The XXAOC Project

In January 2019, WIA’s Sarah Akigbogun began looking for the stories of female architects of colour she might tell. Sarah has been a filmmaker for several years, learning her craft whilst in Pascal Schoning’s unit at the Architectural Association. Since then her work has focused on giving voice to untold stories and histories, and included work with female lead theatre companies, such as the film Escape.

In 2017 she directed, filmed and edited the film She Draws : She Builds, a documentary featuring interviews with 15 female architects. Following this Sarah began the search for female architects of colour and the XXAOC project was born. Her reasons for wanting to do this are outlined in an article on Parlour, published earlier this year.

The search began with a simple tweet which led to an interview with Sharon Egretta Sutton, the first Black woman to be made a full professor of architecture in the US. Following this Sarah was invited to take part in this year’s NOMA conference in New York.

On learning about the incredible work of Dr Sharon Sutton, Sarah nominated her for Part W’s Alternative Gold Medal List:

For the last few months I have been engaged in a project to find and give visibility to female architects of colour. The search started as a tweet. Following that call out to the twittersphere, I was introduced to the work of Sharon Egretta Sutton, whom I later nominated for the Alternative Gold Medal, a fabulous initiative by Part W.
Subsequently I was then invited to present Sharon Egretta Sutton as one of 10 nominees at Part W’s LFA event ‘Gold’. What an honour to present this incredible woman to a new audience. Thank you for the invitation Part W.
My talk was based loosely on Sharon Sutton’s book, When Ivory Towers Were Black, and a recent interview, conducted with her via zoom last month. An instructive read, the book tells the story of how a cohort of largely black and hispanic students received a free Ivy League education. It begins in 1968, as did the talk.
The year 1968 marked Martin Luther King’s Death. It was the year race riots swept America, and the year students staged sit-ins in the University of Columbia, uncomfortable at the university’s relationship with surrounding largely poor black and hispanic communities. The students demanded that black and hispanic students be admitted to the university as a condition of giving the buildings back.
At that time Sharon Sutton was a French horn player, perhaps the first black female French horn player in a union in America; this was a woman of many firsts.
Then a part-time interior design student, she was invited to study architecture at Columbia. She says of her time at Columbia that she and her cohort saw “Architecture as the Revolution” and thought they “could change the world”. She would go on to put that free Ivy League education to good use, trying to do just that, making her career about social justice and becoming only the twelfth black woman to become an architect in the US.
Let’s just think about that. At this point in time, as we speak, there are still only in the region of 450 black female architects in the United States out of more than 100,000 in total. 450. [The Uk proportions are not much better, here there are little more than 100 out of 41,000] For that alone, for achieving that within this context, I believe she deserves the nomination, but in addition to that, Sharon Sutton has five degrees, including her PhD, which was in psychology. In 1994, she would go on to become the first black woman to become a full professor of architecture in the United States. For these achievements I nominate her for the year 1994, the year in which she received her professorship.
Sharon Sutton’s career was not about towers or iconic buildings. In fact, she consciously rejected this type of work. In an interview with the dean of Harvard, when looking for a place to do her PhD, as he talked about towers, she would tell him, “I don’t want to be up there – I want to be down here, with the people”. Sharon Sutton has dedicated her career to social justice and activism.
There are many other things from our interview that stick in my mind and one of them is this:
She asks of architects, “How long can we continue to walk by the homeless sleeping in the streets and just pretend it’s just business as usual?” How long indeed?…

The interview with Sharon Sutton was the first interview for XXAOC’s film about female architects of colour. Sarah is currently raising funds for the project, and if you like the sound of it, you can support here.

Sarah Akigbogun is WIA’s Vice Chair and curates films for our events. She directed the Film She Draws : She Builds, is a Director and Studio Aki and an Associate Lecturer at Canterbury School of Architecture. This year she has also been a tutor and mentor at the Architectural Association and Brighton Schools of architecture respectively.