Design with Love, At Home and In Community - with Katie Swenson

Written By Erin Peavey

Katie Swenson is a nationally recognized design leader, researcher, writer, and educator, and a Senior Principal at MASS Design Group. Katie and I explore how love can be a power to transform the world. Katie shares how she has learned to think about and practice designing with love, and how designers can use love to help dismantle systemic injustices.

Episode Show notes

(Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Erin: What's your earliest memory of being aware that built environments existed and how it can impact people?

Katie: I grew up in Bethesda, MD, about 2 miles from the border of Washington DC. My mom was an art historian and a tour guide at the Smithsonian, and I have a distinct memory of the monumentality of DC. My parents were actually engaged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The understanding about aspiring civic architecture and in many ways, in contrast to the residential quality of the suburban neighborhoods in which we live, made a big impact on me. My family moved to Boston when I was ten and Boston is of course, a very granular kind of a city. I lived in the suburbs but went to school in Fenway and used to row in the Charles River. I think seeing the city from the water, especially in the afternoons, the early Boston sunsets and watching the city in the light, twinkling, was one of the most sublime experiences.

In High School, I started to volunteer at Rosie's Place, a shelter for homeless women in the South End neighborhood of Boston. I think so much now about the terms we use in the Community development field. We talk about housing security and housing insecurity. It sounds a little bit clinical, but that reality of the difference between the two could not be more profound. Without a home, everything else falls apart and I think for me, the disparity between my conception of home, the home that I had the privilege, and to this day have the privilege of experiencing, and the reality of homelessness or housing insecurity was really jarring. I think it was somewhere in that dislocation that my core commitments were really born.

Erin: Talk with us about your current role at MASS and your personal path to becoming an architect, writer, and community development expert?

Katie: I would say I have children, who are in their early 20s and I try to remind them that in some ways my career, which has been so incredibly robust, got a late start. After high school, I went from Boston out to UC Berkeley. I majored in comparative literature, and then I got to spend a year in Paris, where I also got to walk the city and soak in that urban form. I also started to dance at Berkeley and upon graduation, I moved to New York and for the next six years in my early 20s, I danced as a modern dancer. I was also engaged in larger and smaller design projects in the city. Then, I went to architecture school at the University of Virginia. That was a major turning point for me, of course, to be able to harness this other passion of mine.

After UVA, I became a member of the second class of the Enterprise Rose Fellowship Program and that was a fundamental moment in my career. This fellowship is essentially an effort to partner designers with community-based development corporations. I got to participate in a generational movement around public interest design and design centers at the time. I started at design Center in Charlottesville, upon finishing the Rose Fellowship. Then, I came back to Enterprise to lead the fellowship. That story is really told in Design with Love. My work there at the beginning was to make the case about why design matters. Why is design important in affordable housing and community development and then just fuel the field with the thought, leadership, and tools to integrate design into community development. Lastly, it was to flood the field with designers. Both Rose Fellows and others brought really an attitude and a set of capabilities about how to design in partnership with communities.

Back in 2010, as leader of the Rose Fellowship, I was with a group of the fellows at Structures for Inclusion, a conference that used to be held annually to bring together public interest designers. It was at Howard University and I met Michael Murphy there. As the Buttaro hospital was under construction, I felt like I was seeing the future of the public interest design movement take a major step forward, where MASS was taking on projects of both larger ambitions, theoretically and at scale. The core hypothesis at the time was the idea that buildings are never neutral; they either hurt or they heal. It has been exciting to see MASS, live into that question and come to this place of proof, where we understand its implications.

I joined the team in February of 2020, and it had been a dream for me to come on full time at MASS. It was at the same time as COVID-19 hitting, which in many ways has solidified that core commitment about why our buildings matter, and how do they affect our health and well being. So, as a Senior Principal, I am in charge of leading the advancement in narrative team designing the practice of MASS in our ability to pursue seminal work and develop our narrative is key. I also work within our affordable housing practice and then my love of mentorship and education also gets me involved in helping, to try to create a learning organization at MASS.

Erin: Can you unpack what you meant when, in Design with Love, you said, “I naively thought that design could be the answer … it was my mistake to think that design by itself could solve a problem, without recognizing that it takes people, joining together and using many tools, including design, to support their community...I realized this job didn’t require me to be an expert, it required me to be humble and a facilitator”?

Katie: There has been a lot of questioning, certainly over my tenure in the field the last 20 years, about the role of architecture and architects within the profession. There has been a critique of architects as service providers. It means that architects essentially serve those who call, pick up the phone, respond to a request, and to paying clients. However, both MASS Design and the Rose Fellowship are organized to serve those who may not be able to pay. People who may not readily assume that designers are what they need. I think within that larger framework, it's really important to remember that designers are always working in service to our partners and also working in service to the broader societal goals that a project or partner presents.

Erin: What do you feel about our commitment to thinking about the broader community and their intrinsic need to be heard?

Katie: In architecture, we prioritize the core structural and physical safety of the building. Although one could argue in the age of Corona virus that the safety of the buildings has not heretofore been made to include the quality of the error and protection of safe breathing air for residents. We've even in some ways fallen short of the physical safety of the building. How can we really understand who we are as architects, if we are not necessarily creating the aspiration and a metric to evaluate the dignity of the spaces that we are creating as a core competency of a building.

Erin: What has shaped your understanding of architecture and design's role in dismantling systemic injustice rather than contributing?

Katie: In 2001, when I entered into the community development field for the first time as a Rose Fellow, I knew that I wanted to be a part of helping people in poor neighborhoods. However, I did not understand why things were the way they were, and further I would say there was a lot of misinformation out there around what was called Broken Window syndrome. It has been a learning journey for all of us and I was lucky to be able to work with April Disimone from ‎designing the WE and co-teach a seminar with her called Undesign the Red Line.  

There are federal, state, local governments and banks that had participated in racially discriminatory housing policies that included where redlining was a system to evaluate neighborhoods by the characteristics of their inhabitants. Essentially areas were designated blue, green, yellow, and red, and people who lived in neighborhoods that were deemed blue or green were able to have access to credit and mortgages. The trick is that those neighborhoods were White and had racial covenants on them that prevented people of color from moving into those neighborhoods, and so they were deemed safe for investment. Yellow neighborhoods were called ‘in transition’ and red neighborhoods were not safe for investment. The neighborhoods were deemed to have detrimental influences and thus were not safe for investment.

Erin: What do you see as a role of White designers in serving communities of color?

Katie: Sadly, there is no pat answer to this, and we are all learning. I was reading The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward, and in her introduction, she writes that race in the US is not a tiny matter. It brings up a couple of points. The first is understanding how heavily the past bears on our present and our future. So, I think the first thing that White designers, and all designers need to do is to really understand history in a much more precise way. Another thing that she brings up is the exhaustion of the moment for people of color, recognizing how the exuberance of this moment around dialogue is also triggering of deep trauma. So how do we, as allies and accomplices understand what is the work that we have to do.

Erin: What do you see that designers and city policymakers are both getting wrong and getting right?

Katie: Writing Design with Love was a long journey, but one of those seminal moments was meeting with the Rose Fellows in October of 2016, in San Francisco. There became a conversation around the divide between urban and rural. In many ways, the fellows who were working in rural communities, told us that we have no idea what rural America is really like. They were essentially saying, do not stereotype us. In fact, there is a whole set of issues that are going on. So, I think we are getting a lot of the stereotypes wrong, and they are really starting to breakdown our trust and aspiration for each other. I hope that Design with Love starts to take you on a tour of just a fraction of the America that I have gotten to see, visiting probably 90 communities across the country, where invariably there are a lot of things that are also going right. I think there is a lot of good news out there that does not make it to the primetime news.

 I have had this incredible privilege of being able to get to know Rose Fellows and their community partners on the ground. They are the experts in their own stories. There is beyond a shadow of a doubt, but one of the things that I had had exposure to was that I have gotten to know the connective tissues that was in between them. So, I felt like this wonderful opportunity to be able to write about this from a perspective, from seeing a number of communities. I worked hard to make sure that it was the voices and stories of the people on the ground, who were telling their own stories and participated in the editing of those stories and reviewing and feedback.

Erin: How do you see the role of love in design and why do you think it is so important?

Katie: I was just rereading bell hooks’ (i.e., author Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks) book called All About Love, and in the first chapter she says let's go ahead and define ‘love’. She also makes this point that so many of us are taught to believe that the mind and not the heart, is the seat of learning. We think that to speak of love with any kind of emotional intensity, will mean it will be perceived as weak or irrational. bell hooks defines love as ‘the will to nurture our own and another spiritual growth’, and with that she makes the point that therefore love, and abuse cannot coexist. Similarly, when Martin Luther King talks about The Beloved Community, he is building on a larger tradition around loving The Beloved Community, but he did not see it necessarily as a utopian idea or an idea of heaven. He thought that it was real and could be achieved in our human world. In The Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. If bell hooks is saying that love and abuse cannot coexist, then Martin Luther King is saying is saying racism and all forms of discrimination cannot exist in The Beloved Community.

Erin: Do you think now is the time, if it had not already been the time to really question, are utter logic and an absence of emotion really our core goals?

Katie: The mechanisms of what makes life worth living, and there is a hierarchy of needs like shelter, for example. We also need ideas of identity as importantly. Issues around how our built environment can contribute to and contributes our senses of our physical safety, needs and spiritual needs. The book presents communities, some of whom are quite clear about the spiritual underpinnings. It does not have to be a faith tradition, but the underpinnings of our aspirations and aspirational selves, or sense of how we see the world. Throughout the book, these kind of core commitments to our interdependence and understanding of the world are connected. That is meant to fundamentally create our sense of self and our place in it. It allows us, in turn, to be aspirational ourselves in our lives, and what propels us is cultural.

Erin: Could you tell us about the Franklin Square Project and what made it special??

Katie: I would say it is important to know that the that photographer, Harry Connolly is from Baltimore. He has been a partner in the Kirby Lane Park project, and you will see so many of photos and daily interaction on that chapter. That was one of the chapters that I rewrote with the leadership of Donald Quarles, who is the community leader and a hero of this story. Donald is quite clear that when we talk about cities, the first thing to talk about is not their negative attributes. We need to understand the power of places. He starts out by saying that there are good things happening in Baltimore. He's really intent on drawing energy to the positive momentum. Now we all know that there are also very bad things that are going on in Baltimore and the systemic underpinnings have everything to do with that. In the 1930s, Baltimore got a head start with race-based zoning practices. As far as back as 1910, and that has perpetuated into the fabric of the city, which have created neighborhoods that do not have the kind of amenities and some of the core elements of safety.

The story in Baltimore is much about the Franklin Square Neighborhood Association organizing and pulling together under Donald's incredible leadership. It is also a story about Donald and Rose Fellow Daniel Greenspan, who represents humility and empathy. Their partnership helped Donald raise his aspirations. There were some empty lots, which used to be homes and those homes had been left to abandonment and then torn down. The sites were left with some rubble and then were used as dumping ground because that was allowed. The first energy behind what became the Kerby Lane was to stop the dumping. When Daniel and Donald first met through the Celebration Church and community in the neighborhood, he decided to build a fence. As Donald so accurately points out, good things lead to the next good thing. He started to wonder what does it mean for a community to have an architect, a builder and a partner on the team. Their aspirations started to grow and then they started to talk about the idea of building a park and a safe space in the neighborhood.

I think of this kind of incredible leadership from the community. It also points to the humble, and incredibly helpful role of a designer, who was also able to not only help draw, envision, test, and iterate the idea but also be a vision lens and help navigate the city systems and bolster the ability of the community group.   

Erin: How is the community navigating the pandemic and how the park has been potentially serving them.?

Katie: I think the pandemic has made things really clear. Home is something that matters, if we did not know it before, we certainly know it now. Home is the unit of build form that we need more than anything, and the second is garden. We need the safety and shelter of our homes to not only live, but also go to school, work and exercise. We also need these outdoor spaces more than ever. Kerby Lane Park has put rules and regulations around mask wearing and safety in place.  

Erin: Can you tell us a bit about your book ‘In Bohemia’ and what it meant to you?

Katie: When we set out, trying to start and scope out Design with Love, about how to approach the bulk, our travel schedule, and ideas. It was Harry and I, with our colleagues at Enterprise and Fellows. Then, in May of 2017 my partner, my fiancé, died very suddenly, completely unexpectedly of a fatal heart attack. We were to be married two months later. It stopped the presses for me. One of the responses that I was so incredibly lucky to have found was writing. About 10 days after his death, I started writing and I didn't stop. I was not writing about anything; I was just writing to save my life. It became a deep personal investigation into the nature of love. Love is about that larger commitment that we talked about earlier, but there is a transformative power of love that is unlike any other fact. I don't know any other, either emotion, economic stimulus or building design, which can have the same transformative power of love.

When I come back to work, to understand and reflect on the work that I have been involved with for so many years. I came to understand the work of the Rose Fellows differently through that lens. I do not think the book would have been called Design with Love, if it were not for this experience.

Erin: What's the one thing that you wish people knew around designing to foster that connection and belonging that we would use to inform our design decisions?

Katie: Both of these books are about love and home. I think those are two key critical concepts that people will take away. The criticality and importance of home that provides a platform for all of us that we need.  We can then take that commitment through love into a housing policy and an attitude, that we bring into both architecture and design, but also into all of our larger national core policies. One to take away is an understanding that we are all aspiring to be able to bring our most aware selves, but we fall short. Our job is to try to pay attention and live up to being a ready partner with others in developing these quality relationships that will create the quality of the work.

 We hope this episode can inspire and empower you to use Love and Design as forces for positive change.

If you want to find out more about Katie and her work at MASS Design, Enterprise Communities, and more, check out the links below:

Erin Peavey https://erinpeavey.com
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