Omar Hakeem, AIA, was in college at SUNY Buffalo when Hurricane Katrina hit. Months later, he traveled south to assist in disaster recovery efforts and was stunned by the horrific living conditions he encountered. From that point on, he committed to using his design skills to support others. He now does so as design director at buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a nonprofit community design center that focuses on the endemic challenges many resource-strapped communities face.
As architects, we need to be engaged in social issues. Whitney Young said it in 1968: “You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights.” That’s still true to a certain extent. We’re not accessing a holistic cross-section of the United States, from a racial standpoint and from an economic one. As creative problem-solvers, we need to be seeking out challenges, and we need to do so within the framework of creating spaces and places that support our natural environments and ecosystems.
Integrating public interest design into one’s practice or career is challenging, and many designers don’t know where to start. The work John Peterson and Public Architecture have done with their 1+ program is phenomenal; it’s helped establish a national pro bono model. On the other hand, working solely in a pro bono format assumes that addressing difficult challenges must be done for free, or at night and on weekends. At buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, our operational model is roughly 50 percent feefor-service and 50 percent contributions. This may not be feasible for some firms, but it can be done.
The system needs changing from the top-down. We do many projects through the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program, which is how most affordable housing gets funded these days. The process is not conducive whatsoever to design. The period when designers can work is very short and there’s no money to work ahead of the funding award; there is no guarantee that the project will even happen. We are trying to design multifamily projects—ideally where communities will thrive—on such a short timeline and with limited financial resources. It’s very difficult to produce quality work.
Working this way results in a lot of shovelready projects, built for communities that had no voice in the design. When you drive down the street, you can pick them out: “That’s affordable housing.” We need to change how the LIHTC process is laid out; we need more architects to advocate for a different way of working.—As told to Steve Cimino