Sharon Sutton

When Ivory Towers Were Black (2017) tells the story of a real experiment and its reversal. Between 1968 and 1972 Columbia University's architecture school deliberately admitted a large cohort of Black and Latino students, changed the curriculum to work in Harlem and with its residents, and produced a generation of professionals trained in the neighbourhood. A decade later the programme had vanished and the numbers were back where they started.

Sutton does not write as a spectator: she was one of those students. The book combines her experience with archival research and interviews, and explains the mechanism of the rollback, which was not an announced decision but an accumulation of budget cuts, shifting priorities and apparently neutral admissions criteria. Her argument is that the composition of the profession determines what gets built and for whom.

Born in 1941, Sutton was among the first African American women to be licensed as an architect in the United States and the first to reach full professor in the discipline. She is professor emerita at the University of Washington, where she directed the Center for Environment, Education and Design Studies, and previously taught at Michigan and Columbia. She was also a professional French horn player before becoming an architect.

Her other line of work is participatory design with children and teenagers. Learning Through the Built Environment (1985) proposes teaching schoolchildren to read and transform their surroundings, and Weaving a Tapestry of Resistance (1996) gathers years of workshops in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Sutton insists on a simple point: those who learn as children that space can be changed grow up asking to take part.