Architecture Lobby

All is not perfectly well in the world of architecture, and this advocacy group is looking to improve it.

- Samuel Medina

In the wake of November’s presidential election results, a fresh controversy embroiled the country’s architects. The national head of the AIA, Robert Ivy, had scarcely waited for dawn to break on November 9 to make public the organization’s support for the president-elect, Donald J. Trump. Ivy’s statement reminded our new “Cheeto”in-chief of his campaign promises to get America’s infrastructure working again. The tone was vaguely cajoling: “We stand ready to work with him,” Ivy wrote, in an egregious use of the royal “we.”

The AIA’s 89,000 members, needless to say, were not consulted as to the contents of Ivy’s communiqué. Amid the ensuing backlash— condemnations poured in from architects and industry commentators on all sides—the response from the Architecture Lobby was the clearest rebuke, if for no other reason than it appeared to be the most constructive. Laid out in 600 or so words, the statement balanced an unrelenting critique with clear-minded resolve to build opposition—not just to the AIA or Trump, but against the most immiserating aspects of contemporary society as they are reproduced within the world of architecture.

The lobby was founded in 2013 by architect and academic Peggy Deamer, currently a professor at the Yale School of Architecture, and a handful of her like-minded (and notably younger) colleagues. What was once a scrappy outfit born in Ivy League lecture halls is now a growing body with eight chapters of committed members across the country. The effect of the postelection scramble was galvanizing, instantly doubling the member pool, and the lobby is planning a slate of new projects to take advantage of that momentum.