Detroit Free Press du lieu suivant : Detroit, Michigan • Page 55

on real change U-M architecture professor brings a world view and startling new angles to the profession By John Gallagher Free Press Business Writer society judged people solely by their brains, talents and energies, University of Michigan professor Sharon Sutton would have had an easy life. But being born a black female on the Sharon Sutton, professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, brings aspects of environmentalism, feminism, a agenda and the civil rights movement into her thinking and teaching about architecture. 8LJk r1 i I 1 if Kentucky border during the Jim Crow era presented a few roadblocks. Well, maybe more than a few. So many, in fact, that her later achievements among others, being the first black woman in the United States to be named a full professor of architecture left her burning with an ambition to help others like herself.

Indeed, Sutton has built a sometimes controversial career at the University of Michigan's architectural school. Instead of pursuing the traditional path of teaching students to design buildings, she researches the more basic issues of her profession. Those issues involve society's power structure and the ways in which the architectural profession often promotes the status quo. "What I am describing," she says during a wide-ranging conversation about her views on power, society and justice, "is a no-one-in-charge, everybody-responsible society." Such an inclusive, egalitarian view doesn't win many adherents in an architectural profession long dominated by a handful of autocratic, mostly white male stars, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Philip Johnson. But Sutton, 53, who holds degrees in music, architecture, psychology and education, is practiced at overcoming obstacles.

Sutton was bom in Cincinnati in 1941 to a very religious mother who got her daughter into piano lessons. "A lot of black children get involved in music that way," she says. Later, at an academically rigorous school, she was required to play in the band and chose the smallest instrument available for free a French horn. "I talk like a French horn it's a very melancholic instrument," she says with a soft chuckle. The lessons woke an ambition in her.

"I lived and breathed music," she would say much later, "bathed in the sound of a stuffy symphony orchestra savored the smell of a musty concert hall looked forward to the taste of nervous sweat during a difficult performance." For a black child of that era, such a lofty ambition was all but beyond her reach. But she persevered, struggled with lessons, and at 16 filled in with the Dayton Symphony during a performance of Gustav Mahler that required extra French hornists. That encouraged her, but her initial audition for a major regional music school her tryout judged by a panel of "expressionless white men" went poorly. "They requested, for my first tune, an orchestral excerpt that begins on the next to the highest note on the instrument As you might imagine, things did not go well," she recalls. Her humiliating rejection was eased only with the help of a caring young music student, also an African American, who encouraged her to try out for the prestigious Manhattan School of Music in New York, where the more liberal air of Gotham might be more welcoming.

She won a full scholarship, but her. joy was tempered by the suicide of her fellow student, who wrote her in a farewell note that he could no longer endure living in a hostile racial situation. The experience gave Sutton a burning desire both to succeed and to help other people like herself, especially women and racial or ethnic minorities. She did succeed in New York. She went on to play in the orchestra for the Bolshoi and other ballets, and she played in the pit for Broadway hits like "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Man of La Mancha." During this period, in the 1960s, she was one of a number of women who took over abandoned properties in run-down sections of Manhattan.

Working virtually as squatters, they fixed up the properties into workable loft and studio space. The experience gave Sutton an interest in architecture and design; she later studied and taught architecture at both Pratt Institute and Columbia University in New York She came to the U-M faculty during the early '80s. Ann Arbor was far from her Manhattan haunts, and the place where she chose to buy property, in the tiny village of Dexter, a dozen miles west of Ann Arbor, was even more remote. But property was cheaper there and Sutton found, bought and renovated an old building into a studio and home. At U-M, she has used her professorship as a pulpit to preach "moral architecture," an all-embracing term that includes aspects of environmentalism, feminism, a child-centered agenda and the civil rights movement She's been a frequent critic of both the architectural establishment and the academic world.

DAYMON i. HARTLEY Detroit Free Press Both, she believes, are obsessed with the "star system," in which a handful of famous names, invariably those of white males, dominate affairs. Instead, Sutton contends, architectural design and education must be a collaborative process in which marginalized people like women and blacks have a say. "She's really looking out for the greater good, the common good, in terms of what architecture can do," says Linda Groat, also a U-M professor of architecture. A case in point A few years back, Sutton was chosen to lead a design studio for advanced students.

Normally, a professor will choose a hypothetical project say, an art museum or a private residence and each student will spend weeks creating his or her private design. Sutton posed a different, not entirely welcome, alternative: to study a real neighborhood in Detroit and, working as a team, not as individual designers, to create a prototype for low-income housing. Many students protested that it wasn't architecture. Some didn't like the idea of working together. Several sought the more glamorous work inherent in a traditional design studio.

But half a dozen students took up her challenge. Sutton led them down to the Islandview district on Detroit's east side near Belle Isle, where the Church of the Messiah is trying to rebuild the community with low-income housing projects. Sutton's students produced maps, surveys of vacant lots and other material that helped the church's nonprofit housing corporation plan projects. "We were very helped and very happy with that experience," says Richard Cannon, executive director of the housing corporation. Sutton travels extensively throughout the United States, teaching, lecturing, sharing her vision.

The big question now, Sutton says, is whether to stay in the DexterAnn Arbor area or move back to a big city, the sort of place that's more of a natural home for her. She was a finalist last year for the post of dean of architecture of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. That fell through, but she's recruited heavily by other schools looking for deans. "Can I be more useful as a free spirit who writes and teaches, or in trying to shape a school as an administrator?" she asks. It's a dilemma, especially when her current post at U-M permits her so much freedom to explore the issues important to her life.

"The job at Michigan gets better and better," she sighs, the sigh of a person who never has time enough for everything. "It gets harder and harder to leave." Sharon e. Sutton POSITION: Professor of architecture at University of Michigan. CAREER: Architect, educator, psychologist, musician. Once played in more than 1,000 performances of "Man of La Mancha" on Broadway.

ACCOMPLISHMENT: First African-American woman to be named a fufl professor of architecture in the United States. PERSONAL 53; born Cincinnati, Ohio; resides in Dexter in Washtenaw County. RECENT BOOK READ: "Power and the' Powerless" by Michael Parenti Business Monday Detroit Free Press October 17, 1994 5FB.