Many Voices

By Sara Caples, Everardo Jefferson

RIBA Publishing

Do you know how to create beautiful buildings that truly promote social change? Architects need to understand how to design for social equity, but too often this is presented as a choice between work that does good and work that looks good. When done well, building for social equity can directly enhance the formal, experimental and creative language of architecture. Renowned architects Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, who have been designing for underserved multi-cultural communities in New York for decades, provide thought leadership that is deeply rooted in practice. By urging architects to approach equity projects with an open mind, the volume highlights the need to dig deep into the diverse culture of local neighbourhoods. It provides techniques to encourage listening, communicating and fully engaging with users, resulting in imaginative design responses that draw on all the tools that the architect possesses. Packed with interviews from established and up-and-coming designers, and highly illustrated case studies from all over the world, this accessibly written book serves both as a point of inspiration and a challenge to Western-centric ways of working. Ultimately, it explores how listening to the aspirations of diverse communities enriches designs and broadens the architectural language of all involved. Featuring:

• International case studies from Austria, Brazil, Bolivia, China, Egypt, India, USA and many more

• Interviews from leading designers, including: Tatiana Bilbao, Wanda Dalla Costa, Andres Lepik, Xu Tiantian, Li Xiaodong, Sara Zewde

• Guidance on a range of topics, from integrating narratives to working with colour, communicating with communities and stakeholders to ethical practice

Harlem: Mart 125

By Jonathan Rose, Sara Caples, Everado Jefferson 

Yale School of Architecture

The task for this studio was to design a new mixed-use building across from the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Harlem. The developer Jonathan Rose, with New York-based architects Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson challenged their Yale students to design a sustainable mixed-use residential and cultural building, with housing for retired jazz musicians, restaurants, and media spaces, on the last city- owned parcel.

The studio questioned issues of cultural representation versus the mutability of the site’s ethnic anchorings. It requires the designer to consider each space from the user’s perspective. And it demands high standards of sustainable design, headed towards net zero, that support a more satisfying occupant experience, with maximal use of controlled daylight and natural ventilation.

The book features interviews with those on the studio juries including Robert A. M. Stern, Alexander Garvin, and Vincent Chang.

The New Mix: Culturally Dynamic Architecture

Architectural Design
Edited by Sara Caples, Everardo Jefferson

We are at a new moment in architecture, one when many cultures are contributing to the unfolding of modernism. This enriching influence is broadening the mix, extending the range available to architecture, of materials and colours, of evocative forms, of cultural references and of social thinking.

In an era of boredom with monocultures and orthodoxies, there is the almost universal expectation that the metroculture, be it in London or Beijing, will provide broadened cultural experiences in food, performance, dress and sound. The new ethnically diverse city is a place of zesty daily encounters/collisions/cohabitation between cultures, a place of mixed signals, contradictions, delightful confusions. Franco-Japanese cuisine, elite schoolchildren wearing doo-rags, jazz performed on gamelans―no matter what one’s mother culture - we’re all getting addicted to varied rhythms, different emotional emphases, ‘other’ ideas of beauty.

This change is visible in schools of architecture, at least in the range of students, typically from many ethnicities, none of them constituting a majority. No wonder, then, that there is increased interest in ways that architecture can incorporate a larger compass of riches.

A rising group of practitioners is meeting the challenge of this broadening cultural landscape in pursuing strategies of quick switching, layering, reframing.  These new architectural expressions of multiple cultures represent an enrichment that ultimately might help create a more robust modernism, helping to rescue it from a ‘potato blight’ of too much sameness.