The Roots of Love & Design

October 3rd is?World Architecture Day, a time to appreciate the great architectural minds of past and present as well as reflect on what role architects play. This year, I am contemplating my own experiences as a culturally informed, systems-thinking architect dedicated to seeking the balance of the social, economic, and environmental. I started a full-time career in architecture back in 1996, and since then have dedicated myself to continual improvement of the processes of planning and acts of design. Over the years, there's never been a dull moment, and always new solutions to seek and people to engage. I've travelled the world and back, and have interfaced with a multitude of different cultures, languages, climates and codes. Becoming an architect wasn't something I decided to do on a whim. In fact, architecture is a deeply personal experience that connects me back to the natural world and also humanity itself. It is in many ways rational and mathematical, as it is also deeply spiritual and unpredictably artistic. Architecture is about a call and response to the Universe around us. And I love it.

I don't think I heard the word 'architect' until I was about 16 years old, about to graduate from a rural high school on the southern Great Plains, surrounded by the subtle beauty of the tallgrass prairies. My parents tell me they were amazed that starting at age 3, I was already drawing houses, trains, landscapes, animals, etc. at a level they would have expected out of a kid more than twice my age. Perhaps this was related to the fact I was spending a lot of time in nature with my parent's farming / teaching family (nearly all of them artists, music lovers and very inventive to boot) and got a sense of the natural world through observation and interaction. We'd find rocks and plants, and my parents / grandparents would help us young ones learn their names, and then create art and poems about them. As I got older, I learned more about how to fix machines, weld, pour concrete, dig ditches, measure things - all essential skills to run a farm. I literally learned fractions by having to help run the right wrench over to my dad or uncle who was usually wedged somewhere under or inside a machine. You didn't want to have to make too many runs, so learning the sizes and numbers on the sides of those wrenches became very important.

When it came time to figure out my life after high school, I was wanting to do something that involved all my interests: math, science, art, music, people, and being of service. Looking back, it's no surprise my high school guidance counselor suggested I look into architecture and engineering. As a mixed-blood kid "from the sticks" whose relatives were not monetarily wealthy, I probably had less options than my peers from the bigger cities, but I had big dreams and a huge amount of grit. At first I thought I was going to be an architectural engineer. So, it was one fine day during a campus visit to the?University of Kansas?("KU") that I quickly realized I wanted to be involved in the design process as an architect rather than as an engineer. While the engineers were heavily math-focused and assisted architects, it was the architects who seemed to have an incredibly wide spectrum of possibilities and specializations that could directly impact clients and communities. By the end of the tour, my mind was made up. In the Fall of 1991, I headed to up to Lawrence, KS, intensely eager to study architecture and learn everything I could.

The other component I've spent my life constantly trying to figure out is how we stay mindful of living beings (e.g. people, plants, animals, etc.) as we set about designing and building space and place. While a project can be designed as a piece of art or sculpture, it has to be practical and purposeful in how it affirms the living, growing, praying, laughing, and loving we living beings on the planet are meant to experience. Coming up in the context of a family agricultural enterprise, I learned early on what it felt like when an engineer somewhere designed a bolt in the least optimal place on a piece of machinery. I remember having to do repair work on those and coming out the other side with skinned knuckles because of the illogically placed bolts. I would think, "Who the heck designed this?!" Those experiences never left my mind as I grew as an architect. We can never forget there will be living beings who have to build what you draw. And over the years, there real people who will occupy and maintain the buildings you design, and we owe it to them to take all end users' real lives and real needs into account from the very beginning. This is serious stuff.

Taking classes at KU, I began really falling in love with architecture. I had great teachers and classmates. There was?Steven Padget?who showed me the fundamentals, and?James Reittinger?who pushed our limits in design and mental capability. And then there was the unstoppable force, immaculate dresser, and master story-teller known as?Lou Michel, our architectural history professor. If anyone was in love with architecture, it was Professor Michel, and it was a torrid and insatiable affair. Here was a man would not only show us images of buildings from across the globe, but gave fantastically passionate lectures on how each building came about based on what was happening in the world at the time, as well as the personal struggles and triumphs of the architects involved. Every class was something like an epic saga mixed with an action/adventure movie. Professor Michel shared stories of?Brunelleschi's Dome?in Florence, Italy, Frank Lloyd Wright's?Fallingwater?in Pennsylvania, and many more. I was fascinated by the personalities of the architects and their drive to innovate that seemed to balance perfectly between art and practicality. Because of Lou Michel, I too fell deeply in love with the world's architectural heritage, and the daring designers who weren't afraid to fail when challenged with navigating politics, lack of technology, or facing environmental constraints. And there are amazing stories yet to be told.

Throughout my college career I kept going back to this idea of architecture as a manifestation of people on a specific land base during a certain time period with limited materials and technology available. This seemed important to me as I was/am literally a bridge between cultures, languages, and people with one half of my family roots in Kansas / Anglo-America, and the other half in New Mexico / Mexico with ties to Spain and indigenous communities. Over the course of history, cultures from around the globe developed ingenious ways to gather food, build shelters, create ceremonial space, and derive a unique sense of community out of the natural world by living in their homelands for thousands of years - in tune with the climate, flora and fauna around them. I wanted to explore and understand this through the lens of architecture, while also keeping in mind what systems of economy, politics, and access to opportunity can do to a design outcome.

I began diving deeper into the history of our Brown and Black relatives here in the Americas and how they were quote-unquote 'discovered' and/or brought here from 1400's onward. The early architecture of the United States became intriguing to me. Here were these colonists with intentions and identity rooted in the "Doctrine of Discovery", which later fueled expansionist theories such as "Manifest Destiny" which led to many?deleterious impacts on many indigenous peoples?and so-called minorities. These newest arrivals in the Americas seemed pretty self-assured at times, and ambitious to say the least. From the time the United States gained its independence, the acquiring of more territories, by force or by treaty, the wealth and resources of the U.S. grew exponentially. With that, the American government had more opportunities to present its image to the world. By and large, they went back to the designs of Romans or Ancient Greece, as many did during this?era of Neoclassicism, which?persists to this day. Looking at the architecture in and around Washington D.C., one sees a definitive thread back to largely Anglo-American history, from European roots with monarchs and emperors, big churches and Popes, all the way back to Ancient Greece. The cultural expressions and designs inherent in the ancestry of the Native Americans from that area, the Spanish-ized Indians (later to be known as Hispanic), nor the African slaves brought in to build those buildings and economies are not apparent or celebrated.

In college, I joined a group that would later become the?National Organization of Minority Students?(NOMAS) and met other aspiring architects that came from communities of culture and color. We all began to realize the architect's role in evolving or perpetuating these threads of culture and what that could look like for each of us. Yet we also knew that not all our roots led back to a Greek temple. Sometimes it was Mayan, African, or aboriginal in other aspects. So what could the threads of that tapestry look and feel like? We came up with more questions then answers at that time.

As architects, we are not only stewards of safety and well-being in the built environment, but we are also people who help others express their identity, their purpose, and right to be seen as well as heard. In my career, I've worked with incredibly poverty-stricken communities, people of average economic status, but also millionaires and multi-millionaires. Everyone wants beauty they can afford (at scale), and an expression of who they are and what they believe in. Across this spectrum of economic capacity, there's an awareness I have that a large budget allows for intensely artistic creativity and thoughtfully crafted details. But in that same spectrum, another part of me ponders, "What about people like my mom's side of the family? Do they have a right to inspiringly beautiful buildings that celebrate where they are from and how they engage the world around them? Do they get to see colors, shapes, patterns and space that makes them feel good, a little proud, and reminds them of where they come from? Is architecture an inherent right for everyone, or just the ones who won the wars and wrote the history books?"

The architect stands in a very unique position to answer some of those questions, especially when they are aware, informed, and choose to acknowledge them.

We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Individuals such as I am not alone as a designer with roots in historically misunderstood, economically challenged and/or marginalized communities, even though sometimes it can feel like it in the day to day practices of planning, engineering, and architecture. So what to do? Keep on keepin' on! And do not forget your history and roots.

My three wishes on World Architecture Day are as follows:

• Make a concerted effort to ensure pathways to great design and talented architects and engineers are evident and accessible to?all?people of?all?walks of life and cultural backgrounds, regardless of what happened in the past.
• Intensely focus of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) for the young ones, starting in grade school. There must be a heavy emphasis on removing barriers for our unique communities of culture and color whose visual and spatial stories are not yet fully expressed.
• At the high school and university levels, intentionally expand curriculum and actively teach more than just the history of Anglo-America or European Nations' ways of creating and designing. And do so with the intensity of Lou Michel.

Thank you for reading/listening, and Happy World Architecture Day!

As a Founder and Design Professional, I am humbled and excited each day we wake up and continue the path ahead that has been illuminated for us.?Subscribe to the?De la?Luz?| Of the Light?newsletter?for more updates and insights on topics related to cultural influences in design, community building, issues related to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI), and lessons learned from a road less traveled at the nexus of nature, art, spirituality, and architecture. To learn more about what I am up to, please follow De La Luz | Of The Light on LinkedIn.