Black Females in Architecture has created a space for people whose perspectives have not been recognised. Now, its co-founder writes, it aims to push for meaningful change: a sector that values multiple cultures, views and lived experiences
Black Females in Architecture formed organically in 2018, motivated by the lack of visibility of Black women in the built environment sector, and rigid architectural teaching and practice approaches that fail to accommodate our lived experiences.
Reflecting on our journeys through the academic space, where you’re supposed to be nurtured, no one shared our perspectives; many of us found ourselves subject to issues of accessibility, race and class.
Our aim is to create an equitable space for others who feel this disconnect. A lot of time is spent listening to and advocating for our community, bringing people together to share experiences navigating the industry.
Since 2020, there’s been a greater awareness of the challenges of being in such a minority (primarily in Western contexts), and the need for such initiatives as decolonising curriculums. But there’s so much more to do.
We’re proud of our contribution and will continue pursuing these intangible legacies. But eventually, we thought, we want to create something tangible from the conversations we’ve started.
Like most grassroots organisations, achieving financial sustainability has been tough, but we now have over 500 members, many of them architects, designers, construction mangers and so on. Yet, as directors, we never practise architecture – it seems a shame.
In our recent exhibition Earth, Memory and the Spaces We Inhabit, at NOW Gallery in Greenwich Peninsula, we interrogated how women engage with space and shape communities, through lenses of sustenance, leisure and ecology. It isn’t about pulling answers from the sky, but learning from the past to inform future practice. In some ways it transcends race, but there is something powerful in harnessing historic practices from the African context for the collective community.
It also gave us the chance to actually design and build something for the first time, hopefully opening doors to future collaborations. It may even be a step towards forming a practice based on concepts around womanhood, culture and identity, defining positions around ways of being in the world.
But our ultimate goal is an architectural environment that welcomes multiple cultures, perspectives and lived experiences, and has the creative freedom and openness to explore, express and embrace those ideas, wherever they may lead.
Selasi Setufe is co-director of Black Females in Architecture