Thanks to Kimberly Zerkel and Morgan Pansing for words and photos. Shot on location at H Club LA.
Adaeze Cadet knows that play matters.
As a child in Sacramento, the now-LA-based Principal and Design Director at renowned architecture firm HKS didn?t foresee the Master’s Degree, the board-room meeting notes, and teetering skyscrapers like San Francisco?s The Jasper with her name on it. She just knew that she really loved playing with her box of LEGO bricks.
At nine years old, in the midst of her block creations, she stood and declared to her family that she was going to be an architect. Instead of balking at her goal or treating it as a passing phase, Cadet?s parents understood how important it was to encourage it.
?My mom would take me to open houses so I could nit-pick over the design,? the architect and designer says while recalling her upbringing. ?She got me a bunch of architecture books and really helped to foster that.? But it was while flipping through these books that Cadet first recognized a problem that continues to plague the architectural world.
Adaeze Cadet on site at h Club in Los Angeles \ Photo: Morgan Pansing
?Nobody looked like me,? she recalls, ?There are all of these great architects but not one of them, according to these textbooks, is Black or a woman.?
Lack of representation and blatant bias led to an early incident that nearly undid the years of self-motivation and encouragement from her family. It started with a specific professor at Philadelp...