Black History Month at RIBA: Saluting our sisters and interrogating our collections

This year’s UK Black History Month theme, saluting our sisters, throws into sharp relief how scarcely Black women are represented in the RIBA Collections.   

We know that Black architects have historically been, and continue to be, underrepresented in the profession. This is particularly true of Black women architects who, for example, represent 0.4% of the profession in the UK.

However, the scarcity in our collections is not only a reflection of this lack of representation in the profession, it is also an important reminder of how curatorial choices can perpetuate the status quo.  

Reflecting on collecting practices

Historically, Western art and archival collecting practices were often based on the principles of 'connoisseurship'. They reflect a preoccupation with the idea of a design being attributed to a single ‘author’.

Teams or collaborators who made major contributions towards a design, or those whose work is assigned to categories such as ‘craft’ or ‘vernacular’ are less likely to be recognised within this model.

The result is that practitioners with the resources, cultural capital, and public profile to have their name attributed to a work (privileges historically more available to white men), are the people whose histories are most often collected and preserved.

The bias and oppression experienced by, for instance, Black women architects, has an enduring impact on the likelihood of their work being saved for future generations. This is a cycle we need to do our part to break.    

(Under)representation within the RIBA Collections

We’ve talked before about how incomplete our understanding is of our first Black members. This is even truer when it comes to trying to identify the earliest Black women RIBA Members.

Their names are certainly among our archive of membership nomination members, but because the records did not record ethnicity (or, indeed, gender), they remain unidentified for now.

Within the archival gap represented by Black women architects is a notable, known exception. A small amount of material in our collections relates to the Matrix Feminist Architectural Collective. In the mid-1990s, Matrix ran a survey of women architects, with the ambition of highlighting the scale of women’s contribution to the built environment and building a database of their work.

The Matrix survey offered insights into the age, qualifications, employment, and status of women architects, as well as the types of building projects they were engaged with. It also asked respondents about their ethnic identity, finding that 1.47% of respondents identified as of Black African or Black Caribbean ethnic origin.

The papers from the survey, including the completed questionnaire, can be found within our archive collections, along with a report authored by Sandra Manley and Ann de Graft-Johnson in 2003 titled Why Do Women Leave Architecture?, which won a RIBA Research Award.

The RIBA Collections also holds photographs of Matrix's work, including Jumoke Training Nursery in Southwark, and Jagonari Women's Centre on Whitechapel Road (see images).

Current projects

We have more work to do to identify material like this, which might exist in our collections and help tell the story of Black women in architecture but, because of the way things have been collected and catalogued over time, has not yet been identified.

For example, the archive of postwar British practice Fry & Drew might also reveal more about the local architects and officials with whom they worked on projects in Ghana. Our library has a rich array of sources that can help illuminate these stories, some of which we’ve compiled into a Saluting our sisters themed reading list.  

As well as researching and interpreting existing material, we need to diversify the material that enters our collection. We recently refreshed our Collections Development Policy as a step towards this.

It commits us to proactively acquire works by architects, designers and other professionals engaged in the built environment who are not currently well represented in the collections, including women, LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, ethnic minority groups and those from a broader range of socio-economic backgrounds.

The RIBA Collections represent the collective memory of the profession, and that memory needs to include the diversity of the profession, both historically and currently. 

We seek to preserve the history not just of architects but, more broadly, of the built environment. This means that projects representing these groups in other ways, such as clients, patrons and end-users or collaborators, are also key to building the diversity of the collections.

By expanding our collections, we have an opportunity to counter narrow and self-perpetuating ideas about what – and who – is worthy of collecting.  

Looking forward as a profession

The Royal Institute of British Architects began collecting during the institute’s earliest years in the 1830s, with the ambition, set out in the founding prospectus, of offering a “Library of works of every kind connected with architecture” and “a Museum of Antiquities, Models, Casts, Specimens…”.

The driving force for this was, in part, to provide a collection of example objects that students could study and draw from. The ambition to inspire students through our collections remains today, but as the often-quoted Mariam Wright Edelman saying goes, “you can’t be what you can’t see.”

If we want to see a more diverse cohort of students coming up through the ranks to become architects, we need to make sure we’re not obscuring the names of those who came before them.

We try to encourage architects to think about how to preserve their practice archives for future generations. Sometimes the best place to start is by having discussions with RIBA’s curatorial team as we are always adding new material to our collections.

Perhaps you can help us to reflect the growing diversity of the profession with your projects. So why not consider getting in touch with us?

Read more from Inside the Collections or learn about our other EDI initiatives.