Blaming Long-Dead Architects For Creating Inaccessible Buildings

Alice L. Givan, an 80-year-old Brooklyn resident, wrote a letter-to-the-editor that was published in the New York Times (January 2, 2023) in response to an article on the paper's website about a 200-year-old Greenwich Village building that was demolished.

In her letter, Ms. Givan stated that she had "two points of view" on the matter. "I see beautiful, historic houses, and I feel dismay that one will be torn down." On the other hand, she "see[s] houses that are inaccessible" to the elderly and to "parents carrying children and groceries." 

She ends her letter by asking, "What were the architects who designed these houses thinking?"

Ms. Givan has made the mistake of projecting twenty-first century sensibilities, needs, and ways of doing things on to those who lived a century or more ago. When those "beautiful, historic houses" were built, the elderly more than likely lived with their family members who could assist them up and down the stairs and parents, particularly the well-to-do ones, could hire servants to handle the groceries and nannies to look after the children. Plus, there were deliverymen (presumably able-bodied) who brought the milk and butter, coal, blocks of ice, and other necessities to these residences.

An Architect In Harlem

When Percy Charles Griffin was growing up in Mississippi, he was always painting pictures. So much so that his mother told him he was a born architect. She knew, says Griffin, 39, that "I couldn't make any money at painting , so the next thing to that was be an architect." Although at the time Griffin "didn't know what the word 'architecture' meant. When I came up here [New York], I wanted to be an engineer." But math--a subject he was good in during his high school days--became a stumbling block when he got to City College because he had lost interest. He told one of his professors this and he was told to switch his major from engineering to architecture. "There too," recalls Griffin, "I was pathetic."

During his second year at  the college he began to perk up and the attitude of those professors who thought he was wasting his time went from "sympathy to admiration." His scholastic improvement took him to the top of his class.

Griffin, the first in his family to go to college, eventually won an architectural award at City College for his thesis design--a cardboard model of a four-story, block-long , multi-service cultural center that included a 300-seat theatre, art gallery, and restaurant.

Griffin's decision to attend college came after landing a job in the office of the famed architect Philip Johnson, who is responsible for the AT&T Building in Midtown Manhattan. "I went to school because everyone [in Johnson's office] was a college graduate. Princeton, Harvard, all over. I really wanted to complete my education." Johnson, knowing this, made it possible for Griffin to attend school by allowing him to have a flexible work schedule where he could take off "one, three days every week" without deducting "any money from my salary. I was doing regular architectural development, drafting, design development. Same as anyone else. Griffin gives Johnson credit for evaluating his school projects. After graduation in 1972, Griffin took the architecture licensing exam which he passed.

To Percy Griffin, who teaches at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), architecture is the best of two worlds: aesthetics (how a building will look) and technology (how the building will be built and how well it can stand up to stress from weather, aging, weight, etc.) "It's very artistic. You have to have imagination and then you turn right around with this imagination, understanding the technical part of [architecture], which is the engineering, the structure, the mechanical, the electrical, and energy conservation. It's a mixture of many different fields. Not only the design or the technical but sociology, philosophy, history. I feel that history is a major part of understanding architecture. Where it came from, the different periods it went through. Without the history, you would not have very much depth as an architect."

A majority of Griffin's clients--75 percent to be exact--are black. Most of his projects involve home renovation. He also does design work for churches (such as the cultural and community center at the Thessalonia Baptist Church in the Bronx). Some of his clients include Sylvia's Restaurant on Lenox Avenue and actor Irving Lee of the daytime soap opera The Edge of Night.

Griffin feels, however, that the black community--particularly its leaders--do not make adequate use of "the professionals that are available to them. How many projects that I see going up in Harlem, the Bronx, Chicago, all over and no black architect  [is involved]. [Black architects] could survive pretty well if we could get our ten percent or fifteen percent of the money for construction." He wonders how a black community leader can be a leader without knowing that "it's a hard struggle for black architects."

This excerpt is from an article that was originally published in the Harlem Weekly in 1984. A longer version of this article was posted on November 1, 2012.

Letting Dancegoers Interpret The Dance For Themselves

In April of 1989, avant-garde dancemaker and former architect Gus Solomans, Jr. collaborated with a team of Columbia University students in the creation of a dance work called Site Line, performed by members of the Solomans Company/Dance at the Danspace Project of St. Mark's Church in Manhattan's East Village. In a telephone interview, Solomans described the work as a dance with "a wall that would divide the dancing space in half. The audience on each side of the wall [will] see essentially a different dance. They'll be able to see the dancers on the other side. The wall is partly transparent, partly translucent, and partly opaque." Solomans said that he wants the audience to interpret what they see for themselves,"to make choices, to participate as viewers, not just sit there and [let the choreography] wash over them and be entertained. I try to make the visual atmosphere rich enough to get some stimulation."

In another dance work, performed at Danspace in January of 1990, Solomans's company presented a piece for five men whose title was  represented by a symbol described by Solomans as "an unpronounceable graphic gesture." Both the dancers and the musicians provided vocal sounds. And as with Site Line, the audience was expected to interpret for themselves what the vocal sounds and movement signified.


This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News. It was edited from two articles that were published in 1989 and 1990.

Creating Choreography Via Architecture

Avant-garde dancemaker Gus Solomans, Jr.'s segment will be half of a shared evening of dance at the Danspace Project of St. Mark's Church in [Manhattan's] East Village (April 14, 15,16 [1989]). In a collaborative work with a team of Columbia University [architectural] students, the Solomans Company/Dance will present Site Line, described by Solomans (a former architect), in a telephone interview, as a dance with "a wall that would divide the dancing space in half. The audience on each side of the wall [will] see essentially a different dance. They'll be able to see the dancers on the other side. The wall is partly transparent, partly translucent, and partly opaque." Solomans says that he wants the audience to interpret what they see for themselves, "to make choices, to participate as viewers, not just sit there and [let the choreography] wash over them and be entertained. I try to make the visual atmosphere rich enough for everyone to get some stimulation."

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (April 15, 1989) as part of a Spring 1989 Dance Roundup article.

The Ups And Downs Of Being A Black Architect

"Architecture in its concern for the creation of human environment, must deal with physical, psychological, social and economic needs of its clients."--Robert J. Nash, black Washington architect and fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Black architects comprise a very small percentage of the total number practicing in the United States. But despite that fact and despite a few drawbacks to pursuing an architectural career, ""the numbers of blacks studying architecture has increased drastically since the late '60s," says J. Max Bond, Jr.

After serving 14 years on the faculty of Columbia University's School of Architecture, he should know. He is also the chairman and a partner in the architectural firm of Bond Ryder Associates in New York City.

"The changes reflect the changes in society," continues Bond. "There have been attempts at special programs, pre-architectural programs, things like that. Right now one of the really great inhibitions is that architecture is not one of the most secure professions. Nor is it one of the highest paying professions because it is subject to the shifts in the economy."

Roger Roberts, who has been a project architect for the past six years with the firm of Richard B. Dempsey, also in New York City, does not think now is a good time for anyone to consider a career in architecture.

"Perhaps by the time they got through school and got a little bit of learning, things might pick up. Right now we are oversaturated [with architects] The overall picture is that things are  slow but if blacks become more successful businesswise then black architects would become more successful. [When the economy is bad] we're the first ones to feel it. The housing market is very bad."

As a project architect, Roberts's job is "to oversee the production of a job. To see that everything gets drafted correctly and properly and all the necessary details that are required for the job get done, to coordinate with the engineer and to oversee the project when it goes into construction.

The design work that comes into Richard Dempsey's office is, according to Roberts, "through referral or else you get published and someone may see it or if you've done a job and they're happy with it, they come back again or recommend you to someone else."

On the other hand, Max Bond's work is mostly in the public sector. "Most of the commissions in the last 10 or 12 years come from public agencies and generally related to the black community. We as a group have not been extensively employed by private industry. It's beginning to happen. Nor have we in many ways been employed as much as we feel we should by the federal government."


This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published in the Baltimore Evening Sun (October 25, 1982).

Inside An Architect's Home

"As we look around today," said Percy Griffin, a Harlem-based African American architect, "we see a little of many different styles creeping into architecture: the Renaissance, the Gothic, Byzantine, and so on. We went to one period back in the '50s where we had steel and glass, the glass boxes." Many of these buildings can be found on Manhattan's Park Avenue, north of Grand Central Terminal. For example, the Lever Brothers Building. This style is called "modern" architecture. Now we're in the post-modern period in which architects borrow from other architectural styles. Said Griffin about post-modernism, or what he called "eclectic architecture": "It's like baking a cake. If you have the right ingredients, it will be tasty. So's architecture."

Griffin's home, in a four-story limestone building that he owns on West 144th Street in Harlem, is a mixture of different styles. (He lives there with his wife Sandra, an urban planner, and their seven-year-old daughter, Kammara.)

The Griffins occupy the basement, and the first two floors of the building. The upper two floors are rented out to three tenants.

The den, in the basement, where he and his wife spend most of their time, is described by Griffin as having a high-tech decor. It is furnished with a circular bar, a TV, a stereo, and a spinet piano.

The main floor containing the family area and the living room is eclectic. The walls are white. The living room has a built-in fireplace, a glass top coffee table, and paintings on the wall. (The paintings are his own work. They line the walls throughout the house.) The family area, adjacent to the kitchen, has a long wooden dining table, a couch, a bookshelf that he built, and a wall in which a rectangular opening has been cut inside of which are placed wooden ancient Roman columns on either side of the opening. A few feet away is another column,that is more modern, and painted blue to match a similar column in the living room.

The upstairs area is designed in Scandinavian light wood. The wall of his and his wife's bedroom which faces the stairs is made up of a series of small window panes to emit light when desired and is shielded from within by a Japanese shade. Down the hall is their daughter's bedroom furnished with a bed that is a few feet off the floor and is accessible by a ladder nearby. Underneath the bed is a row of shelves for various dolls, a birdcage with two parakeets, a dresser, and a TV set. Taped to that same wall are her drawings. Along the wall outside her bedroom are framed pictures of her.

This article was part of a much longer article about architect Percy Griffin. It was originally published in the Harlem Weekly in 1984.

Percy Griffin, Architect And Teacher, Designs Mostly For Black Clients

When Percy Charles Griffin was growing up in Mississippi, he was always painting pictures. As a result, his mother told him that she felt he was a born architect. She knew, said Griffin, 39, that "I couldn't make any money at painting, so the next thing to that was to be an architect." At the time, Griffin "didn't know what the word 'architecture' meant. When I came up here [New York], I wanted to be an engineer." But math--a subject he was good in during his high school days--became a stumbling block  when he got to City College. He had lost interest in the subject. "I went to one of my professors," recalled Griffin while perched on a desk in his office above 125th Street and 7th Avenue, "and told him I had no interest. He said, 'Why don't you try architecture?' So sure enough, I did.There too I was very pathetic. The first semester I was very, very sad. Awful. Some of the professors didn't have any hope [for me], didn't have any faith. They felt that I was completely wasting my time trying to study architecture. But inside of me I knew that's what I wanted to do and that's what I would do. The next semester," he continued, "I went from sympathy to admiration. I led my class in the third semester [a year and a half after entering college]. I was at the top of my class." Griffin went on to an architectural award at City College for his thesis design. (The cardboard model was that of a four-story, block-long multi-service cultural center that included a 300-seat theatre, art gallery, restaurant, outdoor fountain and garden, et cetera. If the project had not had funding problems, it would have been constructed on the block located at 8th Avenue and 121st Street. The site is presently a community garden.)

Griffin, the third of four children, is the only one in his family to have gone to college. His parents, despite their lack of formal education (his mother, a housewife, went only as far as the 6th grade; his father, a longshoreman, could not read or write), understood the value of an education. His father would not allow any of his children to work during the summer because he was afraid it would discourage them from going to school.

Griffin's decision to go to college came after he had attended a technical school in Brooklyn and landed a job in the office of Philip Johnson, the famous architect who later designed the AT&T Building in midtown Manhattan. "I went to school because everyone [in Johnson's office] were college graduates. Princeton, Harvard, all over. I really wanted to complete my education. So he [Johnson] told me, 'Fine. We will make this office fit your school program.' I went to City College for five years, taking off one, two, three days every week and they didn't deduct any money from my salary. I was doing regular architectural development, drafting, design development. Same as anyone else. At that time, I had gotten very, very good at it. Very talented." (Griffin gives Johnson credit for helping him in his school projects by evaluating them.) After graduation in 1972, Griffin took the architecture licensing exam; he passed it.

He tells an interesting story of how he came to get the job in Philip Johnson's office. After two years in one architectural firm, Griffin went "looking around for another job in architecture. One of the agencies sent me to Philip Johnson. I didn't want to work in that office because it was too prestigious for me. They offered me a job the very same day. Three weeks later I was standing at the newsstand on Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street when one of the bosses from Johnson came by. He said to me, 'I thought you wanted a job.' I said, 'A job?' He said, 'Yes, you came up to the office looking for a job three weeks ago.'" When the man announced he was from Johnson's office, Griffin replied, "I couldn't pay for the job. They wanted too much money." It was 12 noon. The man told Griffin to call him at 3 p.m. When Griffin called, the man told him, "We gave the agency the money. What's your excuse now?" The following Money morning was the beginning of a five-year association with the firm.

The office he is presently in was once the workspace of the renowned black architect John Louis Wilson, now retired. (Wilson was the first black to graduate from the School of Architecture at Columbia University.) Griffin worked out of Wilson's officer as an independent architect. Today he is in partnership with Stuart Furman, his former teacher at the Brooklyn technical school. (Furman, who is white, teaches at the New York Institute of Technology's Manhattan campus, near Columbus Circle, where Griffin also teaches.)

To Griffin architecture is the best of two world: aesthetics and technology, "It's very artistic. You have to have a concept. You have to have imagination and then you turn right around with this imagination, understanding the technical part of [architecture], which is the engineering, the structure, the mechanical, the electrical, and energy conservation. It's a mixture of many different fields. Not only the design or the technical  but sociology, philosophy, history. I feel that history is a major part of understanding architecture. Where it came from, the different periods it went through. You need to know the history of architecture and the history of the world. I feel that without the history, you would not have much depth as an architect.

"As we look around today, we see a little of many different styles creeping into architecture: the Renaissance, the Gothic, Byzantine, and so on. We went to one period back in the '50s where we had steel and glass, the glass boxes." Many of these buildings can be found on Park Avenue, north of Grand Central Terminal. For example, the Lever Brothers Building. This style  is called "modern" architecture. Now we're the post-modern period in which architects borrow from other architectural styles. Said Griffin about post-modernism, or what he calls "eclectic architecture": "It's like baking a cake. If you have the right ingredients, it will be tasty. So's architecture."

A majority of Griffin's clients--75 percent to be exact--are black individuals who hire him to do home renovations He also does design work for churches (such as the cultural and community center of the Thessalonian Baptist Church in the Bronx) and day care centers (two or three centers a year). His many clients include Sylvia's Restaurant on Lenox Avenue, actor Irving Lee (of the soap opera The Edge of Night), and Dr. Billy Jones, a psychiatrist at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, who lives in Griffin's neighborhood [in Harlem].

Griffin, who said he works very hard but enjoys his work, looks at 1983 as his best year professionally. However, he does have a gripe. He feels that the black community as a whole does not "want to use the professionals that are available to them. How many projects that I see going up in Harlem, the Bronx, Chicago, all over, and no black architect [is involved]. They wouldn't have a black architect. We could survive pretty well if we could get our 10 percent or 15 percent of the money for construction. A black preacher will go to a white architect," Griffin continued, noting the number of buildings going up or being remodeled because of church involvement. "How can he be a leader and not know where black architects are and not realize it's a hard struggle for black architects?"

At the Convent Avenue Baptist Church, he is on the committee that is helping to build "a connection between the church building and the office building." No doubt his church realizes the full value of his  experience and expertise.

At the New York Institute of Technology, Griffin teaches design. He has been there for eight years. He holds several positions at the school. Among them is the position of assistant director of the architecture department. NYIT, he said, "is 10 to 15 percent minority. Maybe. I noticed lately my classes have been all white. If I have a class of 14, 15, maybe I'm lucky to have two blacks. They may be from Africa, the West Indies, or some other place." Very few of his students are black Americans.

In his offices in Harlem, Griffin employs four young draftsmen: two Spanish-speaking females, an African, and a black American graduate of Hampton Institute in Virginia.

For relaxation, Griffin studies painting at the Art Students League. His specialty is abstract oil painting. Doing them gives him peace of mind. When he is painting, there is no need to respond to the wishes of clients or to construction budgets; he has complete freedom of expression. The paintings in his home are so good that people upon seeing them for the first time offer to buy them. Initially he declined these offers because he felt he would not have any paintings for himself. But now, with more than enough to share, he is willing to sell some of them.

When I asked him what advice he would give to students interested in pursuing a career in architecture, he told me that they should not go into the profession with the thought of making a lot of money. "Learn all you can. Work hard. you won't get rich." (It should be noted that architecture is not one of the highest paid fields. The amount of construction work available depends on the ups and downs of the economy.)

Griffin has never dreamt of designing skyscrapers. He couldn't explain why. But he, in a moment of prophecy, sees the day when skyscrapers will be on the drawing boards of black architects. He doesn't believe it will happen in his lifetime, even if he lived to be 150. "It's too far in the future for me to have a dream of being a part of it. Society," he continued, "is not ready for a black man to get involved with that kind of money transaction."


This condensed article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1984.

Max Bond, Black Architect

The following is an excerpt from an interview I did with the late black architect Max Bond. It took place at Columbia University's School of Architecture, where he was the dean at the time, about 1983 or 1984. He was the cousin of Julian Bond, the former Georgia state legislator and NAACP executive. Bond died in February 2009 at the age of 73.

1. His view of architecture criticism:

"I think that architectural criticism generally in this country is not good as it should be. That's not to say that there aren't some good critics. But the level of architectural criticism is not very high. I think the architectural critic should obviously try to expose ideas and issues. There are several issues that are never really dealt with very much in this society. One of these is what American culture is. [Architectural criticism would have us think that the population of the U.S. is] one hundred percent white or of European derivation. You wouldn't get any sense of the complex heritage of America. [Critics would have you] think that the kinds of things we should look to architecturally are solely from Europe. It is obviously a very important issue because it is related to the establishment of cultural values for this society."

2. His view of black architects:

"I don't know if any of us [black architects] have received the acclaim that we're due. But obviously there have been many very distinguished black architects. There are several architects who I think really deserve a lot of distinction--Paul Williams; Hilliard Robinson who practices in Washington [D.C.], who is now retired or semi-retired. And other people such as Jay Johnson [who is a friend of Bond's. When they were in college, they worked together in Paul Williams's office one summer]."