Tuskegee University Professor Carla Jackson Visits Campus

By Meghan Dufresne, News Editor

Assistant Professor Carla Jackson from Tuskegee University visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in order to deliver three lectures and an informal question and answer session advocating diversity in the architecture curriculum. She visited Professor Kathryn Anthony's "Gender and Race in Contemporary Architecture" course on four occasions. She is also currently collaborating with Professor Anthony on an article looking into architecture education. Jackson's fifth presentation was part of the Feminist Scholarship Series at the gender and women's studies program.

One of her lectures chronicled the life and career of the first female African American land developer, Marie Therese Coincoin. Called 'the missing link' by Jackson, Coincoin owned Melrose Plantation, totaling 13,000 acres, in Louisiana before the Civil War. Coincoin had 10 children by a Frenchman, Claude Pierre Metoyer. One of their sons, Louis Metoyer, was the first Creole to attend the Beaux Arts School in Paris. Coincoin and her son, Louis, developed and built one of the first documented evidence of African and Creole style buildings in the United States. Jackson hopes to expose architecture students to diversity and changes that have taken place in the field over the years.

Professor Jackson herself is the first African American woman to be tenured in the department of architecture at Tuskegee University. Today there are still only seven African American women who are tenured faculty members teaching architecture in the United States. Jackson has studied architecture, fine art, and interior design. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in interdisciplinary arts and sciences with specializations in architecture studies, curriculum studies, and social and cultural anthropology. Her dissertation title is "Perception and Attitudes of Licensed African American Architects and Scholars in the U.S."

Professor Jackson received a $60,000 grant from NASA/Tuskegee University Partnership for her research from 1997 to 1999. Over the past 11 years, Jackson has taught a variety of architecture and liberal arts courses, including beginning design, architecture history, architecture presentation, architecture theory, art appreciation and man and his environment. Jackson also has experience working for firms such as Major Holland Architects and Associates, Tuskegee, Alabama; the Brown Design Group, Atlanta, Georgia; and Attorney Robert Thompson, Tuskegee, Alabama.

Currently, Jackson is developing a new cultural paradigm for coursework at Tuskegee University. She plans to create a new learning concentration for minority students in architecture, where students can express their knowledge, attitudes, and experiences in architecture from a cultural standpoint. Jackson looks forward to bringing diversity into the architecture curriculum through having actual architects, especially African American females, interactively discuss their experiences with students.