Title: Roberta Washington, Architect. New York, New York
Speakers: Roberta Washington, Sarah Filkins, Nancy Groce
Series: America Works
Date: January 27, 2022
Running Time: 10:07 minutes
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Description:
The distinguished architect Roberta Washington, who is the principal (or head) of her own firm, Roberta Washington Architects in New York City, speaks with oral historian and architect Sarah Filkins as part of Filkins’ Archie Green Fellowship to document women architects throughout the United States. Washington traces her career, her involvement in community planning and network building, and her work in designing hospitals, schools, and the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center in lower Manhattan for the National Parks Service. She talks about the challenges she faced as a woman--particularly as an African American woman--in a field that, especially when she started, was overwhelming White and male. She begins this episode by recalling how, as part a junior high school assignment to interview “someone about their job,” her life was changed when she chanced upon a Black professor of architecture, who just happened to be renting her neighbor’s home.
