A recent gift from ALSC Architects created a cross-campus graduate course exploring the impact of infrastructural racism in east Pasco.
Thanks to a gift from ALSC Architects, a cross-campus course helped architecture and history graduate students learn the story of east Pasco’s racial history—a history that led to building decisions that still impact its residents.
Phil Gruen, professor in the School of Design and Construction in Washington State University’s Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture in Pullman, and Robert Franklin, assistant professor of history in the WSU Tri-Cities College of Arts and Sciences, co-taught the Pullman course, which culminated with a visit to east Pasco, one of the cities of the Tri-Cities region.
The spring 2024 course, Issues in Architecture (Architecture 542), examined how racism and discrimination shape the built environment in communities. After weeks of course readings and discussion about the marginalized populations of east Pasco, 21 architecture students and two history students from WSU Pullman spent a day-and-a-half in the Tri-Cities, where they encountered the “built” consequences of racism in east Pasco and met with community members.
The gift from ALSC Architects (Spokane) to establish the “School of Design and Construction Experiential Fund” covered the cost of travel (hotel, food, and transportation) for Pullman students and faculty for their day-and-a-half visit.
Acknowledging the importance of experiential learning for students, ALCS Architects was glad to donate to the School of Design and Construction, stating in their gift use agreement, “We have a proud history of hiring WSU graduates and appreciate the WSU academic programs that provide them with the basis for a successful architectural career.”
“The gift permitted the students the ability to meet with and hear from community members in east Pasco,” said Gruen. “Because of Pullman’s rural location, private funding is often needed to permit students the chance to confront ‘real life’ urban conditions and not just read about them. Tackling on-the-ground conditions by seeing them in person is part of our land-grant institution’s mission.”
The course was funded by a combination of private and government funding. Franklin and Gruen also received a Transformational Change Initiative (TCI) grant for advancing inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) through WSU, which paid for the course preparations. The WSU Center for Civic Engagement and the WSU School of Design and Construction also provided additional funding and support. Franklin also received a grant from the National Park Service that allowed him to hire three students from the class as 2024 summer interns to continue working on class projects that were part of National Park Service grant.
The course began in 2022, emerging from Franklin’s involvement in an earlier National Park Service grant to document histories of migration, segregation, and civil rights at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford, in the Tri-Cities.
Franklin, along with his colleague Robert Bauman, a professor of history at WSU Tri-Cities, used these histories, along with other research, in their second co-authored bookon Hanford history, Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region (WSU Press, 2020). Franklin is also the assistant director of the Hanford History Project, a Department of Energy-funded effort to preserve physical artifacts and archival material of the Hanford Site.
According to Bauman and Franklin, the Tri-Cities area during World War II faced a system of segregation similar to that of the Jim Crow South, a result of a combination of federal policy and racism of local white residents coupled with the racism of many recent Southern white migrants to the area from the Jim Crow South.
Not until after WWII in 1947 did President Truman desegregate the military. Prior to that, at Hanford, the work crews, the barracks, the mess halls, bathrooms, government housing, restaurants, businesses, and the neighborhoods were all segregated. Moreover, African Americans and Asians were forced to live in east Pasco, and for several decades, Kennewick was a sundown town, banning African Americans after dark.
But the idea for the Issues in Architecture course really materialized for Franklin when the city of Pasco announced it planned to close the Lewis Street Underpass, built to go under the train tracks that separated Pasco from east Pasco—literally the “wrong side of the tracks.”
That’s when Franklin contacted Gruen and said, “Phil, I have a project for us. Let’s teach architecture students who are going to go out in the world and practice, to look at underrepresented communities and at how architecture and infrastructure shapes those communities.”
While the underpass underscores past infrastructural racism of the area, it made Pasco businesses and services more accessible to those in east Pasco, as the trains that rolled across those tracks were often long and slow, sometimes taking 20 minutes to pass by. Even today those in east Pasco remain segregated by infrastructure decisions from long ago that created race barriers. East Pasco is not only separated by train tracks but also by US Highway 395, another example of infrastructure separating Latine and Black communities from the majority-white area to the west.
Both Franklin and Gruen wanted their students to consider examples of the built environment, the role Pasco’s infrastructure has played in furthering discrimination, and how that discrimination has contributed to east Pasco’s marginalization—the most disadvantaged area in the Tri-Cities.
The concepts learned in the classroom and on the trip were applied to student projects to bring east Pasco’s lesser-known history of racism and resistance to light, as well as illuminate how residents suffered from lack of investment, neglect, and discrimination—and how a built environment free from discrimination might create a better future. Over the course of the semester, students worked collaboratively on one of four projects:
- A digital walking tour of east Pasco, with drawings and maps identifying historical and community significance sites.
- Historical essays for the Hanford History Project, highlighting marginalized people, places, and stories of east Pasco that were previously unresearched and untold.
- Design proposals, including digital renderings, plans, and elevations, for new buildings and landscapes that address community needs in east Pasco.
- A story map, using geographic information systems (GIS) software, which places stories of significance in east Pasco within the broader history of the Tri-Cities region.
Before the study tour, Rae Hendricks, an architecture student originally from Richland, said she hadn’t connected the dots between the racial history of the Tri-Cities and modern architecture.
“As a future architecture professional, I hope to be the type of person who can speak about important topics that other people may be inclined to ignore due to their sensitive nature,” she said.
The students conducted a virtual presentation on April 12 this past spring to allow the community to provide input on the progress of each project. Franklin explained that this maintained the course’s priority of a “bottom-up” approach of listening to and learning from the community rather than a “top-down” approach where faculty dictate every measure of course content.
Though the students completed the course in May, the grant that Franklin received from the National Park Service allowed three of the students to work as paid summer interns with Hanford History Project, continuing to work in collaboration with Franklin on their projects—part of the grant deliverables that include a digital walking tour, essays, and a story map that will be unveiled on the National Park Service app and website for future public use.
“Without the funding, the students would have missed the opportunity to meet with east Pasco residents directly and hear about the long-standing issues of discrimination their community has faced over time,” said Gruen. “Students brought information they learned from the on-site visit into their final projects, and the faculty—and some of the students, as well—are now busy re-casting some of that information into publicly-accessible materials.”
The public can explore some of the work developed by students in the course online. Many of these projects, including the essays, are still in progress, as they are part of the work students are involved in to fulfill grant deliverables that the National Park Service will include on a new website.
To support the School of Design and Construction Experiential Fund, please contact Dana Sprouse in the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture at dana.sprouse@wsu.edu or at 253-987-5052.