LAUSR

My name is Chango Cummings, I am a Black American artist, designer, and Twin Cities, MN native. In 2021, I completed my Senior year at Parsons school of Design and received my BFA in Architecture. My focus at Parsons was utilizing architectural design to create regenerative Black spaces. In this reflection essay, I want to break down some aspects of my experience in white spaces, Black spaces, and spaces in between that have led me to the work I am currently doing. Only 2% of registered Architects in the United States are Black. Most folks, even architects, can’t name a Black Architect off the top of their head. And Black women architects? They are only 0.2% of registered architects, you could count on two hands the Black women architects in the U.S. Architectural design is a hyper-white space, and that is the reason I entered the field. For me, it is as plain and simple as this—if we are not building our own communities and spaces how do we expect them to change or to function for Black well-being. I am not an academic, I am a practitioner of race-conscious architectural design, and as such the research on white space is informative—and I have a unique vantage point which can contribute to that research. The hyper-white field of Architecture creates hyper-white spaces, and hyper-white space is hyper anti-Black. Anti-Blackness in the field of Architecture starts from the ground up, from the college classrooms to the professional realm and everything in between. When a field is controlled by white men, and Black people have been excluded, there really is no question that it will function in this way. Unless, of course, you do the work of undoing, but this work is hard and grueling, and it falls on the shoulders of Black people who are already marginalized in the field of architectural design. Most are not up for this task and even if you are up for it, many times it still fails. Academia has a special kind of evil when it comes to the anti-blackness. My path to university was trial after tribulation.