Bryan C. Lee Jr. '08 Named 2021 Cooper Hewitt Emerging Designer
Bryan Lee ‘08 and his firm Colloqate have been dismantling systemic racism in the broader social arena and in the practice of architecture for some time now. In his keynote lecture during the Hillier College 2020 Design Showcase, Lee describes how, through the process and outcomes of design, designers can get to Design Justice. It is a practice where designers and the community work together to produce spaces that will serve the people who will use it. The recognition he and his firm Colloqate have received with the 2021 Cooper Hewitt Design Award for Emerging Designer affirms how a just design practice functions and what that work can look like.
As Lee said in an interview with Terri Peters of Architect’s Magazine, “Design justice is a foundational principle; it is not a design process, yet. It is an underlying framework for how to think about getting to the architecture. The principal argument of design justice is that we are creating spaces of racial, social, and cultural justice through the process and outcomes of design. Complementing that notion is that design justice seeks to challenge the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression. It is people- and justice-focused. It seeks to create radical visions for what living in space with one another means. In the next five to 10 years, we’ll start to see the aesthetic correlation between design justice and what we call colloquial architecture—just like you saw the change in the aesthetics of place as a byproduct of the environmental movement 20 to 30 years ago.”