jan.
Why Architecture
Needs Intersectionality
I want to begin this newsletter with a confession: I have a gripe with the discipline and profession of architecture. I used to think that this gripe was personal, but I now recognize that it is due to various systemic issues that this 750-word letter does not have enough space to discuss, nor does the reader have enough time to entertain. My biggest challenge with the practice of architecture, its values, its canon, and its dictums is the predominant argument that architecture is not political.
The fight against the idea that architecture is inherently political, whether as an object in space or as a discipline in practice, seems always to be justified by some form of abstraction. Dismissals like “a building can't be racist” don't seem to measure up when confronted with phrases such as a “virgin landscape”, a “found object”, or “tabula rasa,” and the colonial implication of imposing oneself onto something without the background or history of the thing. The landscape is not a “virgin”, the object/land/territory was not “found” and the canvas is never blank! These are all methods of abstraction used in Western place and space-making. What architectural education is just now beginning to acknowledge is that abstraction is a violent colonial tool that has, for far too long, justified white innocence in the spatial planning of our world.
Before I get too excited and drag you down a rabbit hole, let me share why I believe this critique should matter to you:
Everything has been designed by someone, down to the smallest degree. In nearly every way your physical body exists in space, you have almost no autonomous choice. Your environment is standardized: every hallway the same width, every door the same height, every beam the same depth. Every turn you make has been predetermined by the designer of the floor plan, and your every step is accounted for. Every particle you breathe and every water droplet you drink are a result of some system of design—whether it’s high air filtration from a quality HVAC or a curious chemical property of a pipe fixture, someone's design choice has manifested itself into a material object or a spatial plan that now orchestrates your physical being.
Dramatics aside, this isn't the biggest issue. I am grateful that my toilet flushes into a septic system and that my window sits exactly 36 inches above the floor, allowing me to conveniently look outside onto a landscape from my chair without strain. The problem that I have is that these standardizations—these systems—have not been designed equitably but have instead been designed through a lens of abstraction, and always through the white male perspective. These systems have been designed with the idea that architecture is apolitical and under the notion that structured formal organization strategies are not oppressive.
If considered to be a spatial expert, an architect should be able to design in the vision of equity, yet the discipline itself cannot even manage to be equitable. In 2022, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) reported that only 2% of licensed architects in the United States are Black. That’s 2,492 out of 121,603 people—and only 566 of them were Black women.
Intersectionality, as coined in 1989 by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate and scholar of Critical Race Theory, is the natural interconnectedness of social categories such as race, class, and gender. These categories create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage, consequently creating distinct differences in how one perceives and lives in our social world. It is the lived difference between “a truth” and “the truth,” the understanding that some things are absolute—like the statement “sugar is sweet”—but the perception of the intensity of the sweetness of the sugar is relative.
I strongly believe that positioning architecture toward intersectionality could reshape our physical environment to be more equitable for our diversified social world. The postcolonial world is cosmopolitan. It is convergent. Globalization conceals the fact that we are indeed not all perceivably equal. It asserts that architecture is solely an accessory to nature and society. Nonintersectional architecture is exceptionally capitalistic, which is a problem when social groups are described as surplus populations in a value system, thus imposing the idea that their needs are not valuable or profitable. Design is not and has never been an accessory. Every design has a direct effect on the lives of the people over which it assumes sovereignty.
Written by Keren Dillard
Edited by Tamara Evdokimova