Facing the design profession's diversity problem?and its changing future ?One need only take a casual look at this audience to see that we have a long way to go in this field of integration of the architects.?
That?s how civil rights activist Whitney M. Young, Jr., then the executive director of the National Urban League, opened his impassioned remarks to a convention of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1968. Young?s speech has become a touchstone in a profession that, nearly 50 years later, still struggles to increase the racial diversity in its ranks.
Progress is slow: It wasn?t until 1996 that the AIA?which celebrates its 160th birthday this year?appointed its first president of color, Raj Barr Kumar. (Its first woman president, Susan Maxman, served from 1992-93.) And the organization?s first African-American president, Marshall Purnell, began a yearlong term in 2007. Beyond the AIA, change has come only incrementally to the profession: As in other industries, people of color remain underrepresented in architecture.
Though African Americans made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population at the last census, only 2 percent of licensed architects in the U.S. are African-American, according to the National Association of Minority Architects (NOMA). In 2007, African-American women made up a scant two-tenths of a percent of licensed architects in the U.S., for a total of just 196 practitioners. (The University of Cincinnati?s database of African-American ar...