Hospitality Design - August 2020 - 20

Mr Meng Chongqing Gourmet in London by
Holloway Li flaunts bold green tones

A canopy of flowers infuses a sense of nature in
London's spa and café hybrid Linnaean, a collaboration
between Holloway Li and Martin Brudnizki

to breathe life, context, and experience into
stale anecdotes and best practices, we can view
monumental design problems through a betterfitting lens."

Do the Work

"We have to find a
way to put resources
back into these
communities."
- Kimberly Dowdell, HOK and NOMA

020

August 2020 hospitalitydesign.com

Perkins and Will has been at the forefront
of inclusivity for the better part of a decade
thanks to principal and director of global diversity
Gabrielle Bullock. Each office establishes a plan
that aligns with the firm-wide strategy, which is
tracked and measured through the firm's Progress
Tracker and Annual Diversity and Inclusion
Report. "We've been very good at looking at
gender in an inclusive culture, but race has always
been the one piece that was difficult for folks to
talk about," Bullock explains.
Approximately 2 percent of the nation's
architects are Black; at Perkins and Will 4
percent of its U.S. staff is Black. Bullock knows
that both the firm and the country can do better
and that now is the time to "double down on the
issue of racism and the disparities that creates.
We continue to evaluate our practice, processes,
and policies with an eye toward advancing Black
talent into leadership roles and to clearly recruit
more." For a long time, she points out, people
have thought that racism is a Black problem, but,
"we're the recipient of its impact. It's everybody's
problem, it's a humanity problem. The heavy
lifting must be on firms and organizations-all the
way down the line."
Other design firms are also implementing
changes. Gensler is partnering with historically

Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the
50 different cities where the firm has offices;
AvroKO is setting up diversity task forces in its
New York, San Francisco, London, and Bangkok
studios; and last year, FXCollaborative started
processing internship applications blindly. "We
scrubbed names, schools, and leveled the playing
field by limiting the ways our unconscious biases
could get in the way of identifying the most
compelling talent," Lee says. "We found a group
of young people who were driven and diverse.
Their schools were not from the pool of usual
academic suspects, and it confirmed that the
pipeline could be expanded easily, and that our
biases require active retraining and unlearning."
Na Li, cofounder and managing director
of the London design and architecture studio
Holloway Li, was born in China, but received
her architectural training in England, which she
considers a great advantage. Still, as a minority,
she "works especially hard to be seen, supported,
and heard in the industry," she says. Immersing
oneself in interior design can be an expensive
endeavor-not just the academic programs
it entails, but the traveling and experiences
necessary to bolster a burgeoning career. "Few
people from ethnic minority groups will ever
have the opportunity to be able to do all of this,
and their natural talent, which is the most
important ingredient, is missed," Li says. In
addition to scholarship and pipeline programs,
another way firms can help, Li suggests, is by
sponsoring design-focused trips and internships
for those students who need financial support.

Photos by AGNESE SANVITO and NICHOLAS WORLEY

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Hospitality Design - August 2020

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