Mabel O. Wilson-BUILDING ADVOCACY : WHO BUILDS YOUR ARCHITECTURE?

As an ongoing advocacy project, Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) asks architects and allied fields to better understand how the production of buildings connects their practices to migrant construction workers who build their designs. WBYA?, a group of architectural designers, scholars, and activists based in New York City, has extensively researched the networks, modes representations, and processes of the global architecture and construction industry. Through exhibitions, publications, workshops and public forums, WBYA? seeks to inform the design disciplines and professions of the importance of developing an ethical response to critical matters of human sustainability. MABEL O. WILSON is a Professor of Architecture, a co-director of Global Africa Lab (GAL) and the Associate Director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. She's currently writing Building Race and Nation a book about how slavery influenced early American civic architecture. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She is a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She was recently one of twelve curators contributing to MoMA's current exhibition "Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Architecture." She's a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide and whose work was most recently shown in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago.