 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage founder and director of Colloquate Design, Brian C. Lee, Jr. I'll be on. There it is. Perfect. How we doing this morning? Going all right? All right, good, good, good, good. Yes, my name is Brian Lee, Jr. I am the director and founder of Colloquate Design in New Orleans, Louisiana. And I am really, really happy to be here. Thank you for coming out this morning to give me your eyes and ears for just a little bit of time. We're gonna have a little bit of a presentation time and then a conversation like you're in my living room. I used to do this back in the day when I first moved to New Orleans. A lot of my friends would kind of get together and we would just have a real serious conversation about the things that we're kind of dealing with in our respective work. So I'm gonna talk through some of the things that I've been working on over the last few years and I appreciate it. Thanks again. So my efforts, my work focuses on a conversation around this thing called design justice. And design justice came about over many years of dealing with social impact design and public interest design work and then thinking about myself as a young black man in architecture school in these environments that were maybe not servicing the communities that I was from and wanted to serve. So this is a story. This is me telling a story, right? It's based in this idea of colloquial architecture. Now colloquial architecture is the sophisticatedly informal use of formal architectural precedent as a means to speak directly to the communities in which we haven't serviced in the past, right? There are disinherited communities that we often neglect in this work. And so my objective as a director of this organization is to think about the ways in which our work speaks to organize, advocate, and design for racial, social, and cultural equity. And that's not an easy task. It means that we have to acknowledge the difference between equality and equity. It means that we have to dig deeper in our past to understand the injustices and inequities that have been pervasive in communities in order to understand how we interact moving forward. And so that's what our practice does. So I'm gonna tell you a little story. When I was seven years old, eight years old, my mother was sent off to Sicily, call me so Sicily. Now this was during the first Iraq war and this is where all the kind of nuclear warheads were held, right? But she was working on recreation there. And so we ended up living there for a few years. I ended up walking around the city and enjoying the space in ways that I really didn't understand until I moved back to Trenton, New Jersey. So this second bubble here is my grandmother's house in Trenton, New Jersey, right? And so my grandmother's house was a space where all of the family members would, we would pack 30, 40 people in this house, run up and down the stairs. And I remember seeing my grandmother walk up and down the stairs and feeling like this house, this old house, this house that she had lived in for such a long time was taking advantage of her. It was hurting her legs. Every time she walked up and down the stairs and I remember thinking, I don't want this house. I don't want this space to interact with someone I love so dearly in this way. I want to design something different. I wanna do something to help her. My parents said, okay, well, that's architecture. And so you should think about the ways in which you design spaces. And so I started designing houses frantically, frantically, right? And so over that time, that kind of put me on the path to looking at being an architect proper. This is my grandmother's tall woman right here in the center bubble. So about seven months ago now, she passed away in Philadelphia. And obviously my grandmother, like everybody's grandmother and a lot of people's grandmother is super important to me. But when she passed away, I tell this little story because I wanna connect the ways in which that space really bound to my heart. My grandmother passed away and my aunt kept saying, let's play this particular song. This particular song was by Charlie Wilson. I'm blessed. I don't have the best vocals so I'm not gonna sing this song for you. So you're just gonna have to look it up, you just Spotify out and do what you gotta do. And so my aunt just incessantly wanted to play this. We're all a little bit down so do what you gotta do, auntie. They played it during the funeral. We're all just crying. Oh my God. And so after the funeral, I go back to New Orleans and I'm working. I'm in a meeting about three weeks later and someone has this song on their phone and it comes on and I just break down. I'm just, oh my God, I can't, I can't with this. And what it meant to me, what it meant to me in that moment and what I think it means to me still to this day is that there was an inherent inextricable link between this cultural moment, this social kind of interactive person that was important to my life and these spaces that created who I am to this day. And this happens so often, right? Whether it's music or a painting or anything else in this world that kind of distills your experience and that can be in a note, in a keystroke and the like. And so this is about, I always say architecture is the hardware to the software of life and art and culture is the user interface. It's the way we understand these complex constructs and put them into a space that we can fully grasp, right? And so that in a sense talks about the form, talks about the content and talks about the context to which we understand those things. So design justice, what does it do? It seeks to eliminate the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as a means to perpetuate injustice into the world, right? And design, it allows us to then stratify the profession in a way that brings in people who have historically been disinherited from a process that creates our cities, right? The marginalized have always been the mass. And so finding ways in which design speaks to the masses is where we start to find those little wins and those little wins start to pile up if only we're on the same page. There's a quote by Whitney and Young. You'll find this to be true in this particular presentation. My presentation is about 90% quotes and about 10% memes and that's what you're gonna get. So no, it's not that much. But Whitney and Young, 1968, spoke to this particular issue talking about my profession in architecture. You are a profession that is most distinguished by your thunderous silence and complete irrelevance. Yeah, I know, right? I say this in a lot of architecture rooms and they've heard it a lot, but that was nice. That's the reaction I wanted. It is, it's a powerful statement when a profession of 100,000 speaks so softly or doesn't speak at all on issues of injustice or inequity in the work that we do. It's specifically when we have such a powerful impact on the world that we're serving. There's another set of quotes that I talk about, one that is directly by James Baldwin, Giovanni's room, that says, perhaps home is not simply a place but an irrevocable condition. And I say this because this is the Baldwin test. This is how we kind of understand whether or not we are working with our clients in the right way and whether or not this is a project that we wanna work on. Are we thinking about conditions that are actively seeking equity and justice in the work? It's not simply about the shell. It's not simply about the physicality of the space. It is actually about the forces that create that space and perpetuate that space into the future. The second question that we always ask when we're dealing with clients, when we're dealing with communities and in community conversations, we can disagree and still work together unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, the denial of my humanity or my right to exist. Right? Yeah, you can go out to school. Yeah, I dig that. Yeah, I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. It's super important because again, when we're dealing with spaces that have embedded histories to them, if the conversation does not speak to the ways in which we lift oppressions, lift people's humanity and lift people's right to exist, then we're having the wrong conversations and it's not a conversation personally my company will be a part of, but we hope that within the larger conversation of design justice we ask that other people consider these as principles as well. So how does this affect us, right? So how do we look at the system? When we do this, we can talk about individual biases and we can talk about systemic biases, right? Oftentimes when we talk about prejudice in the built environment, we often think about these interpersonal connections, interpersonal disadvantages. And that's important. That's important to understand the ways in which bias plays out individually, but the ways in which systems work, the ways in which systems work extend beyond the individual and extend into the community in ways that last in perpetuity in a lot of ways, right? The city is often seeking immortality and the ways in which the city, the neighborhood seeks immortality is through the system itself. It's through the pedagogy, the policy, the procedures, the practice that we put in place, the projects and the people, right? All of these things create a system that we have to interact with in order to make a better space for more people. So we ask that you understand these and you start to see the ways in which these principles can start to impact your work. Because again, as designers, as a designer, my focus tends to be in the practice and project area. And if I'm not careful, I will stay there. And so what we ask is oftentimes for people to think about the ways in which your primary focus goes up and down this continuum and the ways in which you can play a broader impact on that. So within the design profession we also have health safety and welfare. A lot of times people don't necessarily understand what the welfare component is. And I find this to be a really, really powerful moment for us to think about the ways in which we already have systems that can be pushed forward even further. The welfare component of HSW speaks to the demonstrably positive emotional and physical response amongst buildings and users, right? Positive emotional response. There's a directionality to it, right? There's a force, right? Force times, or mass times, acceleration equals a force, right? There is a direction and a mass to that. And that's what we're asking people to consider. So in this, I'm gonna ask you, and I'm gonna show you a little bit of ways in which there's a critical path of injustice that has been perpetrated within the built environment over time. And then I'm gonna show you a couple of projects that I've worked on that tries to consider these issues. I'm gonna run through these just because we're gonna have a conversation about a lot of this stuff. Again, the black codes were a really important thing after the Emancipation Proclamation. We started to see the extension of slave codes go throughout the South and creep its way up into the North a bit in certain aspects. The other one we talked about is Euclid versus Ambler, which really started to stay at the Supreme Court level. What does it mean for cities and states to have rights around police powers for changing zoning requirements in particular areas? Whether that's going to project housing after 37 to 41 in New Orleans, Levitown, the kind of segregationist community in New York, sep-ted policies that happened in the 70s and 80s, and then housing and urban development, which has really, we saw in the last 10, 15 years around the housing crisis, the ways in which the Fed actually put a lot of money into affordable housing in ways that were not sustainable over time. So this is an image I often show that really talks about the ways in which institutions of oppression take hold. There are more prisons than there were ever plantations. There are more prisoners than there were ever enslaved peoples. We're creating spaces from a, again, from an architectural standpoint that do not speak to lifting people's humanity, do not speak to lifting oppression off of people, and we've got to be better about those considerations. And when we talk about the ways in which our history tie what's important to particular communities, we've got to acknowledge its totality. This is a series, this is Alton Sterling and Baton Rouge on your left-hand side, and Eric Garner in New York. Both men murdered in front of convenient stores in their respective cities. This is important because the convenience store is a particularly powerful place within communities of color. And to understand that means to understand all of the nuances around those interactions and those spaces and why it's important for people to be able to have a safe space, a space of solace within a community, specifically in this type of community. And so, if we look at how these two men were accosted, this is policy in place, right? At the bottom, you'll see the Black Coals in 1876. No Negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise disclaim a congregation of colored people without a special permission in writing. Persons who loaf at the top, you see, in 2011, they did a vagrancy law. This was all the ways in which they did this through vagrancy laws. Persons who loaf in the streets habitually or who frequent the streets habitually or loiter around a public place. So the laws haven't actually really changed all that much. We use the same things to criminalize Blackness, to criminalize marginalized communities. And so we have to understand that all of this is still embedded in who we are. It's still embedded in our policies and procedures in place. We obviously know about redlining, separate but equal. So what I'm gonna talk to you about is a few projects to which we consider these things explicitly. So one project that we, I don't know if you know, we took down a few monuments in New Orleans a few months back, yeah. So monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a lost cause, right side of history, wrong side of history. This conversation happened. And so before everything happened in Charlottesville, those same people that were in the streets in Charlottesville were standing in front of Jeff Davis, in front of Robert E. Lee, in our faces in New Orleans with AK-47s pointing directly at us. This is the state that we're looking at in 2017. Now, I did not lead this particular push, but being a part of it was eye-opening in a lot of ways. To the bottom you'll see Malcolm Subur and Angela Kinlaw and Michael Questmore, these three right here. They led this in its most contemporary form, but it extended over 60 years, right? Like people had been attempting to take down these racist monuments for a very long time. One of which was to the White League, which is essentially the KKK in New Orleans, which overthrew the city government for seven days and had the National Guard have to come in. And for some reason they felt like, all right, well, let's throw up a monument to that. All right, so I mean, these are the things that were hoisted as valuable. And really the critical point here is that we are, I oftentimes, I'm a little bit of a nerd. That just happens sometimes, but the idea here is that if you've ever watched any time travel, movies or TV shows, there's always somebody that's trying to protect the timeline, right? They're trying to protect the timeline from somebody jumping back or this, that and the other. And what we see here is that people are changing the timeline when they put an exalt and lionized things that had no bearing or were completely false from the narrative of what our cities were or are, right? It doesn't mean that they didn't exist. It means that we honor what actually happened. The Confederacy did not lose. Why are you the highest point in our city? Why are you the person that's standing on the highest point in the city of New Orleans? You didn't win the Confederacy. You didn't win that battle, right? So anyway, we had the conversation during that time. What does it look like for us to challenge those narratives, to tell a full story about what it meant to be Robert E. Lee? We talked about the 197 enslaved people to which he owned, the brutality through which he treated them. And so as we started to see these take downs happen, we started to see those who were on the wrong side of history and the right side of history. And by the final one, we were jump roping in the streets and having a good time. But that mission doesn't stop in that day, right? It has to keep going. We have to, once that palette is cleared, what does it mean for us to tell the stories, the true history? We've got to acknowledge that and we've got to root it. And so Paper Monuments came about. So Paper Monuments is a project in New Orleans that is a public history and public art project that combines artists and historians to tell stories that are beyond the stories that are often told, a way for us to kind of acknowledge the people, places, events, and movements that are bigger than individuals, bigger than lionized soldiers, right? And so that's what we've set out to do. And over time, we've collected more and more of these stories and these are being posted around the city and we're able to extend that story beyond just the individuals that get a chance to be heard. We also tell these stories publicly. We allow those stories to permeate our environment. This was at the old side of the Jeff Davis Memorial. We actively collect public proposals. We ask artists to do murals. And what you see on the far right here is the story of project, which is the next phase, which allows us to take those stories, turn them into physical space interventions that hold history in place and start to acknowledge it in a way that previously had not been given. So the last project I'll talk about before we sit down is a project called the Claiborne Innovation District. So in New Orleans, there was a highway, like in a lot of disenfranchised communities, a highway that cut through a historically black in African-American community. Now this highway destroyed about 300 or so businesses in that community and has caused exponential damage to the housing stock, to the wealth inequality in the space and the like, right? And so how do you change it? How do you start to think about the ways in which design can be a positive actor in that community? So we asked, how do we think through this in a way that specifically talks to the way people already engage in the community? We second line, we dance down the streets all the time, we festival in New Orleans all the time, that's what we do, play music every single day, that is who we are. And so our job as designers was to tie into that and allow people to be expressive in the ways in which they already are, right? And so we combined ourselves with a Chame Seventh World Festival to do a lot of community engagement. And what that resulted in was a series of projects with the community that built out small little quick shelters that were booze designed with community to ask these kind of critical questions about what was the past here in this space? What was the future in this space? And then we went on a design strategy that extended our scope of services beyond the five scope that we generally do. We added programming and planning in a way that really hadn't been done in the city before. We had over 85 hours of community engagement over four and a half months. We had six hour workshops, usually weekly, in which people came and did the lecture component and did a workshop component in which they had direct hands on in the design process. We talked with our elders. We talked with our youth. We talked with our artists. We talked with our business people. They became design advocates for this project. And so this will be the first project that I know of in the country that will hire 16, young, 16, between 16 and 24 year olds that will serve as design advocates. They will be organizers for an actual architectural project, almost like a political campaign, and they will be in the community constantly drumming up support and working on the ways in which the things that people don't support can be derived. Create reports around that and we get to a design that has some impact, right? And so over the next 18 months, we will be seeing a newly refurbished space underneath the highway in New Orleans that speaks to the cultural, historic and economic needs of a community that has historically been disinherited from a process. So I wanna leave you with one last thing again. All of this is about the language we speak to the communities that we are serving, right? There is a lot to it because language is important. The stories we tell are extremely important. The culture that we acknowledge in those spaces is extremely important. And for people of color, for people in general in America, there's a power in the places and spaces where the culture is recognized, where stories are told, and where that language is valued. So that's not just because that is good design, it's because that's justice. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you again for giving me eyes and ears.