Notes
EDRA As A Springboard For Design Juries On Trial, Designing For Diversity, Defined By Design
Kathryn H. Anthony
University of Illinois
EDRA’s 50th anniversary provides a unique opportunity for each of us to reflect upon the value of this special professional organization. For decades, EDRA has provided so many of us with a voice, an audience, and, perhaps most importantly, a strong sense of community and friendship that we would not find anywhere else.
Whether it be my early experiences serving as a juror in academic design studios, watching students hold back anger and tears in the face of harsh, public criticism; confronting unfair treatment and gender discrimination on my job in architectural practice as well as in my role as an architecture faculty member; facing my late husband’s life-threatening illness, an unpredictable form of cancer for over seven years; or watching people struggling to navigate a world not designed for people like us, I was able to use my own situation and those of others for whom I felt compassion, but whose voices were not usually heard, as a springboard for research.
All these experiences served as question marks for me to start researching and start writing. And EDRA played a critical role. So often the ideas debated at EDRA helped shape and refine my own research.
The social science research skills I had under my belt, the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and more recently, a more journalistic approach, allowed me to investigate both the breadth and depth of these issues, resulting in 5 books, including Design Juries on Trial, Designing for Diversity, Running for Our Lives,Defined by Design, and Shedding New Light on Art Museum Additions, co-authored with Altaf Engineer.
Defined by Design, published in 2017 by Prometheus Books and distributed by Penguin/Random House, fulfilled my lifelong dream to bring environment-behavior and gender issues in design to a popular audience. The book sparked much media attention, causing audiences to raise their antennae about how spaces and places affect them in ways they never realized before.
My testimony before the US Congress in 2010, where I advocated for increasing the number of toilet fixtures for women in US federal buildings, in order to reduce long lines for ladies’ rooms, a subtle but powerful form of gender discrimination, was another way to bring these issues before the public.
Toilets and restrooms are the great leveler – we all use them, but we rarely talk about them.
I’m grateful to my mentors who first introduced me to EDRA while I was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley 40 years ago. One of them, Galen Cranz, is with us at EDRA 50. She took a chance on me back then as one of her incoming students. Clare Cooper Marcusand Robert Sommer are two other mentors who inspired me to connect with EDRA and whose work strongly influenced my own. Longtime EDRA member Sue Weidemann, who is also here at EDRA 50, took a chance on me as a new faculty member at Illinois. All turned out to be terrific colleagues and lifelong friends.
At my first EDRA conference in Tucson(1978),I camped out on the floor at the home of some grad students at University of Arizona. Attending the conference confirmed my magnetic attraction to this multi-disciplinary field.
I attended several EDRA conferences since then, from San Luis Obispo to Pomona to Chicago to Oaxtapec to Edinburgh. I was Co-Organizer of EDRA 21 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990), while I also served on EDRA’s Board of Directors and as Treasurer. I believe this is my 24th EDRA conference. I have enjoyed every single one.
Now as a seasoned faculty member, one of my greatest pleasures is introducing my students to EDRA and encouraging them to submit their work to the conference. Several have joined me at EDRA over the years, including two brand new masters of architecture graduates, Kelly Tang and Kennedy McKay, who are here right now. Some have even gone on to assume leadership roles. Nick Watkins served as Chair of EDRA.
Although like so many others here today, I hope to keep researching, writing, and teaching for a good while more, it’s also time for EDRA to pass the torch to a new generation. I already see it in good hands. I hope EDRA continues to inspire you just as much as it has inspired all of us here on the panel—and that it continues to provide that all-important voice, audience, strong sense of community and lifelong friendships for all of you here today.