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The Young Architects Forum (YAF), a program of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the College of Fellows (COF), is organized to address issues of particular importance to recently licensed architects.

FAQ: What is a young architect and what is an emerging professional? Young architects are architects licensed up to ten years of initial licensure, and the name does not have any relationship to age. Emerging professionals are professionals who have completed their academic studies up to the point of licensure or up to 10 years after completion of their academic studies. Although young architects are now defined as distinct from emerging professionals, many components refer to these groups similarly. For example, a local YAF group may include emerging professionals and a local Emerging Professionals Committee may include young architects.

Q2 2020 Connection - How to empower neighbors and transform communities

By Amaya C. Labrador AIA posted 04-08-2021 01:00 PM

  

How to empower neighbors and transform communities

By Clarice Sollog

An interview with a 2020 Young Architect Award recipient




Wayne A. Mortensen, AIA, NASW
Mortensen recently accepted the role of CEO at NeighborWorks Lincoln, an affordable housing developer in Lincoln, Nebraska. Previously, he worked on behalf of urban neighborhoods as the Director of Design and Development for Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a not-for-profit community development organization. With graduate degrees in architecture, urban design, and social work, the Nebraska native is a licensed architect in Ohio and has lectured broadly on the creation of equitable housing and just communities. He is a community activist and was elected to serve as the 2021 President of the Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Editors Note: At the time of the interview, Mortensen was employed by Cleveland Neighborhood Progress. He has since accepted the role of CEO at NeighborWorks Lincoln, and is expected to start in mid-July.



Clarice Sollog (CS): Congratulations on being a 2020 recipient of the AIA Young Architects Award! Your career to date seems to be centered around community-based design and civic engagement. Can you explain what influenced you to head down this path?

Wayne Mortensen (WM): I decided that I was going to be an architect in the sixth grade, but it was my modern history seminar at Nebraska that nearly disillusioned me with architectural practice altogether. I enrolled in architecture school to help uplift communities and bring people together. That ethos seemed wholly absent in modern practitioners in both concept — Plan Voisin (Corbusier), Broadacre City (Wright) — and execution — Pruitt-Igoe (Yamasaki), Cabrini-Green (various), and the many regrettable enactments of Robert Moses. The latter were real projects that actively harmed people by reinforcing the most insidious aspects of American society (segregation, racism, classism, et. al.) and bred skepticism about the ability of design to solve problems.
A year away from school spent with the AIAS, in Washington, D.C., as president allowed me to recharge and focus. The next fall, I would enroll at Washington University and seven semesters later become the first student (though not the last) to wrap up graduate degrees in architecture, urban design, and social work. It was exactly what I needed to become the professional I am today and move into a sector of work that few architects are able to break into.

CS: What has been the most transformational experience, leadership position, or project for your career — something that set something in motion or maybe forced you to reframe your career goals or focus?

WM: After graduate school, I joined a planning consultancy named H3 Studio and worked as a project manager and outreach coordinator in marginalized communities across the Midwest and South. We worked in disaffected rural and urban communities and teamed with three other firms to pull off the Unified New Orleans Plan — a project that led to several subsequent follow-up efforts. It was fulfilling in every sense, save the repeated trauma of having to abandon the relationships you spend months creating with the completion of each contract. It helped me understand that the for-profit model was not structured to help advance communities, long-term.
My selection as a Rose Fellow in 2010 changed all of that by opening a door to the community development industry and providing a network of like-minded professionals for support, knowledge sharing, and collective impact — all of whom are smarter and more talented than me! Without the innovative structure of that fellowship, I don’t know that I could have broken into this world and found roles that allow such direct and sustained service to a singular community. I was fortunate that one of those wicked smarties, Jess Zimbabwe, was an acquaintance through AIA, or I may never have become familiar with the fellowship, and I would likely still be trying to figure out why I wasn’t happy in consulting.

CS: Can you share a little about the work that Cleveland Neighborhood Progress does, and what your role with them is?

WM: We are essentially a “super CDC” (community development corporation) that works as an intermediary between Cleveland philanthropy and myriad community partners working to improve their neighborhoods. We are a convener, facilitator, and collaborator of work that advances city-wide improvement, and we try to attract resources and develop capacity across the community so that the voices and ideas of residents can be elevated and carried out. When I first showed up in Cleveland as the hot-shot fellow nobody had heard of, I hilariously thought it was my ideas that were going to slowly (See? Both humble and realistic.) reverse decades of disinvestment and save the day. Within months, I realized that my technical capacity, creative energy, and professional values far outweighed any presumptive salvation plans. The ideas and initiatives were already largely authored by the real community experts that have been doing the living and dying and laughing and crying in their Cleveland community for decades — they just needed me to ask, “How high”?
My formal title is “Director of Design and Development,” which positions me as a staff leader in our “placemaking” portfolio and charges me with conceptual feasibility of the development projects (typically adaptive reuse or urban infill) we are considering. If we decide to pursue the project, I slide into my unofficial role of “director of whatever it takes” to move the project forward — owner’s representative, architectural collaborator, public meeting facilitator, PowerPoint designer — whatever it takes. (I have been known to clean bathrooms on the eve of ribbon cuttings.) From time to time, I will also utilize skills developed in my past life to facilitate public planning efforts or help organizations through strategic planning conversations. What makes my role a little more unique is that it wouldn’t have traditionally been filled by an architect, had it not been for the Rose Fellowship. It is worth pointing out that architects can bring a lot to the myriad conversations that occur within the community development field — even with the residual scars of design studio and Heidegger.

CS: Tell me about the one aspect or accomplishment of your career, so far, that you’re most proud of and what about it makes it top the list?

WM: The project that I was cleaning the bathrooms of was a six-year, $63 million adaptive-reuse project called Saint Luke’s Hospital in Cleveland. It was a hopelessly idealistic M.Arch thesis come to life. We bought a derelict medical campus for $1 and got a refund of $900,000 in order to do the environmental abatement and raze the (non-historic) additions — and that was the easiest part of the project. What followed was a transformation of a 384,000-square-foot historic hospital into a mixed-use transit-oriented development in one of Cleveland’s most depressed communities (at the time). The project became 137 units of affordable senior housing (two market rate), two not-for-profit headquarters, a Boys & Girls Club, a preschool, and a K-8 charter school that utilized senior mentors in their pedagogical model. (Cue the groans from the thesis adviser.)
The project was beautifully designed (Wallace Roberts & Todd, DLR Group), but it was the financial structure of the deal that was truly innovative. To fund the rehab, we utilized state and federal historic tax credits, new-market tax credits, low-income-housing tax credits, and an $8 million capital campaign. We had such incredible buy-in that the contractor (Mistick Construction) fronted $4.5 million worth of work prior to the [financial] closing of the third phase (which was 10 days before the first day of school)! That is just not something that happens. In order to secure the anchor tenant (The Intergenerational School), we turned over $4.5 million of the capital campaign so that they could be an equity investor and get the rent rates they needed. And the cherry on top? That it was the residents — in a community planning process eight years prior — that hatched the idea by circling the derelict hospital on a neighborhood map in red sharpie.
Needless to say, the bathrooms were spotless for the ribbon cutting, and sharpie-circled “Saint Luke’s” will always remain the best project many of us will ever work on.

Before and after exterior view of the Saint Luke’s Hospital adaptive reuse.

Before and after exterior view of the Saint Luke’s Hospital adaptive reuse.


CS: How do you define success in the realm of community-based design? What are some of the challenges that are faced and how can they be overcome?

WM: If people will talk to you after a project is over. Seriously. If some go out of their way to shake your hand or give you a hug in public, well, then you’ve done very, very well. That said, community problems are problems for usually insidious reasons, be it economic exclusion, structural oppression and racism, exploitation, etc. You are trying to effect change over a period of a few years against forces decades in the making, and a rendering is never going to get you there.
Balancing the needs of the community against the economic realities of development and plan implementation will always be the hardest part of public facilitation. Maintaining relationships with different factions of stakeholders whose concerns and needs are often in conflict with one another is a skill I … hope to eventually develop. In the meantime, you need to get comfortable with simultaneously being the target of loud ridicule while having the quiet respect of those you admire.

CS: Is there a component of architectural education — that often talked about concept of “design thinking” — that you believe is key to developing emerging professionals as participants in community-based design? Or did your diversity in education — with additional graduate degrees in urban planning and social work more adequately provide you with the tools to succeed in your chosen path?

WM: Extracurricular activities. I don’t think I’m a model professional by any means, but without leadership opportunities available through AIAS (or Mortar Board or Panhellenic or Young Democrats or any of the countless other organizations available on a college campus) my life is far less charmed than it is today. I was the first architecture student to be selected to the Homecoming Court at Nebraska in 20 years! (This is an area where more economical state undergraduate programs thrive, by the way.) If my self-worth was wrapped up in what my design critics thought of my work, I would have left the profession years ago a very broken person.

CS: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received? Can you share some advice to other up-and-coming young architects that may be looking expand their careers to have more impact in their communities?

WM: “If you say you’re going to do something, you better f---ing do it.” Brad Buchanan, FAIA
Brad created a program in Denver, Colo., named Freedom by Design. When I was at AIAS, we collaborated to make “FBD” the national service initiative of the organization. He dispensed this advice at the inaugural captain orientation on the topic of pro bono designers working with medically and economically fragile clients. A simple concept that is broadly applicable.


Author Bio:

Clarice Sollog, AIA, NCARB
Sollog is a Project Architect at CDM Smith in Orlando. She was awarded the AIA Orlando Young Architects Award in 2014 and is the Young Architect Regional Director for the Florida Caribbean Region.
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