Metropolis - January Sample 2008

OBSERVED
government
planning
process

Shop Talk
Former NEA design director Jeff Speck talks
with Maurice Cox, the architect recently selected
to succeed him.

At last year’s Aspen Design Summit you presented a project that completely captivated the audience.

That was Bayview village, an initiative started in 1996, in which my office worked closely with a community of rural poor on the eastern shore of Virginia to create a counterproposal to a maximum-security prison that was planned for their neighborhood as economic development.

Were they being displaced?

Worse, they were on the verge of being stigmatized for the rest of their existence. They fought this prison very effectively over a three-year period, and once the governor backed away from this plan, they were left with the question, What now?

I can’t say that I didn’t see it coming. When my phone rang and the caller ID said “Metropolis,” there was little doubt what was next. The day before, Maurice Cox—architect, educator, and former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia—had been appointed director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts. Now a contributing editor of this fine magazine, I had recently stepped down after four years in that selfsame NEA job. Guess who they wanted to do the interview?

I accepted the assignment with pleasure. A firm believer in guilt by association, I had watched my empty desk with some anxiety over the selection of a replacement. And I had encouraged many talented and socially conscious designers to apply, Cox prominent among them. Now my reputation was secure! But were my programs? Time to ask some questions.

The NEA’s director of design oversees all of the grants that the agency gives in design, from graphic design to regional planning. He also steers three “leadership initiatives” that the NEA funds, all of which teach design skills to community leaders including mayors and, more recently, governors. As a federal appointment, the job carries its share of paperwork— and frustrations—but also provides the special satisfaction that comes from identifying those who are doing the most good and giving them cash to do more of it. Here is what Cox had to say about his new job and his path to Washington.

—Jeff Speck

And you volunteered to be the town planner and architect for these people? We worked pro bono as the community planners, and we assembled a team to address the larger issues of environmental and spatial justice. We brought in the Nature Conservancy to propose a grant, and won funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA grant enabled this community to become the planner, developer, and affordable-housing provider for its own rural village.

So now, a few years later, they’re living in nice homes. I remember the conclusion we reached in our working group. The theme of the conference was “Taking It to Scale”— repeating local successes globally. Our first thought was that we need more projects like this. But then we realized that what we really need are more Maurice Coxes. Because what you accomplished there required a tremendous amount of effort and was not scalable without the presence of people like you who are really going to take on huge challenges like this one.

Well, what’s needed in the design disciplines is a sense of urgency that these types of effort are the work of our profession. We need more designers that frame their work as socially relevant and, if necessary, politically charged. That is the larger challenge to designers: How do we make it a central part of our practice to serve communities that are not traditionally served by design?

So is that a particular challenge you hope to take on in your time at the NEA? Absolutely. The reality is that if design is going to become a relevant issue to the majority of Americans, we’re going to have to speak directly to them. Design is not a conversation that can be exclusive to the design community. continued on page 46