Architect-Advocate Pascale Sablan Is Revising The History Of The Built Environment

“There is a difference between activism and advocacy. Activism is posters, marches, protests, getting everybody aware and informed, mobilizing, cultivating resources to draw attention on a particular issue,” says Pascale Sablan. “Advocacy, to me, is more long-term, the nitty-gritty of policy writing, getting information and statistics embedded so that regardless of the person in charge, this rule has to be followed. Although I do play both roles, I think I lend myself more as an advocacy leader and I have been strategic about selecting board positions that allow me to create policy changes.” In the New York-based architect’s case, those positions form a laundry list: currently, senior associate at S9 Architecture, northeast regional vice president and historian of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), director on the AIA New York Board of Directors, board of trustees member for the Mary Louis Academy and founder and executive director of Beyond the Build Environment; formerly, president of the New York Coalition of Black Architects (then NYCOBA, now nycobaNOMA).

Throughout her career, Sablan has focused on elevating her fellow diverse peers, not just the principals and owners of architecture firms but designers at all levels of practice. As NOMA’s historian she established a framework for recording the organization’s past through oral histories as told by its older members. As president of NYCOBA, she created a monthly program to highlight individual members and their professional achievements, which led to an exhibition series, Say It Loud, that started at the Center for Architecture in Manhattan and traveled to the United Nations and its information centers worldwide. On Juneteenth this year, she released a three-action item pledge to dismantle injustice in the design world through Beyond the Built Environment. The powerhouse woman is actively changing history with a simple mission: women and designers of color must claim and be credited for their contributions to the built environment.

Sablan’s want to be an advocate began after she experienced discrimination by a professor in her first few weeks of architecture school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In front of a class of about 80 peers, she and another student were asked to stand and told they would never become architects due to their race and/or gender. Though Sablan would soon prove her biased professor incorrect, it was her advocacy moment. “I realized that I was no longer just representing Pascale,” she explains. “Whenever I’m in a room, I am the steward and representative of women and diversity so I just need to claim it and understand that because I know that my actions are judging our entire demographic.” It’s a sentiment, she has found, that many diverse designers share. In lectures she now gives at universities and architecture studios, she asks the audience to stand if they have ever been told their gender or race will bar their achievements. At least one person always does.

The 19th-century French playwright Charles-Guillaume Étienne penned the translated phrase, ‘If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.’ Sablan lives by this manta and uses her positions of power to encourage it of others. “Our education system is still clinging to this concept of not keeping record of women and diverse designers, and then we are not being taught about the glory of keeping record ourselves,” she says. She believes that one of the architecture profession’s diversity and inclusion issues is a lack of credit given. “Step one is teaching our culture, our gender, you need to document yourself,” she insists. In 2018, she founded Beyond the Built Environment to create a platform for diverse designers to do just that. The organization is the digital record of Say It Loud exhibits, which have since become self-submitted profiles of architects and architectural designers that include a headshot, responses to questions about their achievements and photographs of a selected project worked on. Inclusivity of job description is key, says Sablan, whether you were design architect or just detailed an interior, that work should be recorded.

This summer, Sablan set a goal to amass a “Great Designers Library” of 500 entries. She wants platform to be a resource to potential employers—developers looking for diverse architects to hire for a project—and to students who feel diversity is missing from their architecture educations. She also plans to use the list to lobby architectural textbook companies to expand the canon of “greats” they teach. With a quick Google search, Sablan shows me the that currently, the top 50 results for the keywords “great architect” include only one woman, nine minority architects and zero African Americans, though the list ranges in time period from Renaissance to present-day. After a big social media push in the last two months, her Library now includes 415 diverse designers from around the globe.

With this, Sablan has become a steward of information previously unrecorded. While some might consider the valuable resource to the design community to be a good enough start, she has bigger plans to activate the data. “I now have a network of global women and diverse designers that can help me identify areas of advocacy needed,” she explains. When 500 architectural designers submit their profiles, she plans to organize a live global chat where she will ask questions about issues in the workplace, in school, at internships, etc. that will give her raw statistics to argue for change where needed.

Of all the registered architects in the Unites States, only 2% are Black and 9% are non-Black people of color. Visibility is just one aspect of the solution to a far too-white architecture profession. The Library and global advocacy chat are two of the three points in Sablan’s action plan released on June 19. The third addresses coverage in architectural media, calling on publications to pledge to assess their current coverage of diverse designers and increase it by 5% each year until they reach 15%. It’s not enough to write a few top ten lists during Black and Women’s History months, she says. “I want the same kind of urgency and responsibility to elevate women and diverse people during February and March to be a strategic goal for a publication as a whole.”

As for her own impact on the built environment, Sablan practices what she preaches, taking on projects that are designed with input from the communities that will use them. While in school at Pratt Institute, she interned at New York-based Aarris Architects, a small firm that allowed her hands-on experience in nearly every aspect of an architectural practice. What most impacted her was working on the African Burial Grounds National Monument in downtown Manhattan, a memorial to the 20,000 slaves that were buried under the city buildings (part of the project was to reinter the remains in a mound-like landscape). For ten years after graduation she was an architect as FXCollaborative where she was a member of the international studio, learning about how culture can be reflected in architecture. Fast-forward to now and at S9 Architecture she is on “projects that reflect those cultures into the built environment where I’m getting to engage the community, asking them what they need and having the design formulate that,” she says referring to the Bronx Point affordable housing project, a handsome tower that includes 542 units, a plaza, community resources and will be home to the first brick-and-mortar Universal Hip Hop Museum, designed by SmithGroup, led by architect Michael Ford.

Reteaching a system that has been built to exclude will take time. But leaders like Sablan who recognize their ability to advocate are pushing for that change now. The global protests this summer after George Floyd’s death were “a nod to the fact that this is not just a United States issue. Having black skin is an issue wherever you are in the world so fully understanding globally what that means is really critical,” she says of her want to engage an international group. “Hopefully we can start hearing those voices because we do impact the world; architecture is not a U.S.-focused profession.”

The tragedy immediately compelled her to act. It’s just her personality, she says, noting that as one of ten siblings she has always been one to prop up her peers and family members, highlighting their successes when they did not do it themselves. “I think that the idea that speaking about something you’ve done is cliche or boastful or negative is terrible. If you don’t celebrate you, who’s going to do it?” she asks rhetorically. “Teaching women not to be aggressive or outspoken is all part of the system of making sure we stay marginalized. We’re challenging it.”