Architecture remains overwhelmingly dominated by White males.
Fewer than 2 percent of the 105,000 licensed architects in the United States are African-American, according to the National Association of Minority Architects (NOMA). Minority architects are rare at blue chip architectural firms and seldom seen in senior management positions at these firms.
Many observers attribute the dearth of minority architects to a lack of visibility and awareness of the profession, the recent downturn in the economy that hit the construction industry particularly hard, as well as a hard-to-shake image that architecture is the preserve of White males.
“People don’t realize it’s a career option,” says Kathy Dixon, president of the NOMA and proprietor of KDixon Architecture, LLC. “Maybe they haven’t met a Black architect or met an architect at all. They are not aware of what architects do. It’s also a very expensive major, and it is expensive to take the exam to get licensed.”
In addition, “most architecture programs are five-year degrees, which means an extra year in college,” says Bradford Grant, a professor and director of the Howard University School of Architecture and co-founder of the Directory of African-American Architects.
Dixon estimates that as many as 30 percent of architects lost their job during the Great Recession. Many, she says, abandoned the profession.
In the last decade, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has teamed up with NOMA, other minority architectural groups and schools of architecture at HBCUs. It recently partnered with the Girl Scouts to broaden the visibility of the profession and to attract more people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.
