by Stephen A. Kliment, FAIA

Central to the advancement of the African-American architect is the architecture school. The architecture school is the environment where black students first come upon professional attitudes that they’ll encounter later on when in practice. It is also a venue where blacks are minimally represented. As noted in the first column in this series, the number of fulltime black students at the accredited schools declined from 1,332 to 1,268 between 1991 and 2003, and the number of graduates dropped from 214 to 156 in the same period.

The challenge is not even at heart one of finances. Majority schools are raising money to provide more scholarships for African-American students. Yet far more productive over the long haul in graduating a higher rate of black students is to find and admit a significant enough group to establish what Max Bond, Sharon Sutton, and others call a “cohort” whose members support each other.

On a par with slim student enrollments is the need to attract and promote black architecture faculty at the majority schools. This is on the premise that a higher black faculty ratio will provide black students a close up—for those who believe in the concept—of real, in-the-flesh role models. (The ratio of full-time black faculty has declined from 6.2 percent of the total to 5.2 percent between 1997 and 2003).

The long-term solution for getting more black faculty into the architecture schools is heavy recruitment, networking, going out into the firms and the AIA committees with the message that teaching is an important and intellectually rewarding career option. Black architects and architecture graduates for their part should look more openly at a teaching career, instead of focusing single-mindedly on private practice. It is a two-way street: deans cannot be expected to create black teachers when there is no interest.

This month’s column features profiles of three prominent African-american educators—Professor Sharon Sutton at the University of Washington in Seattle, Professor Garrison McNeil at the City College of New York, and President Ted Landsmark of the Boston Architectural College. Each brings to the scene a unique insight.

William Garrison McNeil, RA, NOMA
Garrison (Gary) McNeil is one of a tiny handful of black architects to reach full-time faculty standing. According to NAAB figures, in 2003 only 109 out of 2,087 had reached that rank, or 5.2 percent. Of those, only 50 had tenure. The percent of full-time black faculty has actually declined since 1997, when it stood at 6.2 percent.

McNeil, professor at the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture (SAUDLA) at The City College of New York, rose through a combination of personality, persistence, talent, and good timing. Born and raised in New York, McNeil graduated with a BArch from CCNY in 1965, then worked for two years at the New York firm of Lundquist & Stonehill and one year with Ulrich Franzen. In those firms he began to pick up the kind of hands-on business savvy that has made him one of the nation's most practice-oriented educators. (He teaches a required yet popular course on practice management—popular because he makes a point of tying each piece of the syllabus to its real-world significance.) Not for him the dry-as-bones professional practice class that students dread.

After two years at Lundquist & Stonehill and one year at Franzen, McNeil opted for graduate school at Columbia. In those days (1969) it was uncommon for a black person to apply for architecture school, let alone to graduate. But his admittance coincided with a more liberal era than has existed either before or since. The student disturbances of 1968 had created an aura of greater tolerance, and McNeil made it, in part too, he feels, because he wasn’t applying for financial aid. (As he tells it, his money ran out by the second semester, and after a convoluted process he won a scholarship to tide him over to graduation.)

At that time Columbia had decided on a triumvirate to run the School of Architecture and Planning. Kenneth Smith was the dean and ran the administration. Romaldo Giurgola was the chair of architecture, and Charles Abrams was the chair of planning. His main urban design instructors were Percival Goodman and Oscar Newman of defensible space fame.

On graduation, Giurgola offered McNeil two options: go to Brazil as an assistant project manager or take a teaching job at Columbia. Instructors of color were rare, and Mc Neil, a teacher at heart, seized the prospect. He worked a freshman studio for two years, team teaching with Max Bond and Alex Kouzmanoff. “I was sent to school to learn how to teach design,” McNeil chuckles.

After five years at Columbia, he was approached by Dean Bernard Spring at City College. (Spring was the first dean of the independent architecture school at CCNY. Before then the school had been a part of the engineering school until NAAB refused accreditation unless it became autonomous.) The college invited him to teach an all-black studio. McNeil turned this offer down flat, explaining: "I wasn’t about to perpetuate discrimination.” Instead, he took on the post of adjunct professor, without any racial restriction.

That was 1972. In two years, he became full-time faculty, the same year as Lance Jay Brown. Both eventually came, in turn, to chair the department of architecture. As the years passed, McNeil was promoted on schedule to full professor and tenure. He saw no signs of bias.

But his own climb up the ladder was unusual. Other minority candidates for faculty posts faced tougher challenges. These stemmed not necessarily from their race but were due to the advantages the other candidates—young white architects (YWA) as McNeil calls them—typically brought to the search committee interview table. As McNeil sees it, these candidates already have a handful of projects under their belts, resulting in stronger portfolios and better public exposure. That in turn comes from what McNeil sees as that special talent to use high-flown intellectual babble to describe even modest projects, some likewise published in the professional press. Whereas architects of color, fewer in number and without the advantages of rich aunts who financed a remodeling or weekend house, were unable to shine and land those positions.

Reaching out to the students himself
As for students, there was the golden period in the late 1960s when the schools reached out to black students. But, eventually, notes McNeil, the tide turned, and “the criteria for black candidates came down to three: be a football great; win a Phi Beta Kappa key; or walk on water.”

McNeil admires such practitioners as Mario Gooden, a recent speaker in the Dean George Ranalli’s visiting lecturer series and partner in the Charleston, S.C., firm Huff+Gooden Architects, an African American also on the Yale faculty who has actively sought a more diversified mix in the architecture schools.

Much of McNeil’s teaching experience has come against the larger background of black architects in practice in the New York metropolitan area. McNeil has had his own firm for 30 years. A good 95 percent of his work has come from New York City public agencies and is situated north of the unmarked divider line of 110th Street. It includes a mixed-use office building in Harlem, a center for children and families, and the East Harlem Headstart Center. Only recently has a white private developer retained McNeil—to design a 20-unit condominium on East 124th Street.

His lament, like that of many black practitioners, is that given the tight budgets and limited vision of public agencies, it is hard to produce innovative work likely to make the journals. He likes to quote two sayings popular among the city’s black architects:
“Black architects don’t get white clients.”
“Black architects don’t get work south of 110th Street.”

The most disgraceful example of this was the award this February of the prestigious commission for the Museum for African Art to Robert Stern—a gifted architect but surely no better than many architects of color. Indeed, black architects often have difficulty being invited to interview for projects logically within their purview.

But on occasion the story ends happily. McNeil tells of the Langston Hughes Community Library in Queens, N.Y. When neither he nor his colleague architect Max Bond were invited to present, a community group headed by Helen Marshall (current president of the borough of Queens), created such a ruckus that the selection committee decided to invite them. The meeting ended in an uproar and afterwards Bond and McNeil shook hands and agreed this one was a lost cause. Yet lo! The next morning, McNeil had a call from Bond, that the job was theirs.

Is there a fix?
McNeil believes that so long as the thin flow of black students to the schools and the disappointing graduating rate persist, the numbers just won’t be there to make inroads into a still largely white profession. He counsels strength and perseverance and shrugs off slights and the sparse invitations into the majority social circuit: persist against the odds.

He highly respects Professor Thomas Fowler, at UC San Luis Obispo, who also ascended to a teaching job early in his career—as deserving recognition as being as smart at networking as McNeil says he had seen in years. Fowler began by becoming active in the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS). He campaigned hard and was elected president, which meant a move to the AIAS headquarters in D.C. for one year. Through charisma and initiative, he made friends right and left and opened the door to a professorship.

And his own students?
This spring, McNeil heads a thesis class of 13 students. Of these, 8 are Hispanic or Latino; 4 are black. He distinguishes sharply between black students of Caribbean or African ancestry on one hand, who he finds have no problem rivaling their co-students from other races, and black students raised in the U.S., for whom the American educational system seems unable, in his view, to prepare properly for the challenges of an architecture education.

Neither is he convinced that American-raised black students are getting the special attention they need to overcome the blocks passed down from previous bad experiences. McNeil makes a point of having such students come to his office. He encourages them to phone weekends and backs them in very way. Meanwhile, referring to the ease with which YWAs just out of school are hired, he adds: “It’s a big mistake [for a school] to take on as teachers young designers without teaching experience, strictly on the basis of small projects they’ve completed.”

Black patrons
Asked about the implied obligation of black clients to hire black architects, McNeil concedes the track record is not encouraging. He has a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, a community that includes a large contingent of rich black business executives. They often come to his house, which they much admire, but he has yet to be asked to an interview. And what a lift it would bring if Oprah Winfrey hired a black architect to do her multi-million dollar mansion and showcased an architect on her show.

Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA
Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA, has been an architecture educator since 1975, having taught at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan, where she became the first African-American woman to be named a full professor of architecture. She is presently professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Washington, where she is also adjunct professor of social work and director of the Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies (CEEDS). First registered as an architect in New York City, she was in private practice there for eight years. Dr Sutton also has degrees in music, philosophy, and psychology.

Here she talks about diversity in academe with Kelly Rodriguez Walker, a University of Washington MArch graduate who edits ARCADE, a quarterly magazine on architecture and design in the Northwest.

Kelly Rodriguez Walker: NAAB reports that the percentage of black faculty and the number of black students have actually declined since 1997. How do you interpret those seemingly dismal statistics?

Sharon E. Sutton: If you take the long view, progress has been made, but if you only look at a 10-year period, it doesn’t look that hopeful. Progress on these fronts is cyclical—look at the last 30 to 50 years and you’ll see movement forward and then back. It’s important to take the long view and although it’s not a rosy picture, I feel quite hopeful at this time. The percentage of minorities in the U.S. population is growing steadily. The country is simply becoming more multicultural. That will translate into better ratios in all professional schools, including architecture.

When I became registered as an architect in 1976, there were 600 women architects in the entire country, primarily white, but a few of color. Black women, especially of that era, were doubly, even triply, discriminated against. Sexism has been lessening far more rapidly than racism, which is more likely entangled with class-ism. I have never figured out whether I was limited by my race, gender, or class or some insidious combination.

The first count of black architects in 1991 was 877; in 1995, 1,158; and in 2007, 1,589. I think I was the seventh black woman to join the AIA. Based on that alone, the numbers look great to me! When I was at Columbia from 1968 until 1973, there was a strong movement to recruit African Americans. This was part of the 1960s social consciousness: a push in academia to diversify and change the profession inspired by the greater Civil Rights Movement. This lasted through the 1970s but disappeared in the 1980s with the change in administration. When I went to Michigan in 1984, there was a looking back to the 1960s and its promises—made but not fulfilled.

KRW: How would you increase the ratio of black students and faculty?

SUTTON: One of my primary criticisms has to do with the narrow way an architect is defined. Three primary impediments to diversifying the field are:

1. The historical financial issue of a minority population that earns less than the majority
2. The serious question about the social relevance of the field
3. The regressive employment practices endured by most architects.

In my mind, the second issue is the most egregious: what I perceive as a lack of substance in the field. We only train one kind of architect, yet we train myriad strains of lawyers and physicians. Since everyone in architecture has to be the same, this limits the appeal. Interior design, landscape, planning, environmental design, even engineering have all been segregated from the educational track.

The outcome is mediocrity because students aren’t given the opportunity to develop rigor in a single area. We need a more integrative model that allows for specialization.

The most exciting concern I see on the horizon for improving the content of architecture is the problem of global warming. Young people are motivated to do good, so a greater diversity of students would be attracted to issues that are essential to survival.

When academic recruiters visit secondary schools, they should go in as a collective of disciplines. Most kids don’t know definitively what they want to be. Give them the big idea of a design education and show them how they can create a variety of natural and built environments. Present the entire array of fields that are available to them, emphasizing the ecological import: how to allow a shrinking world to be inhabited.

KRW: What was your experience as a student who then rose through the ranks to tenured professor?

SUTTON: I had an incredible opportunity to go to architecture school that was made possible by the 1968 insurrection at Columbia University. Today, I often see my African-American classmates at conferences and we always remark that we need to find a way to celebrate that time. One person in particular, Loes Schiller, who later became the dean of students, was very helpful in advising us on how to get through the school. Columbia’s 100-year architecture school history doesn’t really address this extraordinary recruitment effort.

The insurrection evolved out of the university’s intention to construct a gymnasium that would have encroached upon Morningside Park in Harlem. Student activists across campus were up in arms and eventually shut down the university, including Avery Hall, where architecture faculty and students went on strike. Demands were made to diversify the faculty and student body and act fairly with the university’s neighbors in Harlem and with the custodial staff. Avery Hall was a leader in this movement. In due course, one of my interior design instructors at Parsons School who worked for the chair of the architecture division called me and asked me to apply to the Columbia architecture program. I did and was accepted.

Through such outreach, the school was able to recruit 41 minority students between 1969 and 1972, which stands out as remarkable. Garrison McNeil [featured above] and Max Bond were recruited as faculty members and played a major role in mentoring our class. There was such a social vision at the time.

To commemorate this extraordinary recruitment effort, this year’s alumni day (October 27) will feature a symposium on diversity with a panel of the 20 to 30 African-American and Hispanic students who attended the school between 1964 and 1974. The experience of being part of a social movement carried over to my professional life as I’ve continued to work to try to diversify the profession.

KRW: How have those events affected your experience as an educator?

SUTTON: The Columbia insurrection was my first awakening (after a rather apolitical beginning as a musician: I played 1,000 performances on Broadway on the French horn). The second awakening came in 1986 when I was awarded a Kellogg National Fellowship—a leadership training grant. A fellowship requirement was to learn to work across disciplines on important social problems. I had just concluded my doctoral dissertation where I engaged children in design-build activities and then evaluated what they learned. In the fellowship, I wanted to learn to extend this work on a broader scale and know how to communicate with the public about the power of design.

The fellowship crossed with another “insurrection,” this time at the University of Michigan, where I was teaching at the time. In the spring of 1985, black students and faculty testified for four hours before the state legislature on racism at the university and in the town; the event was broadcast live statewide over the radio. The stories were shocking. At the time there were just 70 African-american faculty out of about 3,500.

The legislature ordered the university to fix the situation. The new president, James J. Duderstadt, engineered a solution called the Michigan Mandate. He doubled the number of African-american faculty in one year, for example. I applied my newfound leadership skills, advising the president, provost, and others on how to transform the university into a multicultural institution. It was about intellectual leadership. At that time I wrote some critiques for Progressive Architecture. These experiences eventually led to my membership and presidency of the National Architectural Accrediting Board.

KRW: What is your university experience now?

SUTTON: Being in Seattle, a city that’s focused on the environment and sustainability, has given me lots of opportunities for participating in civic issues as an architect.

I’ve had aspirations for an administrative position, but that’s not going to happen—the climate isn’t right. Discrimination in Seattle is very subtle. No one mentions race. At a strategic planning session in the architecture department, there was no discussion of diversity even though it’s one of the university’s mandates. I’m hopeful that the college’s new dean will take this issue on. Out of 80 faculty in my college, which has 4 departments, I’m the only African-American faculty member. There are only 8 African-American architects in the city of Seattle and 20 in the entire state of Washington.

My situation as the only African-American faculty member is not unusual, given that 88 African-American faculty are spread out at over 110 majority architecture schools, not counting those in the 7 HBCUs. Things can only improve.

KRW: What roles can and should the HBCUs play in bringing black students to architecture practice?

SUTTON: Historically, these schools have played an important role, just as women’s colleges did. They provide a safe space for marginalized groups to find their voice and be in the majority. But, at this point in history, I think that role should diminish. We should be able to move beyond this.

Ted Landsmark, Assoc. AIA, NOMA
Ted Landsmark, Assoc. AIA, NOMA, president of the Boston Architectural College, has long championed the cause of diversity in the schools of architecture. Holder of doctorates in law and philosophy, he also has a master’s in environmental design and an honorary doctorate in fine arts.

Stephen A. Kliment: You stated in your introduction to 2003 publication 20 on 20/20 Vision: Perspectives on Diversity and Design that what we need is to go from lamentation to thoughtful action.

Ted Landsmark: Ever since Whitney Young in his speech to the AIA in 1968 pointed out that only one percent of all of the licensed architects in the United States were African American, there have been conferences, symposia, and well-intentioned programmatic efforts to try to address that problem. The efforts have included programs funded by the Ford Foundation and administered through the AIA, programs that have emerged through the work of individual AIA components, scholarship efforts launched by a number of firms around the country, plus curricular efforts in a small handful of schools.

And yet, in 40 years, we've only gone from one percent to one and a half percent. And that failure of a set of programs can be traced to the fact that all of those efforts were started independently, without coordination, and with minimal review standards to determine whether the programs were in fact accomplishing what they set out to do.

So if we want to see change at this point, we need to be much more focused, coordinated, and self-assessing in our efforts, just as the legal and medical professions have been. They've achieved far greater success than we have in the design field, and it's because they have been more focused on outcomes than on lamentations about the problems.

SAK: I note the topic came up at the recent annual meeting of ACSA in Philadelphia.

LANDSMARK: In Philadelphia, we began to talk about how the architecture high school in Philadelphia and community college programs in Philadelphia, Miami, and San Francisco, all of which are substantially more diverse than any of our schools or the profession, could better serve as feeder institutions to enable us to change more significantly the demographics of the profession over the next decade. Specifically, how institutions that are more diverse and also focused on preparing younger people for entry into the profession can be used better than they are now as resources for changing the profession's demographics.

Until conversations engage a wider range of participants, including people outside the architectural profession and the architecture schools, we won't make much significant progress. But until the moment we begin to talk more seriously with high schools, community colleges, and suppliers of architectural products, such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Loews, it's unlikely that we'll see much substantial change.

SAK: How would Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Loews contribute to that?

LANDSMARK: The studies are indicating that most people, without regard to race or gender, who enter the design professions, have had some exposure to design, construction, or careers in the built environment at an early age. Young people may not have met an architect, but often someone in the family was involved in construction, home decorating, or hardware supplies. And that opens the question as to whether the recruitment of people who are into these fields—which has tended to be scattershot—might not be more effective if we were to coordinate with home-design and home-supply stores such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Loews, by simply placing architecture school recruitment sites in or near those kinds of suppliers, in communities of color where many young people visit those stores with their parents and where one can surmise that those young people have been exposed early in their lives to parents or relatives who understand what one can do as a career within building in the built environment.

SAK: Why are law and medicine so much more advanced in the diversification of its professional schools than architecture?

LANDSMARK: Law and medicine were apparently not afraid of developing coordinated programs to address issues of diversity in the 1970s and ’80s. And those professions developed narrowly tailored and transparent tracking systems that enable them to see what kinds of individuals were enrolling in pre-law and pre-medicine; law and medicine training programs, and also to see what schools were succeeding at graduating and encouraging the licensing of more diverse individuals.

Both law and medicine have tracking processes that encompass every individual of whatever racial origin who enrolls in legal or medical training. They have published diversity rates at different schools and have taken seriously in their accrediting processes the need to diversify their professions. About a year ago I sat on an accrediting team for a law school. One of the questions that came up was around how that school was correlating its efforts to diversify its student body with its concurrent efforts to raise its entering LSAT scores and its graduation and licensure rates of a more diverse student body.

And the law school had very specific answers as to how they were increasing diversity at the same time that they recognized that some of the students entering their program might not have had the same LSAT scores or not have been as prepared when they graduated to pass licensing exams. And they had launched specific programs within their curricula to address those issues.

No architecture school that I've observed has developed that kind of systematic approach to recruiting and supporting more diverse student bodies. Only the University of Arkansas has put together a comprehensive diversity plan that begins to address those kinds of issues. By and large, design schools have addressed the issue with a kind of benign neglect.

SAK: So what can the schools of architecture do to raise the ratio, not just of black students but of black faculty, following the law school model?

LANDSMARK: Most architecture schools do minimal recruitment of more diverse students. They tend to leave that work up to the admissions departments within their universities. And, as a result, they have tended not to focus their recruitment efforts. The new program at the University of Arkansas is one notable exception, as is the program we recently began here at the BAC, funded by a significant private grant.

Faculty can be recruited only through more long-term efforts to develop more diverse faculty. There are only about 40 African-Americans who graduate from all of our MArch programs in any given year. And the number of PhDs being granted to people of color is fewer than a half dozen in any given year. So it isn’t likely, given those numbers, that most schools will be able to compete to recruit from among those small numbers, because many of those graduates are going to choose to go into practice rather than going into the academic world.

That means that schools are going to have to determine initially that they will hire faculty in a broader range of fields to teach within design programs.

SAK: For example?

LANDSMARK: The lawyers who are doing contract work for construction and architecture firms are more likely to be a diverse group who could be recruited to do some teaching within the architecture schools than are all of the doctorates currently graduating from advanced architecture programs. The engineers, management experts, technical design staff working in software, people of color who are working with software involving embedded intelligence in the defense industry, and people who have gone into computer aided design fields are tending to be more diverse than many of the people who are coming out of our architecture programs. And many of those more diverse individuals are perfectly qualified to teach within design schools even though they may not be licensed architects.

I am not a licensed architect, but I'm trained in architecture and trained in law. Before becoming president of the BAC, I taught at MIT. I taught at U.Mass. I was a dean at the Massachusetts College of Art. And I developed a set of teaching skills and academic management skills that have enabled me to lead the BAC for the past decade. There are other individuals who have worked within the context of the built environment who are perfectly capable of teaching a range of courses within design schools. As students and peers begin to see those individuals coming forward as role models within the architectural education profession, it will have the effect of also encouraging the handful of African-American and Latino architects who are in practice to take time out from their practices to teach.

It's also true that schools tend to recruit their faculty primarily from the private sector, and not as much from the public sector, where a significant percent of people of color work after they've graduated from design schools. Now there’s a correlation between graduates of HBCUs [Historic Black Colleges and Universities] who decide to go into public sector work, particularly with the federal government, and are reaching very high levels of achievement in those public-sector jobs. Now many of those individuals would make excellent faculty, but our schools tend not to recruit from housing agencies, the Defense Department, EPA, or other federal agencies that are very much involved with design and building major projects across the country.

SAK: What role then should the seven HBCU architecture schools be playing?

LANDSMARK: Of all licensed African-American architects, 37 percent attended one of the HBCUs, and roughly 80 percent of all of the African-American students enrolled in architecture programs in the United States are enrolled in HBCUs. Those programs tend to be under-funded in relation to comparable programs at majority schools and have faced a series of accreditation difficulties over the years because architecture programs are intrinsically capital and labor intensive and expensive to manage. But they graduate relatively small numbers of students, many of whom as alumni did not earn very large salaries.

And there are fewer opportunities within those programs to earn large research grants. So they tend, on many of the campuses, to struggle financially. A number of them have gone through significant turnover in their leadership over the past decade, which has also had the effect of making it more difficult for them to meet all of the accreditation standards.

SAK: What does this tells us?

LANDSMARK: Two issues have to be addressed. One, how can those programs garner greater support, both on their campuses and from other institutions that can work with them to support their efforts through the pairing of programs within regions. And, two, it raises the question of why major schools have been so deficient in recruiting and graduating people of color who would want to enter the profession.

Now, in early March, the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) voted for the first time ever to remove accreditation from a school. That school is Tuskegee, which has one of the oldest architecture HBCUs in the country and has graduated something like the third largest number of African-American architects in the country, after Howard and Hampton Universities. And the reason, from what we can tell, why they have lost their accreditation is that their campus administration has basically abandoned the architecture program.

They were given lots of warnings and opportunities to correct themselves, and the visiting teams kept saying: “Here's how you can fix this and here's how we can try to help you.” I personally called the president of Tuskegee, when I heard this might be happening, and offered to work with him, and never got a call back.

Meanwhile, I've been informally spreading the word to a handful of people, such as the folks at Auburn University. They have offered to do anything to help the students, as have two black architects at a recent diversity conference at MIT.

But the most dire immediate consequence is that the school will now graduate classes of students who will not be eligible to take the licensing exam. And it's not the students' fault.

So what we're starting to do is find ways for major schools to support those students and faculty in the same way the schools came together to support Tulane when Tulane had to close after Katrina. A bunch of schools did make it possible for the Tulane students to continue their studies, graduate, and move on towards licensure. A whole group of them went out to Arizona State, for example, and completed their thesis work there.

The profession has to understand that some of the HBCUs are really on the edge, and in all the years that NAAB has been accrediting programs, this is the very first school to have lost its accreditation. The people on the visiting team are really upset about this: it's not something they wanted to do.

SAK: You have said that we need to tighten data collection and management, the way they do in the law and medical schools.

LANDSMARK: The AIA commissioned a study and analysis of the current status of diversity in the profession. And the Holland and Knight study recommended strongly that a unified data collection and management system be put in place that would tie together the data available from the 117 accredited programs, with data that NCARB collects from the states on licensing, and data the AIA collects on diversity in the profession.

Because each one of those organizations collects data on individuals in very different ways, it makes it virtually impossible to determine who's entering the profession, how they're entering the profession, where they come from, how many are signing up for internships, how many are taking and passing licensing exams, how long it takes people to get through the exams, whether they're actually becoming licensed, and whether they're joining the AIA.

So until some kind of unified data system is developed, it is impossible to determine what is really working in terms of increasing diversity and what isn't. The problem may or may not be a lack of scholarships. It may or may not be who is signing up for and taking the exams. We just don't know.

The Ford Foundation program of 30 years ago spent millions of dollars on scholarship support, primarily at HBCUs, to encourage more people of color to enter the profession. We have no idea of how many of the recipients of those scholarships are actually practicing architects today. So until a unified data system similar to what exists in law and medicine is put into place, we will always be initiating programs without being able to assess their effectiveness.

Within the last few months, NAAB, NCARB, ACSA, and the AIA have begun to develop the technical details of linking data collection systems and have begun to ask what the key data we need to work with over the course of the next decade are. ACSA itself has begun to poll member schools to determine what kinds of data would be most useful to the schools. I expect within the next year to finally see that unified data system in place.

SAK: Any final suggestions?

LANDSMARK: Globalization and the increased use of embedded information in the technology that designers and builders use are generating dramatic changes in the profession that will impact our efforts to become a more diverse profession. And, above all, our schools need to keep up with the dramatic changes that have occurred within practice over the past decade. And those changes argue two things:

One is that the client base that architects will be serving through globalization will increasingly look less and less like the American architectural profession.

Two is that the people doing much of the work through outsourcing and other ways of actually delivering architecture are themselves much more diverse than has been the case in the past. That’s because increasing amounts of work are being done in such places as India, Egypt, Pakistan, and Japan. So the profession is in fact becoming more diversified in the work that's being done abroad while it continues to be isolated from diverse populations here at home.

So until we adopt vastly more radical ways of addressing diversity by reaching outside of the traditionally defined architectural profession to include a wider range of people involved in the design and building professions, we will continue down a path that suggests that even if we triple the number of students of color who graduate from our programs over the next decade, we'll still only be at two percent of African-American architects in the profession.

It’ s a moment when we need to take a really hard look at what we've done in the past and how it has failed, and then adopt programs that are unified and focused on achieving real results.