By: Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson


Rising trend: Morgan State architecture student Adedotun Olugbenle volunteers with Habitat for Humanity, part of a growing emphasis on social impact in design education. | photo by Leo Howard Lubow


It’s November in Greensboro, Alabama, and a rare cold snap has brought frigid temperatures to this southern town. In a modest two-story house on the edge of Greensboro’s main street, five graphic design students and two professors from Maryland Institute College of Art are waking up.

There’s no furnace, just space heaters, so the MICA team is encased in sleeping bags in a room full of bunk beds. The scene resembles something from a sci-fi movie: frozen bodies cocooned in nylon, plumes of breath rising in the ash-gray light. Someone ventures to the kitchen to make breakfast. A carton of eggs left out overnight has frozen solid.

It’s an unexpected setting for a design gathering. These students carved time out of busy semesters to be here when they could have been interning in Manhattan; instead of networking around the espresso machines of Saatchi & Saatchi, over the next few days they will trudge the back roads of Hale County, one of the nation’s poorest. Hale is home to the Rural Studio, an experiment in social design started by Samuel Mockbee in 1993 and run through the Auburn University School of Architecture. The MICA designers are here to witness firsthand the challenges of a town struggling with race, class, and the legacy of the civil rights movement. They’ll see the living conditions of the residents, interview community leaders, and tour homes designed by Rural Studio architects.

The goal of this trip is to use graphic design skills to help a local housing nonprofit called HERO, which is trying to more effectively communicate its services to the community. After learning about Hale and HERO, the designers will return to Baltimore and spend the rest of the academic year fine-tuning a print marketing campaign. The entire project is funded by grant money, at no cost to the cash-strapped nonprofit.

The man who helped land the grant is Mike Weikert, a partner in the design firm Piece Studio and founder of MICA’s Center
for Design Practice. The CDP, which started in 2007, is premised on a simple idea: Get students out of the classroom and into the community. It partners with nonprofits and governmental organizations in Baltimore and beyond, delving into such real-world issues as lead poisoning and energy conservation. “The CDP is about solving a problem, not just creating a predetermined deliverable, like a poster or a website,” Weikert says. “We find projects where ideas can make a positive and tangible impact. The result for the students is that their definition of design becomes broader. They realize design isn’t just based on a predetermined outcome. It’s based on the process.”

Designing for impact versus mere aesthetics is gaining ground in the broader community. The Alabama trip last fall was inspired, in part, by internationally renowned graphic designer John Bielenberg, who set up a studio space in Greensboro for visiting designers. Bielenberg is among a growing contingent of design professionals trading in lucrative livelihoods for more community-focused practices. “I reached a certain point in my career,” he says. “It wasn’t that I had reached the top, but I could see the top, and it wasn’t a peak worth climbing.”

In 2003, Bielenberg founded a kind of designer’s boot camp called Project M, and he has since rallied students and professionals from Alabama and Costa Rica to Iceland and East Baltimore. Part of his formula is to involve professionals who might not normally consider themselves “designers”—from neurosurgeons to writers—in a collaborative creative process. He calls it “design for the greater good.”


Southern comfort: A team from MICA’s Center for Design Practice joined other designers on a trip to rural Hale County, Alabama, in 2008 to lend their design skills to a local housing nonprofit. | photo by Luke Williams


MICA student Hayley Griffin distributes posters during the 2008 Alabama trip. | photo by Luke Williams


The last fifteen years have seen a number of architects, product designers, landscape architects, and urban planners expand the design profession to include a broader range of social missions and disciplines. North Carolina architect Bryan Bell founded an organization called Design Corps in 1991 to bring architecture and planning services to communities that wouldn’t normally have access to such resources; now a nonprofit, the group has funneled more than $6.1 million to projects such as building housing for migrant farm workers. British architect Cameron Sinclair’s nonprofit, Architecture for Humanity, now oversees eighty chapters in twenty-five countries with thousands of volunteer design professionals working for communities in need. Then there’s Emily Pilloton, a talented young product designer from San Francisco who eschewed a traditional career path in favor of starting Project H Design, which delivers life-improving product design around the globe. When Pilloton came through Baltimore for a lecture last spring, she explained what she calls the responsibility of the “citizen designer.”

“The world doesn’t need another bamboo coffee table,” she said. “As designers we should be asking, ‘What’s our role in curating what we put out into the world?’ We should be designing for social impact.”

This concept was on display at last year’s Venice Biennale, a showcase for international art and architecture. The U.S. exhibition, Into The Open: Positioning Practice, challenged the very idea of who constitutes a designer: One participant was Alice Waters, the chef of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and the creator of the Edible Schoolyard project. How, one might ask, is a celebrity restaurateur’s plan to grow vegetables at public schools considered “architecture”?

“Things have to be approached as systems now,” Bielenberg says. “It’s not just about designing a healthy snack food; it’s about reshaping the way food is grown and prepared and how young people engage in that. To me, that is design. Design is expanding.”

In Baltimore, you can see this expansion reflected in the evolving curricula and interests of students at schools like Morgan State University, MICA, and the University of Maryland. And you see it entering the city’s design firms via a generation driven more by social impact than by status. A new direction is forming in the field of design, one that centers on community, collaboration, and concrete outcomes.



There is an oft-repeated anecdote about Frank Lloyd Wright. Industrialist Hibbard Johnson was throwing a dinner party in the new home the famed architect had designed for him in 1937 when it began to rain. The roof leaked onto Johnson’s head, and the client demanded a fix. “Well, Hib,” Wright is said to have replied, “why don’t you move your chair?”

Wright exemplified the stereotype of the modern architect—an imperious genius, preoccupied with personal vision. Firms in the last century were typically built on the name of this maestro, the one who told clients what was good for them and used emerging technologies to create provocative new forms. Think of Frank Gehry’s titanium-skinned Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or Santiago Calatrava’s gravity-defying bridges. Buildings got wilder, more expensive to build and maintain. The men and women behind them—Koolhaas, Libeskind, Hadid—were celebrities, and design was the domain of patrons who could afford such starchitecture. During the Ground Zero design competition in New York, some complained that so many famous names were involved it looked more like an architectural petting zoo than a thoughtful urban plan.

Then came the market collapse, which hit the architecture community hard. One unintended result of the meltdown may be to accelerate the move toward community-centered projects: Frank Gehry was value-engineered out of a splashy development in Brooklyn this year, so he spent the summer designing affordable housing prototypes for New Orleans.

“The star system is broken now, and it might be for good,” Bielenberg says. “Instead of saying, ‘Look what I did!’ you say, ‘Look what I was involved in!’ It shifts from the self to a greater cause, and it gives you great satisfaction by being aligned with something rather than merely producing something.”

Mary Anne Akers, who arrived as dean of Morgan’s School of Architecture and Planning in January 2008, brought with her
a background in community-based design and planning. The client, Akers believes, should be the city. “At Morgan we design with social responsibility and environmental stewardship in mind,” she says. “We try to make an impact in communities that have been neglected, especially in the inner city. We want to design for all, not just for those who can afford it.”

To that end, last academic year Akers organized students to work with the city on a homeless survey. Jeanne Schleicher, who graduated from the undergraduate program in May, was part of a team that photographed sites where the homeless seek shelter in the winter, and she found the experience eye-opening. “You can sit here and think about it, but to go and actually see the type of spaces people put themselves just to be warm is incredible,” she says. “As architects we need to understand the bigger picture.”

Local architect Gabriel Kroiz joined the Morgan faculty last year as program director for the bachelor of science in architecture and environmental design and quickly set about designing new courses for the undergraduates. This year will see the addition of an Urban Design Studio and a Community Design Studio that will give students design challenges in struggling neighborhoods. “I really want to train people to come out with skills to make and effect change in Baltimore,” Kroiz says. “Our opportunity is the city.”

Morgan State is in the process of formalizing a partnership with West Baltimore community groups to create a satellite design studio in the neighborhood. “We don’t just go to the community and tell them what we think they should be doing. We get the community involved in the process,” Akers says. “We’ve earned their trust.”

Other schools are also creating satellite studios in city neighborhoods. MICA is in the process of purchasing and renovating a building in East Baltimore—where the school has long partnered with community groups and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health—to create a mix of classrooms, public space, and student housing. Garth Rockcastle, dean of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in College Park, has been talking to Morgan and MICA about a partnership among the three schools on a joint space for collaborative design.

MICA President Fred Lazarus says the school is developing multi-year programs that extend project-based learning beyond just one class or one semester. “You have to figure out how to influence change,” he says. “That’s what a design program does. It’s not just putting another poster on the back of a bus.”


Form and function: Student architects at the Rural Studio used a complex structural system called a lamella to create the roof of this animal shelter. | photo by Hayley Griffin



Project H designed this grid-based “learning landscape,” constructed with used tires, to help teach math concepts to AIDS orphans in Uganda. | photo courtesy of Project H Design



The Pattern Book House, one of the several new houses designed and built by the Rural Studio in Alabama for just $20,000 | photo by Luke Williams


If design were a religion, the great theological argument would always return to form versus function. Should something look pretty? Should it function well? Could it do both?

When Fred Scharmen was a student at the Yale School of Architecture, that debate seemed to be reaching one of its cyclic turning points. “The students felt the practice was stale—the idea of form for form’s sake,” says Scharmen, who graduated in 2006 and is now an architectural designer for Ziger/Snead in Baltimore (and a contributor to Urbanite’s “Drawing Board” in August 2008). “We were talking about the politics of form and the underlying economic engines of architecture. It was clear that it was the end of an era, but nobody knew what was next.”

Now that he is out in the professional world, Scharmen sees a field in transition. “It’s about more than just the green movement,” he says. “It’s social, economic, and environmental justice all lumped together. It’s about connection to a cultural conversation and changing the way we think about design and cities.”

An age of architectural excess may be ending, but we remain, at our core, a visual species. As New York Times columnist Virginia Postrel once wrote, “Decoration and adornment are neither higher nor lower than ‘real’ life. They are a part of it.” So what role does aesthetics have in this new community-focused design?

“The problem with design is that all too often we use aesthetics as our starting point, rather than allowing beauty to be drawn directly from our material choices, or the ease of use, for example,” Pilloton says. “For humanitarian solutions, aesthetics can be a great tool to engage the user in a visceral, emotional way, and to ultimately enhance the function and durability of a great design.”

Back in the design studio in Greensboro, Alabama, someone has placed an empty jar on a table with a sticker saying “ego,” a reminder to check yours at the door. The walls are covered with notes about HERO and Hale County, the table a clutter of sketchpads, laptops, and cameras. Bielenberg, who flew in to be a part of the process, has posted a note on the wall saying, “Remind me to keep an open mind.”

The discussion is lively, despite long hours and lack of sleep. What does HERO really need? Slowly, a concept takes shape. It will take eight months to transform this initial idea into a package of printed materials. The result—a series of informational cards emblazoned with photos of Hale residents paried with personal accounts of how HERO helped them—seems to channel the spirit of Walker Evans, a famous American photographer who captured the face of the rural South in the Great Depression. And it manages to be both beautiful and useful.

—Former Urbanite editor-in-chief Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is currently a contributing editor at Architect magazine and a blogger for Metropolis magazine.



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