Yale and Barnard's Rhea Schmid on the Questions We Must Ask Ourselves and Our Communities
By Julia Gamolina
Rhea Schmid received her B.A. from Barnard College in 2015 and just completed her M. Arch I at Yale School of Architecture in 2020, where she was awarded the Wiliam Wirt Winchester and the Gertraud A. Wood Traveling Fellowships. Originally from Zurich and Manila, Rhea has studied, worked, or both, in New York City, Berlin, Bali, Helsinki and New Haven, engaging with ideas and projects within historic preservation, bamboo architecture, and city planning in hopes of cultivating a more holistic approach and understanding of sustainability.
Rhea believes in a design approach that is sensitive and incremental, and an architecture that supports social change, engages with environmental justice issues, and espouses human narratives. She is currently working on a team of six people to build this year’s YSoA Jim Vlock Building Project in partnership with Columbus House. She misses the YSoA M. Arch I class of ‘22, who, due to safety concerns related to COVID-19, are not able to join the summer construction phase.
JG: Why did you decide to study architecture?
RS: From an early age, I’ve felt the impact architecture can have on a person’s sense of self, place, and dignity. At the age of fourteen I moved from Switzerland to the Philippines - my mother is Filipino and my father is Swiss. Trust me when I say that these two cultures could not be more opposite, and so I spent a lot of my youth making sense of these differences, uncovering biases, and questioning cultural norms. Somehow, as a “halfie”, I learned how to be both an outsider and an insider.
I challenged myself to make sense of “difference”, understand its value, and began to apply that to life in all its forms. I began to notice places and spaces that seemed to reconcile opposing sides with grace and beauty. These places were models to me for how I could embrace the diversity of my background. It wasn’t a matter of being Swiss, or Filipino. I did not have to be half of each: I could be a full version of both. I became obsessed with understanding that difference is beautiful, ambiguity is human, and uncertainty is rooted in a desire to never stop listening and learning. I pursued architecture to understand and celebrate these differences within our physical world.
Site Analysis, Family Justice Center, Critics: Turner Brooks and Jonathan Toews, Spring 2020
Fragments of a Whole, Family Justice Center, Critics: Turner Brooks and Jonathan Toews, Spring 2020
Conflict Diagram, Critics: Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Partner: Maya Sorabjee, Fall 2019
What was the favorite project you worked on in school?
My favorite projects are the ones that were born of progressive studio briefs. The design process that followed, steeped in questioning and learning, have influenced the way I interact with the world. For example, in my second year we learned about and designed a Restorative Justice Center, an alternative to our current criminal justice system that brings together all affected community members into voluntary processes that repair harms. I spent the semester learning about the amazing work organizations, like Impact Justice, do and questioning how space can either continue to support existing unjust, discriminatory institutions or how it can quietly fight to build new ones that support humanity’s vulnerability and desire to heal.
In my third year, I had the privilege of taking an Advanced Studio with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman. In their studio, we adopted their rigorous research-based approach to design. They believe a building is only as good as the visible and invisible systems and structures in which it exists. My partner, Maya Sorabjee, and I critiqued existing manufacturing practices along the US-Mexico border and prevailing models of land conservation, while proposing an alternative system centered on human-plant co-evolution. Our architecture emerged from a process that uses strategies of planting and elements of bio-construction to create a productive buffer zone, between developed and undeveloped land, of reconfigurable spaces. Both preventative and remedial, these strategies begin to address local needs, create a sustainable form of development, and protect the watershed.
And in my last Advanced Studio with Turner Brooks and Jonathan Toews, we learned about the organizations, like BHcare’s The Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services, doing amazing work to help those suffering from domestic violence in order to design a Domestic Violence Center, also known as a Family Justice Center. The experience has greatly influenced the way I understand the real and debilitating effects of trauma. As designers of space, and curators of sensory experiences, how can we even begin to talk about “embodying space” if the people we serve, due to trauma, have difficulties embodying their own body? Trauma is complex, highly contextual and systemic, and cannot be ignored in the design process, no matter how messy. Yesterday and today are the results of a society that failed to design with those most traumatized in mind. Black lives matter.
“...for us designers, who speak highly of collaboration, it is important we learn to recognize what in our process is truly collaborative and what is not.”
What are some of the initiatives you’ve focused on in school, and why?
Equality In Design is a student-led group at YSoA that focuses on creating a culture that values inclusivity, mutual respect, and equality in order to cultivate a harassment-free learning environment for all its students. These efforts manifest in lunch talks with diverse speakers, workshops regarding toxic and unconscious bias, and exhibits that address gender discrimination within architecural institutions, among other things.
The initiative I was especially involved with was EiD’s desire to create a new student orientation program for incoming students. The goal was to introduce tangible tools and frameworks that the student body could use to help foster meaningful conversations. We can’t talk about injustices in our world if we don’t have a more inclusive way of talking about them. Otherwise, we unconsciously perpetuate existing, prejudiced patterns of communication that values and favors the dominant way and continues to oppress and marginalize everyone else. And for us designers, who speak highly of collaboration, it is important we learn to recognize what in our process is truly collaborative and what is not. Design will be better for it once we both recognize and improve these shortcomings, again and again.
When searching for internships and jobs, what are you looking for?
At this point, which for me is the very beginning, I see value in learning from any type of experience. Though the academic world, now more socially bent than before, provided me with the space to unpack all these issues I care about, I have so much to learn when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of architecture. With that said, I do take note of leadership within firms. I worked at a preservation and design firm in New York, CTA Architects P.C., right after college, and their diverse leadership and progressive values positively affected the office culture. I also pay attention to how firms frame their design approach. Design without a stance or a vision is neutral and I know we simply cannot afford neutrality anymore.
During an Equality in Design organized debate: "Is providing architectural services to under-served communities more likely to benefit local residents, or lead to gentrification and displacement?", Fall 2019
What’s important to you? What inspires you?
Audre Lorde, in a powerful essay in Sister Outsider, about “dismantling the master’s tools”, states that “in our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” Design, or lack thereof, generally speaking, has created the vessels in which “divide and conquer” became the dominant language. So, what does ‘define and empower’ look like in our built and planted environment? How can architecture hold inclusive spaces for people to define for themselves? How can design speak for the marginalized? How can one design latent properties that grow over time for a more mindful, sustainable, and positive architecture? How do we not simply design for an emotional experience, but design with emotion for a social good? Western architecture and design is starting to grasp the complexity of humanity, not just systems. These questions aren’t new, and luckily, I am not the only one within the architectural and design field, asking them.
What do you hope to do in your career?
I know that I will work hard to live the questions listed above, as well as welcome new questions that will inevitably emerge. I hope to continue to explore how to synthesize poetry, activism, and social work into narratives and built work that mean something to people. What specific positions, organizations, or roles that puts me, I’m less sure of, and, yet, not so worried about. As long as I’m growing and doing good through creation for myself and the future of our planet, I’m forging ahead as an architect, I hope.
Main Entrance, Restorative Justice Center, Critic: Laura Briggs, Fall 2018
Family Justice Center, Critics: Turner Brooks and Jonathan Toews, Spring 2020
Transition Spaces, Restorative Justice Center, Critic: Laura Briggs, Fall 2018
Who do you look up to? Both in terms of women in architecture, and in general.
I look up to the dreamers that do, and the doers that dream. These people manage to do important work without losing sight of the bigger picture, derive inspiration from other perspectives, synthesize complexity without diluting its creative synergy, and, more often than not, they are the ones that do not leave anyone behind in the process.
As of now though, I look up to the organizing bodies, fierce leadership, and courageous voices within the Black Lives Matter Movement; I look up to those playing their part and doing their work towards anti-racism; I look up to my cousin who's a doctor in Manila during these times; I look up to people I know who’ve experienced so much violence and hate, but still believe in goodness. I look up to poets, like Audre Lorde and Rainer Maria Rilke, who talk about ambiguity in such profound ways, and scientists, like Maria Mitchell, who refused to separate the poetics of discovery from the pragmatics of research. I look up to my professor Michael Mendez who pushes environmental justice work within institutional frameworks. I look up to Teddy and Fonna who constantly challenge the way institutions work with marginalized communities. I look up to people within my immediate YSoA community who encourage and nurture curiosity, compassion, and wonder; I look up to my extended Barnard community of bold, brilliant women; I look up to my partner, my brother and sister, all radical and wonderful; I look up to my parents who are beacons of love and support; and I look up to Madame Architects who introduces me to even more people to look up to!
I could go on forever. The more people I look up to, the more inspired I feel to be a part of something great and to do the best I can - to play my part as a dreamer that does and do my work as a doer that dreams, courageously.
What advice would you give to those in high school now, choosing their field of study?
Follow curiosities and ask questions. Both the kinds of questions personal research, mentors, professionals, and alumni can provide concrete answers to - and, especially, ask the kinds of questions only you could possibly answer. Why do you want to pursue a certain field of study? What are you curious about? What are you perplexed by? What could be better? Also, hold on to the questions without demanding answers from yourself.
As Rainer Maria Rilke put it, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves...Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” This is the advice I’ve challenged myself to embody.