In Conversation with AIA Minnesota Gold Medal Winners James Garrett Jr. and Nathan Johnson
The two 4RM+ULA architects share insights on expanding what is valued in architecture
Interview by Anjali Ganapathy, Assoc. AIA | February 25, 2021
Nathan Johnson and James Garrett Jr. in the 4RM+ULA office, which features a mural by Twin Cities artists Ta-coumba Aiken and Roger Cummings. Photo by Chad Holder.
FEATURE
Last year, 4RM+ULA’s James Garrett Jr., AIA, and Nathan Johnson, AIA, became the first collaboration and first Black architects to receive the AIA Minnesota Gold Medal, our state’s highest honor for an architect or designer. I sat down with Garrett and Johnson for a conversation on a range of topics—from what receiving the Gold Medal means and the importance of valuing the community as a client to questions about beauty in architecture and the sources from which a design should derive its character. Garrett and Johnson offer a dynamic and refreshing take on these traditional preoccupations of architectural practice. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation.
Garrett: We intentionally designed this business [4RM+ULA] to allow space for a much broader definition of stakeholder, of who we serve and what service means.
We haven’t done a museum yet. We haven’t had the opportunity to do cabins on Lake Superior. We haven’t had the opportunity to design a bunch of high-end residential projects. The solutions that we’re able to come up with really maximize the efficacy of what our clients are able to do with their space within their modest budgets—which is a very different way of measuring what is valued in our profession.
You can do community centers. You can do art centers in the inner city. Scenic overlooks in forgotten-about neighborhoods. We’re designing a food shelf right now—the biggest food shelf in the Twin Cities. We’re doing work that touches regular people, and that work is now seen as valued.
Students of mine and of Nathan’s can look at us and say, “You know what? I can aspire to work really hard for my community and for people who are underserved.”
Johnson: In our industry, there’s this idea that you have to wait your turn for an opportunity to present itself. That you’re going to work for 30 years or something before you get an opportunity to do an interesting building, right?
The capacity of someone to be able to do something outside of the norm is significant. You don’t need to practice the way that everyone else is practicing to be recognized for your accomplishments. You don’t need to do a museum to say that what you’re doing is architecturally significant.
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Garrett: People who pass by Juxtaposition Arts may never go inside the building, but they’re going to interact with it in the way that it does or doesn’t acknowledge their presence on the street—their culture, the things they are optimistic about, the challenges they face.
Architecture has the power to say all those things, and to have a different set of relationships. It doesn’t have to just be about the people that are going to be inside or specifically about the person who’s signing the check, right? Because a lot of times the person who’s signing the check is multiple levels removed from what’s actually happening there.
So, how do we de-center that and center people and community and the urban context? I think that that is an important aspect of what we do, as well.
“Do I think a variety of designers and architects can design for a variety of communities? Yes, but I think you have to be empathetic. Your architecture shouldn’t change that community; that community should change your architecture.”
Right now, the architecture profession is irrelevant to 95 percent of the population. [At 4RM+ULA] we do a lot of community and stakeholder engagement. We’re very visible. We regularly invite people into conversations about who belongs, who should be recognized, and how they are best represented in a way that is widening the appeal and the awareness of architecture as a relevant, important profession, with significance to regular folks. So, I think part of the reason why we were acknowledged [with the AIA Minnesota Gold Medal] is that we’re broadening this very narrow appeal of architecture. If our profession is to be relevant in the future, we must broaden that path and raise awareness about what we do. We must have conversations with people outside of our little network and our little closed society.
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Johnson: Fundamentally, I don’t believe in this idea that “great architecture is universal and predetermined.” This idea comes from a very culturally specific frame and is not inclusive. Do I think a variety of designers and architects can design for a variety of communities? Yes, but I think you have to be empathetic. Your architecture shouldn’t change that community; that community should change your architecture.
You’re not trying to create the same object and pop it in every single place. As a designer, I need to be able to turn off my preconceptions and say, “What does this community really need?” If you have the capacity to do that, then yes, you have the ability to go into different communities. But if I’m coming from the place of just wanting to take what I’ve done in Minnesota and put that somewhere in Tanzania, that just doesn’t make sense.
Garrett: We’ve built a sort of service niche on engagement because it was being done so poorly by those who are not of the community, from the community. They don’t know how to talk with community. They’re intimidated by community. They want to have everything figured out and basically report back and tell a community what they’ve already done. So, there’s no dialectic there. There’s no give-and-take or any dialogue happening. They just grit their teeth, throw some stuff on the wall, take a few questions and eat some cookies, and they’re done. They’re like, “Okay, we don’t have to ever do that again on this project.” But us, no! We’re going to engage early and often, and we’re going to engage comprehensively, because we want to learn.
We don’t have all the answers, right? We believe that the people who we’re trying to serve—those who are going to be the end users of spaces—have the answers, and it’s our job to come up with pertinent questions that elicit the types of responses that can give architecture life.
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Garrett: We grew up here [Garrett in St. Paul and Johnson in Minneapolis]. These are our people. These are our neighborhoods. We understand density and diversity and cultural context. That’s the first language that Nathan and I and our other partner, Eric, learned in being part of a culture, a city, a community, and a neighborhood. And we never left. We all still live in the cities we grew up in.
If we don’t have enough people from diverse neighborhoods represented in our field to do the work, then we have to develop and grow that, and mentor and train, and invite people in so that they can help interpret their own culture, their own communities. They can help us translate their lived experiences into architecture.
Johnson: James and I are not singular. We’re not unicorns. We’re not the only Black practitioners or practitioners of color. We have stood on the shoulders of giants here in Minnesota. Our legacy is not just us. There are a lot of architects and designers of color within this community that created the space and place for us, and there are going to be a lot more after us that we’re hopefully creating some space and place for.
The Gold Medal award is much bigger than us. There are so many other designers of color—Black, brown, Indigenous people in this community—that can do great work. There are more to come.