On May 12, Al-Jazeera America ran a story about a social justice-focused urban design conference hosted by the African American Student Union (AASU) of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, just days before protests in Baltimore turned ornery. This black student group made waves a couple of years ago when they brought the college-dropout-turned-honorary-Ph.D rapper Kanye West to campus, where he proffered his vision of how design will save the world.
The African-American design students are well-invested in that vision as well. They find it difficult to realize that vision, however, when their instruction has been based in the work of architects whose worldviews don’t give heavy weight to social problems. AASU president Dana McKinney told Al Jazeera that issues of race and justice are not only not discussed among designers, but neither does Harvard’s Design School offer courses that consider these things together.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...own-syllabus/393335/]
Comments (0)