Designer Maya Bird-Murphy wants kids to know about architecture. She grew up surrounded by Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and her own youth was steeped in the lessons of good design. Local summer camps and field trips to Prairie-style homes gave her the opportunity to consider a career in reshaping the future of our cities. As one of the few people of color in her undergraduate program at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, however, she had a realization: Design as a career wasn’t so visible to everyone.

In 2017, Bird-Murphy founded Chicago Mobile Makers to change that. The nonprofit provides low-cost programming to schools in and around the city, where young people 8 to 18 are exposed to the world of design with skill-building workshops and real-world architectural challenges. Now, she’s taking her project on the road. Bird-Murphy has turned a Postal Service truck into a roving classroom to deliver similar programs straight to neighborhoods all around Chicago.

We spoke with her about where she started, why it’s so important to introduce kids to design, and how she hopes to influence the next generation of architects.

What sent you down this career path?

I grew up in Oak Park, which is the home of Frank Lloyd Wright everything. So I was immediately exposed to architecture. He’s like one of our celebrities. Oak Park even likes to take Prairie style and co-opt it in different ways. Our little street flags and signs looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright design. Subconsciously, I was drinking all that in.

How did you decide to form Chicago Mobile Makers?

When I was studying design in Muncie as an undergrad, I became aware that my experience growing up was pretty different from most kids’. We never spoke about designers of color, and it was kind of like, “Oh, they must not exist.” If you’re a person of color, and you arrive in that kind of environment, there’s a good chance you’re going to drop out, which multiple people did in my year. I knew that architecture education needed to change.

Bird-Murphy sits at the classroom’s workstation. The truck’s interior features birch plywood finishes, large windows, recessed lighting, and floors made of marmoleum—a natural composite that is both durable and sustainable." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Tom Harris" photoUserId="6661949394915409920"/>

How is Mobile Makers helping that?

The programming that I do is very different from what we were learning at architecture school. I make sure to talk about designers of color, and the prompts are always about solving a social issue.

We were just at a high school on the Northwest Side, and it’s near an intersection where a shopping center with a Sears once anchored the community. Now it’s just a huge hole. So we did an eight-week program where the high schoolers told us what they wanted to see in their community. We go through the entire design process with them, and at the end, they make a proposal.

“If you don’t grow up seeing great architecture, how can you know you want to be an architect?”
—Maya Bird-Murphy

What did the students come up with?

One proposal was a medical clinic with a lot of green space and a courtyard, and it was really beautifully designed. The students decided on that use because there are no clinics anywhere near that intersection. It’s really awesome at the end to have these proposals that are very realistic and very thoughtful.

Why orient the programming around social issues?

At Ball State, a teacher gave us a prompt to design a public space for a real neighborhood close to Detroit. Most of the students acted like it was a blank slate and just bulldozed the area as if nobody was there. And proposals like those were common and accepted. My partner and I decided we were going to save the trees and turn it into a community hub. Nobody liked it because it wasn’t flashy or slick. That mentality has changed a little bit since, but design education needs to be different, and it needs to be more diverse.

What are the next steps for Chicago Mobile Makers?

Now that the truck is done, we want to expand by creating a hub where multiple trucks could provide workshops in architecture and design, construction, and digital fabrication all at once. By expanding, we hope to create more designers, thinkers, makers, and doers who are civically engaged. We hope to create people who are really motivated and passionate about making change in their own communities.

Design is such an expansive field. But people try to put parameters around it and act as gatekeepers. Young people should know that they can follow their own path.

—

Head back to the September/October 2020 issue homepage