Sharon Egretta Sutton: Building Change From Within
In her practice, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Architecture Sharon Egretta Sutton has always aimed to provide more than just shelter. “Architecture can either enhance or compromise the well-being of individuals and communities,” Dr. Sutton says, “depending upon whether its affordances align with their needs, capacities, cultural identities, and memories.”
Sutton holds degrees in architecture, music, philosophy, and psychology. She is a recipient of a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects’ New York and Seattle chapters and was the first African American woman in the United States to be promoted to full professor in an accredited professional degree program in architecture. Threaded through her multifaceted career as an architect, writer, educator, lecturer, and fine artist is a commitment to calling out injustice and creating social change, often by working against the grain. Sutton is currently doing just that by lecturing at universities on the need to prepare students to become agents of change rather than just serving as workers in a global economy. And at Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments, she helps students develop changemaking capacities in a graduate housing seminar and design studios emphasizing collaborative work.
Sutton’s teaching draws on insights shared in her forthcoming book, A Pedagogy of Hope: Pursuing Democracy’s Promise Through Place-Based Activism. In it, she describes three community-based programs devised to help low-income teenagers “develop the agency to tackle the injustices in their neighborhoods, one through theater, another through organic farming, and a third through critical inquiry.” Sutton challenges her students to take a similarly socially critical approach to fostering urban resilience and equity through design. Her hope is that students come away with an awareness that “a healthy city is a just city, one that promotes equal opportunity and economic equality.”
