What’s so special about February?” I recently asked my graduate design studio class. “Shortest month?” “GroundHog Day?” “Valentine’s Day?” “It’s Black History Month!” was the answer I was looking for.

For as long as I’ve been collaborating with architecture students in design studios (and any teacher will confess that it is truly a collaborative experience), I’ve tried to forge a connection between social/cultural history and the context of design assignments. The goal here is to link what we do in the studio with the larger world, and how architecture might respond to it. Anyone who has spent time in architectural education knows that the studio can easily become hermetic, disconnected from people who might ultimately live and work in the places that architects help create. A great way to perforate that closed world is to inject a social/cultural history dimension that good designers should be aware of. This can prompt the budding designer to empathize with people who ultimately inhabit the built environment we give shape to as architects.

The studio—through its design assignments, research, and the resolution of the competing issues for the designer’s attention—needs to cultivate empathy for the lived circumstances for the people she designs for. Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa has written eloquently that nurturing capacity for empathy in the designer should be part of every architect’s professional education. He describes it as cultivating “empathetic imagination”: the ability in the designer to sense and feel what a person unknown to you might experience in the built environment. 

I’ve found that Black History Month presents a good context for such an opportunity. The possibilities for framing a studio design problem that draws upon Black history in the U.S. are virtually endless. I’ve focused on a slice of local history, as our architecture program is in Connecticut. A few weeks ago, I asked if anyone was familiar with the “Amistad Incident.” No one was. La Amistad was the ship owned by a Spanish slave broker in Cuba that in 1839 was to transport 53 enslaved Mende people from Havana to another part of the island. These people had been kidnapped a few months earlier from West Africa by Portuguese slave traders, in violation of international treaties, and taken to Cuba. While on board, the Mende revolted, took command of the ship, and (in a failed attempt to sail back to Africa) ended up in Long Island Sound off the Connecticut coast. The Mende were apprehended by a U.S. naval ship for murder and piracy and brought to New Haven to stand trial. A drawn-out legal battle over who “owned” the Mende ensued and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled—after an impassioned defense by former President John Quincy Adams—that the Mende were illegally enslaved and should be set free. Some historians have appraised the Amistad Incident as amplifying tensions between the North and the South, part of American history leading to the Civil War. 

Outside of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, which is dedicated to documenting the Black experience in the U.S., there has yet to be a museum dedicated to the history of the Amistad Incident and its place in Black history. A studio assignment to design such a museum on a New Haven site is an ideal project to connect local social/cultural history of international import with an opportunity to cultivate empathy in students. We watched Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad (despite its historical inaccuracies), and the students conducted their own historical research as part of their design preparation. 

An added dimension of this studio assignment is the requirement that students conduct materials research to understand the impact of modern-day slavery in the extraction and fabrication of building materials and systems. The Grace Farms Foundation, based in New Canaan, Connecticut, started the “Design for Freedom” initiative in 2020 to raise awareness among those in design, architecture, and construction about the prevalence of modern-day slavery and forced-labor practices around the world in the extraction of natural resources, the production of construction materials and systems, and in building construction itself. (According to Design for Freedom, 28 million people worldwide are held in servitude for forced labor.) The organization draws a line connecting the designer to the people whose forced labor produces those materials, putting a human face on otherwise anonymous exploitation in the architecture and construction industry. 

 Design for Freedom offers resources and tools for designers to reduce the prevalence of such materials and labor. Using the “Design for Freedom International Guidance Toolkit” and the Design for Freedom 2022 Report as guides, our design studio project must present a matrix of materials used in the design, material certifications considered to reduce the “at risk” factors in specifying materials, and other strategies to limit the use of materials and systems produced through modern-day slavery and forced-labor practices. Design for Freedom also produces resources for architecture students (available on their website) and this year is collaborating with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) on a first-ever student design competition.

Working with these resources, students analyze risk factors for forced labor in selecting a material palette for their museum design. This includes documenting the supply train for each of the construction materials and shortening the distance as much as possible between material fabrication and delivery to the construction site. The students spend a lot of time interviewing suppliers about material sources, then produce matrices documenting their findings. In other words, they explore in detail how to reduce the risk of modern-day slavery in selecting materials that are the least risky for their design projects. 

Do such design assignments cultivate design empathy in students? Empathy starts with awareness. Architectural education must create scenarios in which students are exposed to the unfamiliar, even the uncomfortable. These experiences won’t necessarily be replicated in a student, who comes to them with her own history, but they can inform the student of the breadth of other lives lived, which are just as authentic and valid as their own. Pallasmaa has pointed out that architects know how to design and build walls, but the lives behind those walls often remain an abstract mystery. Fostering empathy in the design studio through awareness of the social/cultural history and context is an invitation for the student to look behind the walls, and design accordingly. 

Featured image of the Amistad via Wikimedia Commons.