By Lamar Anderson

In a time of growing humanitarian crisis, climate change, and mounting income inequality, socially engaged architects and the groups they have organized are no longer relegated to the field's fringes.

Architecture takes up social causes in cycles. Since the 1970s, engagement has tended to rise when the NASDAQ falls and to correspond, roughly speaking, with the presence of solar panels on the White House. When President Jimmy Carter installed 1600 Pennsylvania's inaugural photovoltaics in 1979, the decision came at the tail end of an activist era. Federal money flowed to affordable housing, and community design centers (CDCs), like C. Richard Hatch's Architects' Renewal Committee of Harlem, founded in 1964, helped low-income residents influence planning in their own neighborhoods. “In 1968, when revolutionary activities took place at Columbia and Berkeley and the Sorbonne, it was the architecture students out front,” recalls James Stewart Polshek, founder of Polshek Partnership Architects (now Ennead Architects) and dean emeritus of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

But by the late 1980s, President Ronald Reagan had slashed community development funding. The solar panels went away, not to be seen again until the Obama Administration. Architecture schools turned back to formalism and theory. “There were some professors who had been involved in the '70s, but I think they were all embarrassed about their bell bottoms and didn't want to bring it up,” says Bryan Bell, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Design Corps, who was getting his master's at Yale University's School of Architecture at the time.

Social concerns stayed alive in the 1980s and '90s through organizations like Architects for Social Responsibility (now known as Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility), an anti-nuclear-proliferation advocacy group Polshek founded in 1981 with the late architect Sidney Gilbert. CDCs did not altogether disappear, though their numbers diminished.

In our own time of growing humanitarian crisis, global climate change, and mounting concern over income inequality, activist architects are no longer relegated to the field's fringes. April marked the fifteenth anniversary of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), which has grown from a shoestring outfit founded by Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr in 1999 to an international organization with 59 chapters in sixteen countries. The San Francisco–based nonprofit Public Architecture, now 12 years old, tracked nearly $50 million in pro bono design services given in 2013 through its influential 1% Program. Last year, the Portland State University School of Architecture launched a public-interest-design research center, and the University of Minnesota College of Design will follow suit this year with new undergraduate and master's certificates in public-interest design. If the National Design Services Act makes it out of committee and passes in Congress, architecture students will be able to reduce the balance owed on their loans by going to work in CDCs....Continue Reading

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