BLACK LIVES MATTER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHITECTURE DEPARTMENT

To students, colleagues, friends, and partners,

From an institution that operates on land obtained through colonial violence and a state founded in Black exclusion, we humbly commit to making the Department of Architecture a place of anti-racist advocacy and sanctuary. We stand in solidarity with Black colleagues and students, and with our neighbors in Eugene, Portland, and beyond who have suffered at the hands of police brutality, symbolic violence, and cruelties both casual and deliberate. We stand with those who have endured the health, housing, and wealth inequities endemic to the white-dominant culture which architecture has long reinforced. The benefits of privilege cannot be enjoyed while African-Americans are systematically excluded from education, voting, and financial opportunities. Further, we condemn state-sanctioned violence against protestors across this country and police use of chemical agents and debilitating ‘less than lethal’ munitions that turn city streets into sites of environmental warfare. The continued oppression and extinguishing of Black lives is an affront to humanity and we have an obligation to act. Black Lives Matter.

Repairing these wounds is an intersectional process that must be affirmed and nourished. It places demands on ourselves as individuals, as architects and educators, as citizens, and together as a department, a school, and a university to dismantle the systems and tools that enable white authority. Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), Feminist, Immigrant, Queer, and Disability communities have been at the forefront of the push toward the realization of justice. The field of architecture—and our institution in particular—must actively include, hear, amplify and support these voices through representation and economic opportunity. It is not enough to make overtures toward inclusion and diversity without demonstrating the political, curricular, recruiting, and hiring commitments necessary to foster a real environment of care for students and colleagues from marginalized communities.

Our world and our institutions are facing a turning point, and complacency is complicity. We must interrogate the premises of our institutions and those of our profession to avoid replicating the violence of a past with which we’ve yet to reckon. We must disrupt toxic work cultures that permeate the design schools and the profession, and question architects’ designing in ways that prioritize property over community and which follow architecture’s willing participation in predatory real estate practices that subject neighborhoods to siege conditions and drive displacement. We must work to dissolve barriers to education and practice, and remake both so they reject exploitation, extraction, and the perpetuation of indignity. Our department prides itself on sustainability and a holistic approach to design, human and environmental health, and urban engagement. As racial justice is climate justice, it is our responsibility to push further and to more deeply scrutinize what is being sustained. The pursuit of justice is a critical and unrelenting task. Hold us to account.

Toward these ends, we as a department commit to

1.     Require all faculty to participate in Implicit Bias training

2.     Support Black community partners in Design for Spatial Justice courses, lectures, and other activities

3.     Support curricular revisions and development that focus on issues of architecture and social equity

4.     Support recruitment of BIPOC students with scholarships

5.     Identify immediate action items in the College of Design Diversity Action Plan

6.     Advocate that the University of Oregon make good on demands issued by the UO Black Student Task Force (2015-2017)

This letter is endorsed by the following Department of Architecture Faculty who have made individual commitments to action:

• Nancy Cheng, Department Head and Associate Professor
• Javier Bonnin, Career Instructor
• Howard Davis, Professor                                                                                 
• Ihab Elzeyadi, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
• Justin Fowler, Portland Architecture Program Director
• James Givens, Senior Instructor II
• Peter Keyes, Associate Professor
• Nico Larco, Professor
• John Leahy, Senior Instructor and Lab Manager
• Jerolim Mladinov, Professor of Practce
• Erin Moore, School of Architecture & Environment Director, College of Design Associate Dean
• Hajo Neis, Associate Professor
• Otto Poticha, Professor of Practice
• Siobhan Rockcastle, Assistant Professor
• Judith Sheine, Professor
• Philip Speranza, Associate Professor
• Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, Professor
• Daisy-O’lice Williams, Associate Professor
• Jenny Young, Professor

As individuals, we commit to the following…

I, Javier Bonnin, pledge to revise my studio syllabi to increase multicultural perspectives in the form of architectural precedents, case studies and readings. Sites and programs will be critically evaluated to allow diverse responses and critical interpretations. Will value and encourage a broad cross section of social and racial diversity BIPOC students, faculty and guest reviewers. 

I, Nancy Cheng, pledge to work with architectural professional groups to develop mentoring for BIPOC students. I will work with SAE Leadership to bring diverse voices into our lecture series and curriculum. I will revise my syllabi and design examples to include writings and projects by BIPOC and focus research on shelter for disadvantaged and displaced people.

Donald Corner seeks collaborators to fund scholarships to help make the undergraduate professional programs of the department accessible to African American graduates from Oregon high schools.

Howard Davis pledges to develop two new lectures in Arch 430/530, Architectural Contexts: Place and Culture, about the racialization of place in the United States, focusing on the architecture and urbanism of southern plantations, cities and race before and after the Civil War, the architecture of the Jim Crow era, urban renewal and postwar housing policies as they affected Black communities, recent neo liberal housing policies and how they continue to affect the racial geography of cities.

Ihab Elzeyadi pledges to develop a series of workshops to recruit, mentor, and provide a professional platform for BIPOC K-12 school students to develop resilient architecture and climate change ready environments for their communities. The Solar Decathlon Design Studio will have one school site at a minimum to serve low-income and disenfranchised communities. In addition, he will develop a summer internship program for BIPOC architecture students and early career professional for training and mentorship in sustainable and net-zero architecture at the High Performance Environments (HiPE) lab. Working with other professional organizations, such as ASHRAE, IES, AIA, USGBC we will expand this model to similar programs within their networks.

Justin Fowler will run a collective working group on justice with students and affiliated faculty and staff at the UO Portland Architecture Program and act on its proposals. For a start, this group will support anti-racist curricular and syllabi review; promote BIPOC representation in new instructor hires, visiting fellows, and invited guest speakers; engage external advisors, activists, and allies toward reparative revision of curricular aims and studio delivery methods; and work with SAE to develop a structure to fairly compensate community partners for their critical involvement with studios, seminars, education pipeline initiatives, and public programming. I will also reject program interaction with any firms that provide design services for carceral projects such as prisons and ICE detention facilities, and will lobby our program faculty, department, and professional organizations such as the AIA to come out against these practices.

Peter Keyes will teach a housing course and comprehensive studio which will focus on resilience and social equity, including specific proposals for housing projects that counter the historic patterns of racial and economic segregation in the Eugene-Springfield region.

Nico Larco has revisited, with staff, the strategic plan and policies for the Urbanism Next Center to adjust hiring, research topics, voices elevated and center activities to support BIPOC issues. He will also review his syllabi to include BIPOC authors and related topics.

I, John Leahy, am committed to achieving a significant impact locally with the cohort in Portland, as well as embracing all opportunities to improve the quality and diversity of my course content.

I, Jerolim Mladinov, pledge to modify lectures to increase the amount of domestic and international architecture writings and precedents designed by BIPOC architects, and invite more BIPOC studio guest critics.

I, Erin Moore, pledge to use all tools at hand, including the Design for Spatial Justice Initiative, to continue to build a faculty cohort that is most rich for its full breadth of lived experience; to build a community where it is possible to attract and to fully include students whose excellence is inseparable from their diverse and global perspectives; and to build our collective capacity to carry out difficult conversations and use our work to advance environmental and social justice in design practices.

Hajo Neis: In Europe, I grew up in a context of the critique of racism as part of the larger critique and evil of colonialism and exploitation of land and people in Africa and other places of ‘the third world.’ In the US, I learned how colonialism had continued in the form of racism as a negative transformation. In the next academic year, I will incorporate the critique of racism and neo-colonialism into my seminar and thesis studio of ‘Regenerative Design.’

I, Otto Poticha, pledge to continue to support and recruit qualified BIPOC students plus all minorities to be educated and integrated into the architectural profession. This pledge continues a strong commitment made 60 years ago as my firm was one of the founding firms of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA).

I, Siobhan Rockcastle, will revise the syllabi and schedule for my 2020-21 courses to increase representation from BIPOC guest speakers, design critics, and authored texts and amplify the voices that have been systematically repressed and overlooked in our profession. I will also use my international network to organize and curate a series of free virtual webinars from global experts in computation and simulation to improve the equity of access to design technology for all students in the department of architecture.

I, Judith Sheine, will work to educate students in my mass timber classes in the broader historic, socioeconomic and political issues surrounding the timber industries in Oregon, including discussing articles related to rural Oregon, timber and white supremacy. 

Philip Speranza has volunteered for Oregon Youth Scholars Program this summer, has designated half of the Barcelona study abroad scholarships to minorities and will work with Global Education Oregon to find more funding. He will reach out to HBCU’s for potential exchanges and Benson High School alumnus to discover opportunities for minority student mentoring. He will also will review and revise his syllabi to include more African American and minority designers and architectural influencers along with non-western perspectives.

I, Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg will stand for and promote justice for every single human life, will value and promote equality for BIPOC within the internal and external communities affiliated with the Institute for Health in the Built Environment, as well as through my research, teaching, and outreach.

I, Daisy-O’lice Williams, pledge to continue using my teaching and research to engage the work of Black creatives, authors, and communities. For AY 20/21, I pledge immediate review and revision of foundation-level courses ARCH 202 Design Skills and ARCH 284 Architectural Design II, to do so more explicitly.

I, Jenny Young, pledge to work on endowing a scholarship targeted to recruit and retain BIPOC students in the Department of Architecture. I will work with others to identify and invite distinguished BIPOC architects to lecture and/or teach and visit as distinguished Belluschi fellows.