Behind the Black Architectural Resistance

In April 1968, black Columbia University students took over five campus buildings during a week-long rebellion. Among those buildings was Avery Hall, where Columbia’s School of Architecture was located. This building also became the locus of black students’ demands that the architectural and urban-planning fields restructure their relationships with communities of color, and that Columbia reexamine its ownoccupancy of Harlem.

This story is captured in the new book When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story About Race in America’s Cities and Universities, written by Sharon E. Sutton, an African-American architect based in New York City. Sutton is founding director emerita of the University of Washington’s Center for Environment Education and Design Studies, and is herself a direct beneficiary of the student revolts at Columbia in 1968. She was recruited to Columbia’s architecture school as part of the fulfillment of student demands that the university increase the number of non-white students on campus.

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Not only did the school recruit more students of color, but it also brought in more black and Latino faculty, while augmenting its curriculum and programming to better serve the needs of its Harlem neighbors. The students and faculty members behind the reformation were also able to capitalize on a generous $10 million grant from the Ford Foundation, which they used to build an “Urban Center” that focused on minority affairs. Such victories were short-lived, though. The university pulled the plug on the new endeavors in the early 1970s, spurred by the onset of economic malaise coupled with the rising power of President Richard Nixon.

It’s what Sutton calls the “arc of insurgency,” and that this social justice trajectory mirrors what’s happening today under Trump was not lost on her as she wrote this book. In fact, Sutton’s original book proposal was nothing like the end product. She initially sought to write a book that merely tracked the lives of her black and Latino colleagues who made it through the architecture school—which, thanks to that 1968 student revolt, ended up graduating more African-American licensed architects than any other university in America, save for HBCUs.