The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) 2025 national conference, Future Unfolding, held October 8–12 in Kansas City, Missouri, convened 1,400 professional and student members. The conference highlighted the growing impact of architects and designers of color through conversations, workshops, and events centered on equity and innovation in the built environment. In his keynote address, 2025–2026 NOMA President Bryan C. Lee Jr., emphasized the importance of reaffirming NOMA’s founding mission to serve architects of culture while confronting external pressures to scale back diversity initiatives. Lee urged members to harness their collective creativity and will to build a more just and liberated future for all communities.
Following his keynote Lee wrote this opinion piece, an adaptation of the speech he delivered at the conference:
In the absence of an affirmative counter to the challenges we face, we are bound to repeat the very harms we seek to undo. This is why I see design as protest. Protest, much like design, requires an unyielding faith in the power and potential of a just society. It insists that no challenge is too big to confront or too small to deserve our attention.
Whitney M. Young Jr. reminded us decades ago: “It didn’t just happen… it was carefully planned.” The segregation we resist was planned. The disinvestment in our communities was planned. The spatial violence etched into our cities was planned. So too must liberation be planned.
Writer Paula Gunn Allen said the root of oppression is the loss of memory. If that is true, then the root of liberation is the relentless making and preservation of memory—in language, in stories, in place, and in culture. Memory is momentum.
Our society stands at an inflection point, as does NOMA. NOMA—and our wider professions’ strength—lies in our diversity—architects, planners, designers, students, and allied professionals. Yet we face real and pressing challenges, including communication gaps between national and local leadership in how design can aid communities, external attacks from anti-DEI efforts, and a profession still too often silent on issues of justice. Whitney Young also said: “The crisis is not in our cities… The crisis is in our hearts, the kind of human beings we are.” Our problem is not a lack of skill or resources. It is a lack of will.
NOMA was born to address the specific barriers confronting Black architects in America. This work is not done in a silo, or by one audience only. That mission remains vital. But as we grow, we must create unapologetic, nonjudgmental space for all marginalized voices in our profession. This is not dilution—it is clarity. The same systems that designed redlining built detention centers at our borders. The same logic that dispossessed Indigenous people fuels the environmental racism poisoning our neighborhoods today.
Multiculturalism cannot remain a slogan. It must be a practice—one where Spanish, French Creole, Chinese, and every language our members speak finds a home. Where lived experience is a source of knowledge. Where we evolve from a “clan culture” to a truly collaborative one.
To aid this NOMA is committed to strengthening the foundation of the organization, which includes mentorship pipelines, and ensuring every member knows not just what they receive from NOMA, but what they contribute. We will partner strategically with organizations that advance our values. At NOMA’s conference, we vow to catalyze change. That means mentor-mentee showcases, business exchanges, sessions on emerging practice, and legacy projects that extend impact beyond hotel walls. It means convenings that build power. We will speak plainly about barriers in education, practice, and community engagement. We’ll push for curricula that reflect global perspectives, support small and emerging firms navigating complex systems, and address language, safety, and resource inequities in community planning. We will not wait for institutions to grow a conscience.
The work is not only about resistance. Malcolm X reminded us that revolutions are about claiming space. We stand with the landless—with those whose disconnection from place is systemic and deliberate.
But resistance must be paired with creation. That means divesting from prisons, hostile architecture, and over-policing—and investing in community-led planning, truly affordable housing, preserved cultural spaces, and dignified labor practices. It means returning land to Indigenous and dispossessed communities, defending water sovereignty, and transitioning away from extractive energy systems.
Design is a language. Stories are its sentences. Culture is its truth. Cities, neighborhoods, and blocks hold our narratives, our creativity, our futures. For people of culture in America, power lives in the places that honor our stories, celebrate our heritage, and value our lives. That is not only good design. That is justice.
At the 1968 AIA convention, Whitney Young said: “It took a great deal of skill and creativity and imagination to build the kind of situation we have, and it is going to take skill and imagination and creativity to change it.”
We have that skill. We have that creativity. We have that imagination. What we need now is will. The call to action is to dismantle oppressive systems by design, and just as importantly, have the courage to dream and build what liberation requires.
Design Justice gives us the frameworks to challenge privilege and power. It enables racial, social, and cultural liberation. It demands we transform our practice, our pedagogy, and our understanding of what architecture can be.
We are not just architects. We are protesters, advocates, organizers, visionaries. We carry the clarity of Whitney Young, the revolutionary commitment of Malcolm X, and Paula Gunn Allen’s truth that memory fuels liberation.
We are the future of design. Together, we will build the just city—not as a destination, but as an ongoing practice of creating the conditions for collective flourishing. Now is the time.
Bryan C. Lee, Jr. is president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA); founder and director of Colloqate Design, a New Orleans– and Portland, Oregon–based practice; a licensed architect and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects; and a lecturer at Harvard GSD.
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