Architecture for the 99%: Dr. Harriet Harriss on Democratizing the Deanship, Inclusive Design Methodologies, and How the Younger Generation Can Lead

By Julia Gamolina

Dr. Harriet Harriss is the dean of the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. Dr. Harriss has consistently pushed boundaries in architecture education, focusing on diversity and inclusivity within architecture in her writing and practice. In 2004, she co-founded Design Heroine Architecture, a social innovation start-up centered around collaborative private and public sector projects, which had won an award from NESTA’s (National Endowment for Science Technology & Art) Creative Pioneer Program. Prior to the tenure at Pratt, Dr. Harriss led the Post-Graduate Research Program in Architecture and Interior Design at the Royal College of Art in London. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Dr. Harriss talks about her decision to pursue architecture and how her career has been shaped around innovation and democratizing the field, advising those just starting their careers to carry on doing what they’re doing.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted in January 2020, before current events relating to COVID-19 in the United States. To see how Pratt is responding to the pandemic, please read here.

JG: How did your interest in architecture first develop?

HH: This is an excellent question. However, I first want to say that what’s so encouraging about meeting somebody like you is that when I was first starting out as a young architect, there were very few women that were stepping up and doing this kind of activism work - because that’s really what you’re doing.

Consequently, I think many of us felt very isolated. We were witnessing the feminist magazine Ms go into decline, and the British equivalent Spare Rib go out of print, so finding other feminists became very challenging, especially if you wanted to explore women’s relationship to space. British and feminist design practices in the UK also closed their doors - Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and the Women’s Design Service, for example - so there was a vacuum when I entered architectural education. When I look at you, I think, “This is what the future is,” and I get terribly excited. 

“I wanted to connect architecture to other forms of expression and other critical matters beyond spatial production alone.”

Thank you so much. You’re going to make me cry!

No, it’s true! And I could join in with the crying. But to your question, I originally wanted to take a medical degree, because I thought that the way to save people was to be a doctor. Then I moved to South Africa to work with a charity, doing soup runs in Johannesburg and working in an orphanage, and changed my mind completely. I remember walking around the illegal squatter camps in Soweto and observing how people had painted picture-windows, milk bottles, and even cats on the doorsteps of their temporary structures, in an attempt to make them seem like ‘real’ houses.

I was really moved by this instinct toward trying to create a sense of place and I remember thinking, “architecture really can make a difference, and if I want to make a difference in the world, then architecture is really the more powerful proposition.” Architecture has the power to create communities that bring people together to negate illness, to help avert getting lonely, isolated or depressed. Architecture can really look at the big picture and say, “People are unhappy. How can we reimagine this environment to make things better?” 

This couldn’t be more timely. What did you learn in architecture school, after deciding to pursue the discipline?

I was an architecture student in the mid-1990s, at a time during which architecture was principally in service to corporatism. Consequently, the general perception was that architecture operated in the interests of an elite rather than the interests of the public. I myself came into architecture from a challenging background shall we say, so I had to be very resourceful about how I managed my studies. I was working thirty hours a week for the Manchester Youth Service while studying, so I would come into my history and theory lectures, listen to stories about medieval architecture and join my professors in singing harmonic proportion in order to demonstrate the Fibonacci sequence [laughs], and then I’d get into my broken-down van and drive to a youth club, and spend the evening working with young people in low-income communities who were facing some very difficult challenges of their own.

However, there was a compelling synergy between the stimulus of architecture school and the creativity and resilience of the young people I worked with. It made me question, “How do we bring the two together? How do we relate all of the rarefied wondrousness that is architecture to the real issues that people in these communities are facing?” That’s been the question that I’ve been in the pursuit of answering in my both teaching and practice throughout my career. 

A live project, the Playful Pavilion, designed by students from Montana State University and Oxford Brookes University to engage the public in examining spaces for sport. A response to the London Olympic and Paralympic games. Image courtesy of Harriet Harriss.

The Playful Pavilion assembly. Image courtesy of Harriet Harriss

The Playful Pavilion completed. Image courtesy of Harriet Harriss.

What did you first do out of school?

I was actually working all through school. During my school career, I couldn’t, unlike my counterparts, afford to go on an unpaid or poorly paid internship in an architecture office. So, I kept on being a youth worker, simply because the pay was better. For complicated reasons, I was completely financially independent, so I was in a spinning-plate situation between work and education. On top of this, I was entering every single design competition that offered prize money and picking up smaller jobs that allowed for flexible hours. I even took on the role of the school computer room cleaner when I was doing my Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, something even my friends probably weren’t aware of.  I used to do it first thing in the morning before everyone arrived for class and I would just like to say to them now – since I’m on record - you lot were really filthy [laughs]!

In addition, I was appointed the editor of the college magazine called Pollen along with my friend (and now practice director of Urbane London) Holly Porter. We launched parties to broaden our network and connect to architecture practices, and ended up getting full sponsorship from Dayfold publishers to run the magazine. At the time however, I remember my architecture tutors insisting, “You need to just focus on your studio work.” I remember thinking in response, “Does that really just mean to obsess about nothing other than facades, plans, elevations, and the construction sections and so on?” Because that part of architecture just wasn’t enough for me - I had a bigger creative and intellectual apparatus, and wanted to connect architecture to other forms of expression and other critical matters beyond spatial production alone.

I couldn’t relate more. 

That’s where the competitions helped. For example, the British Concrete Association came to the Royal College of Art and ran a design innovation competition. Everyone immediately started designing buildings in response, but I thought, “We already have countless buildings designed from concrete - that’s not innovation in itself, and what they’re looking for is innovation.” So, I designed a wedding dress out of concrete with my housemate and later business partner, Suzi Winstanley. And we won, and ended up on BBC news, and there were a lot of jokes about most marriages needing reinforcement [laughs]. But it’s always been about using the lenses of other fields of practice to see and do things differently and not just responding to a brief, but thinking beyond it. 

“...feminism is seeing a resurgence among today’s young practitioners, who are using feminism as an inclusive design methodology within architectural practice. This kind of thinking will help ensure that the profession becomes more inclusive and more relevant to diverse communities.”

You just mentioned your business partner – how did you eventually start your practice?

During my graduation show at the RCA, I got approached by the National Endowment for Science Technology and Art (NESTA), who were seeking to fund social innovation start-ups from across the design disciplines. I remember thinking, “Where have you been all my life?!” They asked me whether I wanted to compete for a business plan award. We ended up competing with 300 others for this business plan competition, and Suzi and I won. 

We started, and I’m always afraid to admit this, Design Heroine Architecture. It was intentionally feminist, and we subscribed to the heroic potential of architecture – but at that point in time, the only other feminist practice operating anywhere in London was called MUF, which was perhaps bit more direct than we felt brave enough to be [laughs]. So, we were Design Heroine, to allude to our feminism but also to reference to comic books, because we believed in the power of storytelling to engage people from non-architectural backgrounds in the design process. Within a year of graduating we were running our own practice, writing a book on the future workplace, teaching part time, co-designing schools, doing funded design research, all of that. 

What did you learn?

I learned that if I got twenty minutes a week to actually do any designing, that was amazing. The rest of the time I was managing clients, employees, freelancers, contractors and end users, doing the accounts, running co-design workshops, specifying materials, pitching for work, promoting our projects and not really having any time to do the actual design work. When you run your own business, you step out, in a way, from having any creative contribution to it – 90% of the job is actually managing relationships.

Then of course, in 2007, there was the subprime mortgage collapse in the United States, so all of the analysts including our savvy accountant made us rethink whether we wanted to struggle along as a small practice dependent on public sector contracts that were being cut by a new, conservative government. So, I elected for a kind of professional sabbatical and accepted a Rome Fellowship. When I came back, I think both Suzi and I both felt we were ready to start new initiatives.  I was interested in the design of education, so I took on a Senior Lecturer role at Manchester School of Architecture when I came back,

Concrete Wedding Dress by Harriet Harriss and Suzi Winstanley. Image courtesy of Harriet Harriss.

Concrete Wedding Dress by Harriet Harriss and Suzi Winstanley. Image courtesy of Harriet Harriss.

How did that lead you to Pratt?

After Manchester, I moved to Oxford Brookes and ran the Masters of Architecture program. I then moved to the RCA and led the Doctoral Program in Architecture. Then, the deanship at Pratt came up. I remember sitting down with a couple of my old feminist professors, women I’ve always hugely admired, to discuss it. Their response was that a deanship is “quite a narcissistic position,” and that deans are “often people that are primarily interested in serving their own individualistic agendas rather than those of their faculty.” I remember thinking, “But what if you could actually redesign the deanship to make it more democratic and inclusive?” I think that’s why in the end, I decided to go ahead and apply. 

With the deanship, where do you feel you are in your career today?

What I’m doing now relates back to some of the principles I had as a young adult making the decision to study architecture over medicine. I’m still a proponent of codesign, I’m also working toward giving more agency to my colleagues and students and have them feel empowered, and I’m moving beyond the hierarchical traditions of a lot of deanships. I want to avoid being the kind of dean who is remote, who brings in their own entourage, or who uses a deanship to shore up their practice or spends too long away from being engaged in the everyday life of their school community. Instead, I want to be embedded in the role, and to steer, support and promote the talent within the school.

I have inherited a phenomenally talented faculty and student body at Pratt, so I want to focus on bringing everybody together to work across different departments and programs, to facilitate collaborations that allow for different approaches towards achieving shared objectives. We have a new student-run lecture series called Pratt Futures, because if there’s anyone that can tell us about the future, it’s the next generation of designers. I want the students to have real influence over determining what narratives are important, thus leveling who we learn from, and who assumes a position of authority within the school. The principal responsibility of leadership is to make more leaders, and I really feel that that’s the case. I like witnessing the shift in energy levels when others have agency and it’s been brilliant seeing all of this intelligence, creativity, and talent come to the fore. Education is my principal design project now; it's my professional practice and my first priority.

“The principal responsibility of leadership is to make more leaders.”

Beyond what you’d like to do at Pratt, what would you say your greater mission is? What’s the impact you’d like to have on the world? 

I’m sure you’ve read the book Feminism for the 99% - it makes a very interesting point that traditionally, feminism has struggled because it identified women’s issues as being separate from other structural problems, such as racist public policy or poor investment in low income areas. Except now we see these issues as intersecting, so in other words, if feminism wants to be useful and meaningful for everybody, it needs to speak to the 99%, by confronting all forms of structural inequality, from #blacklivesmatter to climate injustice. In doing so, it will help us frame the right questions, and understand why inequalities such as the housing shortage or access to affordable healthcare are feminist issues, given they impact negatively on women more so than men. I also think that feminism is seeing a resurgence among today’s young practitioners, who are using feminism as an inclusive design methodology within architectural practice. This kind of thinking will help ensure that the profession becomes more inclusive and more relevant to diverse communities. 

Having said that, we need an architecture for the 99%. Architecture today needs to see itself as responsible for and relevant to addressing the world’s problems - climate crisis, social justice, inclusivity, and diversity and so on. All of these problems are inherently at the heart of what architecture should be focusing on, and that’s how we’re reconvening the school’s agenda.

The Wearable Habitation coat, designed by students from London's Royal College of Art, is a prototype coat for refugees that transforms into a tent or a sleeping bag. Led by Harriet Harriss and Graeme Brooker. Image courtesy of RCA.

The Wearable Habitation Coat as a tent. Image courtesy of RCA.

The Wearable Habitation coat as a sleeping bag. Image courtesy of RCA.

What have been the biggest challenges for you, throughout your career?

The first one is the question of affordability of education. One of the elephants in the room, and it’s always been an elephant in the room, it seems, for architecture, is class bias. We are always going to struggle to make education and the profession inclusive if we can’t ensure that there are enough places at the table for people coming from low-income backgrounds. I know there are other deans committed to this agenda, but how do we address this collectively? The diversity of communities should be reflected in the diversity of professional practice, if the work is to be relevant and serve everybody equally, so this really does remain a problem.

In my view, the licensing boards are underplaying their role in setting registration prerequisites that would obligate architects to become more socially and environmentally responsible. NCARB, NAAB, and RIBA among others, could make a huge difference to society by orienting us more toward participation, inclusivity, and diversity, and also addressing the climate crisis, by requiring practices and qualified architects, to make an explicit commitment around those agendas. 

Another challenge concerns the long working hours culture in architecture. We have to examine how willing and complicit education is in mimicking some of the bad behaviors of architectural practice. There are more benefits gained from architecture students taking a day off to visit art museums, and to allow that alternative creativity to infiltrate them, than to have them working on sections, plans, and elevations, eating junk food in a grubby corner of the studio on a weekend. If we’re overburdening students with just too many hours of prescribed work due to an overloaded curriculum, then we’re actually disconnecting them from the very thing that architecture needs, which is the creative fuel and cultural richness of being exposed to and inspired by other forms of expression, not to mention time simply enjoying sunlight walking down a leafy street.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing - you will lead the future and you don’t need permission.”

I really appreciate that because I got very sick in architecture school - my eczema and psoriasis just completely exploded, and I didn’t feel that it was something I could properly focus on taking care of because that would take me away from my work.

I got sick too, actually! We have to ask ourselves, how can architects say that they can design healthy and inclusive environments if the profession itself is unhealthy? It’s a massive contradiction. 

With that, finally, what is your advice for those just starting their careers in the field? 

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve read interviews where older generations such as myself advise students to “Just do it,” and all that sort of rubbish. Say that to a student coming from a comfortable background, they hear one thing, but say that to a minority student from a lower-income area, or a student working three jobs already, and they hear something completely different. What they most likely hear is that we don’t have the first clue about the extreme pressures they are facing, and how hard they’re already working at ‘just doing it.’

What I can say is that when I look at my architecture students, I often find myself humbled by their potential, their tenacity, and their positivity, despite difficult odds. I’m starting to realize that there is - thank goodness - a really strong sense of social responsibility and togetherness. This, in the face of the climate crisis for example, gives them the determination to say, “This world is not over yet, we are going to work together to find solutions to the damage that is happening right now.”

So, if there is one piece of advice that I have, then it’s to carry on doing what you’re doing! Carry on working the networks that you have, working beyond prescribed disciplines and epistemologies, working beyond what characterizes the profession of today, and working collectively in the way that you are doing to respond to the seismic problems that are out there, or to seize the opportunities for meaningful change that sometimes emerge from seemingly hopeless situations. Just keep doing what you’re doing - you will lead the future and you don’t need permission.