In the Pursuit of Architecture
It was an April spring day in my beloved hometown of Portsmouth,
Virginia that I arrived into this world ready to paint the town red. At an
early age I was enamored with buildings, skyscrapers mostly. I would gaze upon
them on television totally mesmerized, and while on excursions through 1990s
downtown Norfolk, marvel at their mass and scale. When I was a child, I used to
build my own cities: inspired by the perfume and lotion cream vessels
organically scattered along the bureau in my parent’s bedroom, I would
strategically displace and rearrange them to mimic the skylines of New York and
Chicago; in the kitchen, I would raid the pantry and stack all the canned food
all about the floor, naming this stack “Capitol Building”, and that stack “Apartment
Building”, and that other stack “The Bank”. And by the age of seven, I had my first
visit to the Big Apple—my world was forever changed.
Flash forwarding twenty years later, I’m now surrounded by others who
share that deep love of the built environment and the edifice. Thinking back to
preadolescence when I first learned of “architecture” as something to do
when-I-grow-up, to me at the time, being an architect was synonymous with being
God: I thought it to be the role of a creator, a destroyer, a master of
imagination manifest; it defines and articulates the space of man—after all
people need places to sleep, eat, learn, work, and play somewhere, and I
intuited that being an architect gave access to creating these environments for
the world.
In the pursuit of architecture, life, insofar, has granted me two
watershed experiences: an education at an HBCU and the gift of seeing the
world.
I studied architecture at Howard University, an immensely active HBCU
in our nation’s capital, and a very rare and highly prized experience I savor
to this day, learning within the craft and life experience of majority-black
industry trailblazers of an earlier and very determined generation of underrepresented
architects and designers. It was also the first time that I hadn’t felt like a
“minority”, that simply I felt like a person among people and not merely viewed
as a minority demographic. As a student-leader, I was very active in our school’s
chapter of NOMAS (National Organization of Minority Architecture Students), serving
as vice president and president consecutively, and where I was connected to
many other underrepresented professionals within the industry.
It is also because of the study of architecture that I have been
granted the privilege to sojourn the corners of this world: touring much of
Italy as part of a design class, studying architecture abroad in Scandinavia, employed
architecturally in India for nearly half a decade, and recently sent to San
Juan, Puerto Rico for the AIA. “Oh, the places you will go” in the name of
architecture.
The uniqueness of my education at an HBCU, coupled with my
serendipitous life in India, brought to fruition a latently developing passion
for collective-based collaboration—collaboration, literally, on anything random
yet creative. Within and around the practice of architecture, I crave for
collective, group-centric teamwork that specifically addresses issues and ideas
around the built environment: as an architecture student, I lead NOMAS and
instituted new programs and k-12 mentorship ventures; while in cosmopolitan India,
I founded Paramorphous, an art
and design think-tank collective—serving also as an ideas sandbox where I could
“ideate” and hatch-up design experiments with other buzzing creatives; and now,
not long back home in America, I needed to gather ‘round a collective mind
again, and soon began the revival of our local Young Architects Forum—and now
serving as the newly appointed Regional Associate Director for the Region of
the Virginias, and with great plans to advocate for the advancement of our
emerging professionals! Oh, the things you will do, in the name of
architecture.
Having reintegrated back within my hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia after
a decade-long estranged absence, I am empowered to bring my life experiences
and rising passion of the built environment to the reimagination of my native
city’s future; being appointed to the City of Portsmouth’s Downtown Design
Committee has been one big way to get started. One of my current colleagues at
Hanbury, and a rising star locally, had once shared in a public talk that it is
our responsibility (as emerging professionals) to “feed the loop” of local
innovation in the industry by simply bringing our talent back home and engage
with our community.
In this pursuit of architecture, and as an emerging professional myself
who has returned to his native town, I share in my colleague’s request and
encourage those who have left the nest of Hometownsville to come back and reexamine,
reimagine and re-excite the possibilities of your native city. The places we
grew up can certainly use our architectural love. “Oh, the places we will go” …back
to, in the name of architecture.
Jeffrey G Butts, Jr., Associate AIA
Hampton Roads, Virginia
