context, and social change.
In May 2018, we issued a call to the Raleigh community and its designers to spend three days discussing how social issues and cultural legacy shape city growth. The response was overwhelming. Based on the community’s engagement and interest in the questions posed in the workshop, North Carolina State University contacted us and asked us to facilitate a semester-long architectural class that would ask students to tackle the same issues over an extended period of time and in a more robust way, giving them the chance to expand upon the work that was started by local professionals. This studio is ongoing and we are currently planning for Part 2 of the professional and community workshop to be held in fall 2019.
Our project looks at an 81.2-acre site located southwest of downtown Raleigh, a flourishing city of roughly 500,000 people that is projected to grow another 50% by 2030. The site is currently inhabited by the Governor Morehead School for the Blind and North Carolina’s maximum-security Central Prison. While this site once was located outside the city proper, seemingly a perfect setting to deposit all the city’s “undesirables,” the city has grown so much that it is now centrally located, though still shrouded in isolation and stigma.
The project explores the hypothetical closure of Central Prison and the hypothetical reabsorption and renovation of the Governor Morehead School buildings while incorporating this institution's fantastic work more inclusively into the city. The participants are looking at the legacy of both institutions, what they have offered the city since their establishment, and rethinking ways that their civic impact can benefit the present and expanding urban population.
These conversations with the students and professionals are redefining the current role of the architect as one of optimist, innovator, researcher, community partner and activist. We are approaching urban growth holistically by interviewing teachers and students from the Morehead School and learning from local re-entry organizations. Most importantly, these initiatives are guiding designers to see that built solutions will only succeed at a societal scale if those most affected have leading voices in our design solutions.
This project incorporates the mission of the Morehead School and addresses the disruptive cycles of incarceration and recidivism, but more than that, it has the chance to revitalize a central portion of Raleigh and provide an example of socially responsible city growth to other cities beyond the region. Our group of Rebel Architects has jumped into the exploration with both feet. We are taking seriously our roles as researchers and archivists and adding the rebel’s charge to listen, interpret and improve. The enthusiasm and level of participation, together with the strength in design solutions proposed thus far, is proof that the profession is capable of, and urgently desires, more.
The hope is for this newfound role to take root beyond the confines of this initiative, to seep deep into the ethos of design. Community-driven projects conceived through an authentic process that are facilitated and implemented by Rebel Architects: Now that is a soaring aspiration worthy of the profession.
Welcome Jassi, Burrell, Abby, Oz and Delasha
Since last spring, the Goldin Institute has gratefully welcomed four new staff members and a research fellow to the organization’s community. All bring a rich diversity of experience working in development and aid work, as well as innovative storytelling and reconciliation.
Jassi Sandhar
A second year PhD student in International Human Rights Law at the University of Bristol, Jassi Sandhar spent nearly two months this summer working with our global partners in Uganda, YOLRED. With academic and field experience in child combatants and war-affected youth. Jassi worked closely with YOLRED program director Geoffrey Omony to capture the oral narratives of Northern Ugandan children impacted by the LRA war, and its legacies including housing instability, joblessness, hunger and insecurity. Additionally, she worked with Geoffrey, and GI staffer Jimmie Briggs to prepare and submit badly needed requests for operational funding to foundations and entities based in the United Kingdom. Though her tenure in the region ends in August, we’re excited to continue the working relationship with her as she completes her thesis on human rights, experiences, and legal protections offered to girl soldiers during and post-conflict.
Burrell Poe
A familiar face within the Goldin Institute constellation of stars, Burrell Poe joins the organization as a Curriculum Associate for Gather. The native of Chicago’s West Side community served in the United States Army for three years, returning in 2011 to undertake the ambitious charge of addressing city violence through what he’s coined as the “Compassion Project.” As he’s observed often at Institute events, and in-house meetings, “Statistically, I was safer on the battlefield in the Army than I was returning to my hometown. I wanted to change that narrative.”
Enrolling in a social entrepreneurship course at the “Social Academy,” Burrell met and studied with Sara Shairer who shared a vision of elevating and spreading the message of global compassion. Later receiving certification from Stanford University, he went on to work with the Institute for Nonviolence in Chicago, where he led circles, workshops and classes with the greater community on the uses of compassion as a force or transformative healing and change. “Statistics have shown that a small fraction of the Chicago population is responsible for violence,” he says, “and that is the population I work with. When compassion is enacted through personal behavior, it changes how we interact with others. A compassionate community will thrive, and I believe that we can use compassion to rebuild a thriving Chicago.”
Abby Goldberg
Alongside Jimmie Briggs in our New York- based team -- through whom she was introduced to the Goldin Institute -- Abby Goldberg carries nearly 20 years of domestic and global experience working in the areas of gender rights, media advocacy, and non-profit development. The San Francisco native is the Senior Advisor for Gather, and a recognized expert in digital advocacy and social media campaigning.
The majority of her career has been leading the transformational growth and development of three very distinct, non-profit organizations including the Global Justice Center, Digital Democracy, and the New Media Advocacy Project. Over the course of her professional journey, Abby has learned and mastered the use of technology and digital video to promote tactical change in policy and law based, producing more than two dozen video shorts. Her most recent digital campaign, “We Have Rights: Immigrant Empowerment Campaign,” consisted of a coalition of over 200 organizations responding to the increase of arrests and deportations of immigrants in the U.S.
An ongoing project in development, “Intercambio,” is a series by and for Cubans and Americans to foster greater connection and cultural respect between the two.
Delasha Long
Newsletter readers will remember hearing about Delasha Long as part of the team that presented Gather at the Conference on Community Writing last year. Delasha is a Web Content Specialist with a background in content strategy, production, design, and management. She got her start in literary publishing, and hopes to use her talents in both print and digital media. Through a partnership with DePaul University, Delasha provides content strategy and research for the Gather Platform, currently assisting with the UX design, technical support, social media, and technical writing. A Graduate Assistant with the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse at DePaul, she works as the standing Journal Manager and upcoming Assistant Production and Design Manager for the Community Literacy Journal.
Oz Ozburn
Oz Ozburn brings her planning and design skills to support all aspects of the work of the Goldin Institute. As an architect, Oz is experienced in deep listening and research to uncover opportunities to solve tough challenges through thoughtful design and skillful implementation. Interested in how design innovation can tackle rural economic development, Oz founded Design Ecology to pursue a different type of project design that strives to find holistic solutions to issues involving urbanism, physical place-making, and gaps in rural fabric caused by social inequalities. Prior to joining the Goldin Institute, Oz was Project Architect for Studio Gang, leading project that focused on creating social change while fostering environmental stewardship. Oz graduated with her Bachelors of Science from the University of Virginia and a Masters of Architecture from Yale University, where she was awarded a travel grant, allowing her to research firsthand the architectural consequences of urban warfare and publish a study on the cultural forms of post-traumatic reconstruction in Nicosia and Beirut.
Looking Ahead
With the recent, successful launch of the Gather platform in the pilot phase, we are excited to have extended our capacity, and depth of talents, with the arrival of these three dynamic people, and expect greater impact and recognition for the work of the organization and the global partners whom it serves.
