A Quintessential Leader: Gabrielle Bullock on Perception, Innovation, and Disrupting the Cocoon

By Julia Gamolina

Gabrielle oversees the Diversity, Inclusion, and Engagement program at Perkins and Will, an initiative which works to support and strengthen a firm-wide culture that embraces a diversity of people, colors, creeds, credos, talents, thoughts, and ideas. Her unique role as an award-winning principal and the firm’s Director of Global Diversity enables her to combine her passion for architecture and social justice to effect positive change at a micro and macro level. Her leadership and expertise is rooted in issues of social equity in architecture, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and physical and mental ability. She is the recipient of the 2019 Whitney Young Award.

Gabrielle has been a key player in the success of Perkins and Will for nearly three decades. She’s worked in both the New York and Los Angeles studios, and became the first African-American and first woman to rise to the position of Managing Director of the Los Angeles practice. Over the course of her career, she has led numerous complex and high-profile projects, including the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, one of the largest building projects ever completed for the University of California system. Gabrielle graduated in 1984 from the Rhode Island School of Design with degrees in fine arts and architecture, becoming the second African-American woman in history to earn an architecture degree from RISD.

In her interview, Gabrielle talks about honing her communication style as a leader and her hopes for the industry, advising those just starting their careers to work for the firms where they see others like them.

JG: How did your interest in architecture first develop?

GB: I remember very clearly that my interest started when I was twelve. I considered myself an artist, and a teacher of mine said, “You know, you could do architecture.” I thought about that and realized that growing up in New York, I was around a lot of public housing projects. Seeing how awful they were and what they did to people, I decided that I could try to make a difference in how low-income people, African Americans, people of color, live, so I went to architecture school.

You studied at RISD - what did you learn there?

I learned how much architecture lingo there was that I did not yet understand. That was frustrating. The other thing I learned was that no professor or critic looked like me, nor came from a place like me. It also seemed like all of the projects that we were doing were not necessarily related to what I wanted to do.

I went through the paces and just thought to myself. “I guess how this is done.” Forty years later I realized that it didn’t have to be that way.

Gabrielle with students at the Cimarron Elementary School that Perkins and Will designed.

How did you grapple with that?

Obviously, I felt a little invisible, but I knew I wasn’t going to fail. I harnessed whatever strength I had and put in double the time to understand what my professors were talking about, so that I could break the rules. We had a Winter Session at RISD where in January and February, you could take whatever course you wanted. I took that time, six weeks, to read everything that anyone referenced so that I could understand this architecture lingo.

What did you first do out of school?

I wanted to work with firms that worked on low-income housing in New York. This was the mid-80s, in the middle of a recession. I ended up working for three small firms that specialized in the projects I was interested in, and lo and behold, they all went belly up. For financial reasons, for survival, I had to rethink where I would work. I came upon Russo & Saunder, a healthcare firm, which Perkins and Will acquired several years after I joined.

I realized that healthcare was actually very important and socially relevant work. I had no interest in doing fancy skyscrapers, projects that didn’t mean anything except being the tallest building. I found my tribe with healthcare, and with Perkins and Will, and have been lucky to work on a lot socially relevant projects - hospitals, schools, all of that.

“...how do we create an environment to have everyone bring their whole selves to work?”

What did you learn from working on these projects?

I learned about the unique nature of the facility and why people go there. A hospital is very different from a school, and an elementary school is very different than a university. I’m intrigued by designing for the whole population, and at the same time, for a unique population. I also learned about cultural differences - a hospital or a university in Saudi Arabia is completely different than a hospital in California.

You’ve now been with Perkins and Will for thirty-one years, starting in the New York office and then moving to Los Angeles. Tell me about this move.

Los Angeles was not at all on my bucket list; I’m a New Yorker through and through [laughs]. My husband, at the time my soon-to-be-husband, is an actor, and he was bi-coastal. I’ll also tell you who my husband is - he’s on NCIS, his name is Rocky Carroll.

Oh my god [laughs]. My boyfriend’s parents watch that show all the time.

[Laughs] Ultimately, we said, “Why don’t we move to California.” I naively thought, “Hey, it’s another big city, it’s all the same!”

Well, it’s not the same - clearly. At the time, Los Angeles felt very divided, for a city. It’s still quite spread out, but at the time, the neighborhoods were very distinct and there was not a lot of crossover in demographics from one neighborhood to the next. Because my husband was familiar with Beverly Hills, we lived in Beverly Hills and I hated it [laughs]. Slowly but surely, we moved further east, which was more metropolitan, more walkable, and in general just felt more like a city.

Tell me then about your path to becoming the Director of Global Diversity.

I had been the managing director for the Los Angeles office for eight years. In 2013, by mutual decision, I decided to transition out of that role, and was given the opportunity to decide what my next firm-wide role would be. I had frequently had a firm-wide role of some sort - leading project management initiatives several years prior, and so forth. I thought long and hard about what my role could be, and I came up with designing and leading a program focused on diversity and inclusion.

This was largely because of the personal experiences that I’ve had as a black female architect in this profession, and the work that we had done regarding the occasional lack of holistic cultural competence demonstrated on projects. I saw a need to advance not only the firm, but the industry. We had tried, like many firms - we had a diversity committee and all this. But it was never solid enough, never a stake in the ground. I had an incredible sense of urgency, that it had to be done now and that I was the one to do it.

What does your role entail?

My role is to strategize and lead all things diversity, inclusion, and engagement. This can be from how to retain and recruit diverse talent, to how to build and maintain a culture of diversity and inclusion, and how to implement policies and things that will allow that to happen. I lead the Diversity Council, which leads the firm in this manner and develops the various initiatives. We also measure the metrics on progress.

“When you become a leader of any kind, you can’t think, “They’ll just have to accept me the way I am.” Learning how to navigate communication styles as a leader is very important.”

How do you measure them? How do you define success in your role?

That’s interesting. We have seven key areas that we measure - success on the quantitative side is the demographic makeup of the firm. We have a baseline from 2014, and we measure all the demographic data of years that followed, with the goal to become more gender balanced. I am proud to say that we are now 50/50. Also, we measure and address the racial and ethnic demographic gaps that we have, that the industry has. As we all know, African Americans make up the lowest number, the biggest gap, so we set out to make that one of our target areas of improvement. We’re getting there.

In addition to that, it’s how do we create an environment to have everyone bring their whole selves to work. What comes to mind is the LGBTQ community. We have invited staff to create a firmwide affinity group for this self-identified group—and they have, and the group is active. Those are some of the quantitative success metrics.

On the qualitative side, real success is our people actively talking about and addressing the issues of EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) within the firm, and they are. Both on an office level, on a national level, and an international level. The other big one is that it impacts our work positively. I can proudly say that we have evidence of that. We have seen that the more diverse our teams are, the more work we are able to get. We get prominent cultural work around communities of color, because they feel that our teams represent the real demographics of those communities. I’m finding that more and more, it’s important to our clients and our communities to have them see themselves in their consultant teams. To me, that’s success - many people come to us because of our philosophy on EDI.

You mentioned your daughter at the AIA Women’s Leadership Summit - tell me about this part of your life influences your career.

I have an eighteen year old; she’s in her first year of college. We actually adopted her as a newborn when I was forty. I tried to have children, couldn’t, and so adopted her.

I will tell you that having my child was as planned as it could be.

That sounds like a dream [laughs]. I am still learning how to like things that are unplanned.

I knew that I wanted to have a career and that I wanted to have a family, and I didn’t want either to compromise the other. It helped to work with a firm that I had been with for a while - there was trust, and I knew that they cared about family. I took three months off, and when it was time to go back to work, I was fine. I had gotten my license out of the way prior - I don’t know how anybody studies for exams with a toddler. I know my limitations, I know that I don’t like to compete with my priorities, so I planned everything as much as I could.

What is it like being a working mom during a child’s various life stages? I’m sure the demands with a preteen or teenager are different, but just as demanding.

I didn’t start traveling as much until she was about eight. Before the travel, things were fine - I’d go home, I didn’t work late, I took her to the doctor when I needed to. A normal existence.

When I started to travel, and when I started going to the conferences, it was a little stressful. I had to convince myself that it was OK to be away from her, that she had a father there for her. Also, it’s not until they get older, and they tell you, “You know, I really missed you.” or, “You know, I remember when you weren’t here for that.” It’s not traumatic, but certainly as a working mother, you do everything that you can to make sure things are in place for when you need to do what you need to do professionally. You hope that it all works out. I think it was the toughest when she was between ten and fourteen.

Oh, my mother will tell you the same thing about me. Puberty.

Right. At that time, even when I wasn’t traveling there would be some other drama. You know, my parents split when I was very young, and my mother raised two girls who were the same age. So, I always thought, if she could do it, surely I can do it too.

“I would like to see that this little thing called architecture that started out in this cocoon, be blown apart to be more universal, accessible, multi-cultural, multi-colored, multi-everything.”

Where are you in your career today?

I’ve never been happier. I’ve never been more fulfilled in doing architecture, working on more cultural projects, and leading the diversity initiatives at the firm. I focus on diversity for about 50% of my time. I talk to people like you, I go to conferences, I speak to university students and elementary schoolers, and basically do anything I can to shift the balance and the make-up of our profession.

What have been your biggest challenges throughout your career?

The biggest challenge I’ve faced has been the way I’m perceived. People’s perception of me was never really tied to my gender - it was my communication style, and that coupled with the bias of the “angry black woman.”

Wow.

While my white female counterpart could be direct, and my white male counterpart could be direct, when I’m direct, it’s frequently characterized very differently. What I’ve learned is how to recognize and address my delivery style. I can still be direct, but it would be naive and fruitless to not really become aware of how I’m doing it. If you can’t get past people not even hearing you, you’re never going to get to your message.

In a leadership role, it’s been even more important that I address my delivery. If I’m leading a practice, then I can’t let that be a barrier. When you become a leader of any kind, you can’t think, “They’ll just have to accept me the way I am.” It’s not that simple. Learning how to navigate communication styles as a leader is very important.

Gabrielle speaking at the 2018 IIDA Annual Meeting

Going through it all, what resources do you wish you had that would have made things easier?

I wish there was someone doing what I do today when I was starting out. I wish there was someone like you! I wish there were more conversations around innovation of our profession, and not innovation in the buildings per se. When I was in school, our profession just seemed like this little cocoon, like some mad scientist designed it, and designed it to stay just as it was. I feel like there is such lost time.

There is a lot of activity right now trying to make up for it. We will get there.

On the flip side, what have been your biggest highlights?

The biggest highlights for me have been when a mentor sees something in me that I didn’t think I was ready for. Even when we have confidence, we still need affirmation. I don’t want to tie everything to being the only one in the room, but as I think about it in all these conversations, it really was a factor in my life! Knowing that there were people who could be brave enough, honest enough, and supportive enough to put you forward in the next leadership position, really made a difference.

Who are you admiring right now?

I admire John Cary. I’m actually just now reading his book. I also admire Allison Williams - she’s an architect, she used to work at Perkins and Will, and SOM, and now she’s on her own. She happens to be African American, and to me, she also happens to be the quintessential architect. She doesn’t wear anything on her sleeve, other than the fact that she’s an architect. She has all the connections to gender and race that we all do, but she leads by her work and her work ethic. She’s been a great mentor.

Speaking of mentors, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers?

Find a firm or organization that aligns with your goals and values. It’s important to find a company that meets your requirements because if not, it will be an uphill battle, especially for women and people of color. If you don’t see someone like you at a firm, it’s likely not going to be good for you. I think the kids coming out of school today recognize that; they’re all driving their own paths, even before they’re out of school.

Finally, what is your mission? What’s the impact you’d like to have on the world?

I would like to see that this little thing called architecture that started out in this cocoon, be blown apart to be more universal, accessible, multi-cultural, multi-colored, multi-everything.

That’s amazing. I’m with you.