Rebuilding the Built Environment: Pedagogy in Practice

AASAP Symposium, with support from ubNOMAS

Wednesday, October 28, 2020
5 pm - 8 pm

Limited exposure to the professions of architecture and planning and their networks, as well as limited access to resources, creates an uneven playing field for students in design schools. This proverbial ‘shifting of the goalposts’ creates difficulty in the transition between education and practice, creating a harsh reality for BIPOC students upon graduation in a field dominated by white spaces and white faces.

Are architecture and planning education structured in a way that sets up people of color, to fail as they join the profession? If so, what elements are the most hindering for the progress of people of color?

Keynote speaker: Quardean Lewis-Allen (BS Arch '09)

Panelists: Mira Henry, Garnette Cadogan, Daphne Lundi 

Moderator: Charles Davis II (MArch '02), assistant professor of architectural history and criticism, University at Buffalo

Student participants: Zachary Korosh (MUP '22, BAED '20), Rosanna Valencia (BS Arch '21), Petreen Thomas (BS Arch '21)

Leading the conversation

Irene Cheng.

Quardean Lewis-Allen (keynote speaker)

Quardean is the Founder and CEO of the nonprofit youth creative agency and innovation hub, Youth Design Center, which provides a gateway for young people in his native Brownsville community and beyond to access mentorship to tackle underrepresentation in STEAM professions, cyclical poverty, and to address the need for place-based community revitalization. Lewis-Allen has been an Adjunct Lecturer at City College of New York and NYU Tisch ITP where he was also a Human-In-Residence Fellow.

Garnette.

Garnette Cadogan (panelist)

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist. He has appointments in architecture, art, and urban planning, and his work focuses on the promise and perils of cities. He is the 2020-2021 Harry W. Porter Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he’s also a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He holds appointments at MIT as a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, at NYU as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge and Adjunct Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and as a Critic in the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art

 

Daphne.

Daphne Lundi (panelist)

Daphne Lundi is a Senior Policy Advisor with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Resiliency. Prior to that, she was an urban planner at the NYC Department of City Planning focused on climate resilience and neighborhood planning. She is a member of BlackSpace and serves as an Advisory Board Member for the Octavia Project.

Mabel O. Wilson.

Mira Henry (panelist)

Mira Henry is a designer and educator. She is the co-principal of the collaborative architectural design practice, Current Interests, and is a member of the design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture. Mira’s built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking.