When David Adjaye stepped onto the stage of Radio City Music Hall, to give the keynote address at the 2018 AIA conference last night, the audience might have been expecting calls to action. After all, the previous speakers had been adamant that architects must tackle social issues. Carl Elefante, the outgoing president of the AIA, admonished the crowd of 6,000 to “seize our dare-to-be-great moment,” a process, he said, that involves addressing the profession’s “diversity shortcomings.”
The subject of diversity was also taken up by Tamara Eagle Bull, FAIA, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and the first Native American woman in the U.S. to become a licensed architect. Eagle Bull, who owns Encompass Architects in Lincoln, Nebraska, was the winner of the AIA’s Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, named for the civil rights activist who at the 1968 AIA convention in Portland, Oregon, told the almost entirely white crowd that the profession was distinguished by its silence and irrelevance on issues of race. Fifty years later, Eagle Bull made the case for a profession that includes more Native Americans. “They are the only ones who can truly understand the needs of native communities,” she said, adding, “Diversity is good and diversity is necessary.”
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