From popsicle sticks to social justice: The evolution of NOMA's Project Pipeline at 20

What would it be like for students who typically aren’t exposed to architecture—let alone architects who look like them—to be introduced to design at an early age?

The National Organization of Minority Architects, or NOMA, created a program to answer this question. The original Project Pipeline summer camp was started in NOMA's South West Ohio chapter in Cincinnati in 2006 by David Kirk, AIA, NOMA; Michaele Pride, AIA, NOMA; and Drake Dillard, AIA, NOMAC. Project Pipeline is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and is on track to host over one thousand 6th-through-12th-grade students in 2026. 

"The longevity is because of the local chapters,” says Tiffany Brown, Assoc. AIA, NOMA, NOMA’s executive director. The camps, which provide students of color with the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of architecture and design, have expanded to include programs in 40-plus cities around the country.  

NOMA’s current president Bryan Lee, FAIA, NOMA, became involved with shaping Project Pipeline’s curriculum in 2012. 

“It was very introductory, very rudimentary—a marshmallows and popsicle sticks type of camp,” Lee says of the camps’ earliest iterations. “By 2012, I was working with about eight people here in New Orleans to develop a curriculum that we were calling ‘social justice through design education.’ We spent nearly six months developing a curriculum that shifted a ‘popsicles and marshmallows camp’ into something that had some teeth to it.”

The importance of this shift, Lee says, was two-fold: to set Project Pipeline apart from other camps, and to make the camps more community-focused.  

“One of the things I used to say very early on in the camps was: It doesn’t matter whether or not you become an architect, but it does matter that you have spatial understanding, and that you understand how the spaces you live in will impact your life in the future,” he says. “Our purpose is to teach people how to navigate space.” 

Lee served as the first official Project Pipeline chair on NOMA’s national board, starting in 2014, working with Tya Winn, AIA, NOMA; Oswaldo Ortega, AIA, NOMA; and Prescott Reavis, NOMAC, to implement a more structured curriculum that allowed the program to be scaled up in local chapters across the country. 

“It’s not simply a camp for kids now,” he says. “It is the definition of the framework for the entire process of kids getting through camp all the way to school.” Working with the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) and AIA, NOMA has plotted a path to support students from Project Pipeline all the way through to licensure exams.  

Brown, who worked at Smith Group and Hamilton Anderson Associates before joining NOMA full-time, says that she attended Detroit public schools and wishes that something like Project Pipeline existed when she was in school. In her work with her local chapter’s Project Pipeline camp, it’s been rewarding for her to teach students about key concepts that will prepare them to pursue an architectural education. 

“I went into my freshman year [of architecture school] never having seen an [architectural] scale, never having heard the term ‘elevation drawings’. If I can expose them to small things like that, that can make a world of difference as they go into any architecture school—just knowing some basic technical skills and terminology. That’s the part I enjoy most.”  

Lee, similarly, says that this work is so important to him because he didn’t have access to this type of program when he was a student. “I didn’t have any of this,” he says. “I didn’t have answers to the curiosity that was bubbling in my mind for a very long time.” 

Lee emphasizes that the term “design justice”— which now is understood in the architectural lexicon as a framework that rethinks design processes to center people marginalized by oppressive systems—originated in the Project Pipeline curriculum. “We kept saying that we were trying to do social justice through design education,” he says. The evolution of this idea has informed a great deal of the work of NOMA and allied organizations like Dark Matter U in the time since. 

Much like the profession, Project Pipeline is continuing to grow and evolve. During the pandemic, Project Pipeline hosted virtual camps and has continued to provide online resources, including gaming options, to students. And, if students participate in Project Pipeline for multiple years, NOMA hopes to cement arrangements with architecture schools to provide credit for the knowledge that students have already gained.  

Lee stepped away from Project Pipeline in TK to focus on the larger systemic issues impacting the professional pipeline to architecture.  

“Even after serving thousands of students, the numbers haven’t changed in the field,” Lee says. (According to AIA’s latest demographic report, out of AIA’s nearly 100,000 members, just 1,195 identified as African American or Black; 3,068 identified as Hispanic/Latino; and 107 identified as Middle Eastern/North African.) “I wanted to focus on some of the things that would break down the barriers within the systems so that the effectiveness of the program had a pathway.”

Lee says that his involvement with Project Pipeline is “one of the best things I’ve ever participated in in my life.”  

“Some of my students have now graduated and are practicing, and it’s really amazing to see them from sixth, seventh, eighth grade, and see how far they’ve been able to journey,” he says. “A lot of those stories, I think, are really, really special.”  

Katherine Flynn is AIA's director, digital content.