HOK’s support of Tuskegee University students continues the practice of empowering aspiring Black architects that began in the late 1800s with Robert R. Taylor.
Few architecture programs have as powerful a story as Tuskegee University.
Robert R. Taylor, often cited as the first accredited Black architect in the U.S., designed much of the school’s eastern Alabama campus. Taylor also developed the school’s architecture program and recruited Tuskegee students to construct buildings. His students even made their own building materials—including bricks and windows—further highlighting the skill and resourcefulness of African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South.
Yet for all its proud history, Tuskegee’s architecture program is often overlooked today. The same might be said for the nation’s seven other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with NAAB-accredited architecture schools.Black Architect
“Many people don’t realize HBCUs have architecture programs,” said Amma Asamoah, an assistant professor of architecture at Tuskegee’s Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Sciences. “To me that’s an issue. Our students offer perspectives that are missing in architecture. They come from communities that haven’t had a voice in the planning and design of the built environment.”
Trenton Scott, a fifth-year architecture major at Tuskegee, is such a student. Scott developed a passion for drawing as a child in nearby Birmingham. As a teen, he turned his attention to drawing buildings and imagining how derelict properties in his industrial hometown could be transformed for community use.
“Community engagement is a big reason I wanted to do architecture,” said Scott. “I see the potential for architecture to bring people together.”
Investing in HBCU Design Students
Over the past eight months, Scott has had the opportunity to further his dream of becoming an architect as an HOK Diversity x Design Scholarship recipient. Awarded to nine BIPOC and minority design students, the scholarship includes a $10,000 stipend for school expenses and a paid internship with HOK.
As an intern with HOK’s St. Louis office, Scott has worked on a variety of project types, including developing a conceptual design for a proposed Afghan community center.
“I’ve gained so much from my HOK experience,” said Scott. “It has exposed me to things about design and technical architecture I haven’t experienced in school. I have a list of people at HOK whom I consider mentors.”
For Angelo Arzano, managing principal for HOK in St. Louis, Scott exemplifies the untapped talent that can be found at schools like Tuskegee.
“These are students who might go unnoticed because they’re not from bigger architecture programs,” said Arzano. “Yet in terms of skill and ambition, they’re just as promising.”
Since 2017, HOK’s St. Louis studio has hosted four Tuskegee interns. The studio also sends delegates to Tuskegee several times a year to lead portfolio reviews, do guest lectures and attend career fairs.
“We want to expand the pipeline of minority talent in architecture,” said Arzano. “It’s something we’re passionate about in St. Louis and across HOK.”
Tuskegee Design Team Win
Last November, HOK’s St. Louis studio helped pay for Scott and several of his classmates to travel to Nashville to participate in the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) 2022 conference and design competition. The student portion of the competition challenged teams from 30 schools to envision a cultural center and landmark bridge for north Nashville, a historically Black section of town that has seen a surge of gentrification in the fast-growing city.
Tuskegee’s entry won first place. A team from Ivy League Cornell University placed second.
“That win proves the caliber of our students,” said Tuskegee’s Asamoah. “It shows their ability to understand historically marginalized communities and translate their empathy, awareness and experience into the built environment.”
Asamoah looks forward to Tuskegee students earning more wins in the coming years. She hopes, too, that more design firms will get involved in preserving Robert R. Taylor’s legacy by supporting Tuskegee and other HBCUs.
“HOK’s relationship has been very nourishing for our students and our department,” said Asamoah. “I invite other firms to also come down, visit the campus, learn about our rich history and take a hands-on approach to helping us grow that legacy.”
On November 21, the US Department of Education (DOE) announced that it is narrowing its internal definition of “professional degree”. Newly excluded professions, including architecture, will have significantly less access to federal loans through stricter borrowing limits from July 2026.
To become an architect, you will still need a licence, and to get a licence, you will still need to have completed an accredited architecture degree. But there will be less financial help available to you. It is the imposition of yet another barrier to becoming an architect.
Since professionalism was introduced in the 19th century, it has been under political attack from both right and left
This news is devastating. It demonstrates the lack of respect that the MAGA administration has for our profession and ensures that a “professional” architecture education will be ever more exclusive.
At the same time, the news, for the many critical of a discipline that is underpaid and increasingly marginal, it is also welcome. It prompts an overdue discussion about what it means to be an architect and what architecture gains by being a licensed profession.
The learned professions, such as architecture, are characterized by both the extent of required education and the specificity of expertise. They bestow an elite status on those who ascend to their privileges.
Since professionalism was introduced in the 19th century, it has been under political attack from both right and left. Free-market capitalists have viewed the professions as a form of protective collusion – an actual but unrecognized monopoly. Neo-Marxists have viewed professions as a noblesse-obligé-driven division of labor that leads to false class division.
Today, indifferent to the right/left divide, advocates of innovation call for the end of the siloization of knowledge demanded by professional boundaries. More than ever, they say, our political economy needs shared information and collaborative expertise.
In the US, the learned professions have lost their exceptional status. Before the rise of neoliberalism, professions were exempt from antitrust-mandated competition because their codes of ethics, prioritizing social responsibility and quality service, were understood to be inconsistent with the cost-cutting economy.
It is ironic (or not?) that Trumpism has initiated a process that many of us architects want to encourage
In the 1970s, however, the Department of Justice went after the professions, forcing them to operate like traditional businesses and offer competitive pricing. For architecture, this meant the end of fee structures that had traditionally indicated consensus rates for a project’s size, program, and location.
From there, architecture firms’ race to the bottom began, as did the watering down of our supposedly collusional code of ethics. It no longer was viable for architects to serve needs in the built environment that were not supported by capitalism.
Beyond antitrust-enforced competition, the profession of architecture also has not done itself any favors. In reaction to a series of 20th-century lawsuits that positioned architects as responsible for building and planning errors, architecture systematically risk-managed itself away from the liabilities that come with a larger stake in programming and construction.
The professional skills for which architects still want to be recognized – design – are increasingly perceived by the public as frivolous or outperformed by those in adjacent fields. And architects’ valorization of design becomes an excuse to dismiss seemingly gauche concerns for business and money.
It is ironic (or not?) that Trumpism has initiated a process that many of us architects want to encourage: the de-professionalization of architecture. Indeed, we see numerous advantages.
Advantage one: architects would identify as workers, unionize, and support other workers in their struggle against technological displacement and capitalist exploitation. The limited successes of recent attempts to unionize architecture firms underscores architecture’s entrenched loyalty to its patronage-based roots.
Architectural employees would no longer be exempt from the labor board’s overtime pay rules
As long as we see ourselves as a professional class above working class concerns, we give the power and benefit of shaping the material world to a wealthy few, and undermine personal and planetary wellbeing in the process. By reimagining architecture as a diverse and engaged discipline, we build the networks of solidarity needed to distribute agency in the built environment.
Advantage two: architects would be legally allowed to form worker-owned cooperatives. Cooperatives further break architecture’s consolidated power model by enabling profit sharing and expanding representation via collective ownership and decision-making, but they currently are restricted due to state fears about equalizing the status of licensed and unlicensed workers. State licensing boards have a monetary interest in prioritizing licensed over unlicensed workers.
Advantage three: architectural employees would no longer be exempt from the labor board’s overtime pay rules. Because professional roles are deemed to require advanced knowledge, intellectual discretion, originality, and/or ethical judgement – work that does not conform to hourly limits – overtime pay is not required. Architecture, a field notorious for overworking its subordinate personnel for excessive durations at low wages, would have to develop more balanced and efficient approaches to work.
Advantage four: through the availability of more models for practice and exposure to the broader interests of its diversifying practitioners, architecture would reimagine its businesses and find ways to deploy its community-building expertise beyond client-motivated or commission-based projects.
Advantage five: building is a luxury for most Americans. Even among those who can pursue a construction project, hiring an architect is optional. With such limited sources of work, architecture services are undervalued – with little leverage for improvement. Through the expanded deliverables and engagement that de-professionalization would foster, architecture could grow its client base and propel its societal relevance.
Advantage six: architecture education would no longer be dictated by the limiting criteria of professional standards. Architecture schools will be freed to teach through the unique contexts of place, be it neighborhoods, resource networks or land rights.
It’s time to turn the tables and misuse conservative ideals
Advantage seven: the practices and scholarship of the built environment would be able to hybridize, specialize and multiply. An architecture that is no longer understood exclusively as “comprehensive building design” can actively redefine what it means to shape the material world, both by focusing within the discipline and exploring across disciplines.
Advantage eight: with no special status incentivising professional isolation, architects would collaborate more earnestly with planners, urbanists, ecologists, landscape architects, interior designers and others in collective action towards a just and sustainable planetary future, helping them to steward the climate and built environment.
Advantage nine: once architectural expertise is not determined by the (disinterested) state, architects, like pilots, can control their knowledge through industry-determined certification. Architects would gain authority over the terms that describe them – and with that, the ability to evolve with the times.
Advantage 10: architecture education and licensing could be shortened, making entry into the discipline cheaper, more accessible and more diverse. Yes, the DOE judgment puts a cap on the borrowing totals available to those wanting to pursue an architectural education, but a shortening of the qualifying process would more than compensate. Currently, the US demands four more years on average compared to European countries to legally practice architecture.
It’s time to turn the tables and misuse conservative ideals. It’s time to de-professionalize architecture and make it inclusive, relevant and valued.
Andrea Dietz is an architect, researcher and educator. She is assistant professor and program head of design at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University. She is also the co-president of the executive board for advocacy group the Architecture Lobby, the founder of Support Structures, and the co-author of The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education (2024).
Peggy Deamer is an architect, researcher and educator. She is a professor of architecture at Yale University, a principal at Deamer, Architects and a founding member of the Architecture Lobby. Her multiple books include Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (2014) and Architecture and Labor (2020).
Intentionality. Persistence. Commitment. These are key actions that come to mind if you ask how architects create institutional change and real diversity within their companies, according to Melvalean McLemore, Anzilla Gilmore, and Zhetique Gunn, the three co-founders of a new professional development program (PDP) for architecture students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The trio are Texas architects and designers who recognized the need for equity in architecture through reframing how designers from HBCUs are viewed by the architecture profession. These women are currently building an accessible network supported by the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) to match AEC firms with diverse architecture students.
