GRIOTS REPUBLIC - AN URBAN BLACK TRAVEL MAG - OCTOBER 2016
In the October Issue of Griots Republic we cover GLOBAL DESIGN! From interior to sound design we plug into the subjects that interest urban travelers. Black Travel Profiles include: Brooklyn Circus Founder, Ouigi Theodor. Up In Air Life Founder, Claire Soares. Fashion Influencer, Jason Andrew and Blogger A.V Perkins of A.V Does What. This issue also includes interviews with International D.J., DJ Super Nova and street artist and designer Jerry Gant. This is Black Travel!
In the October Issue of Griots Republic we cover GLOBAL DESIGN! From interior to sound design we plug into the subjects that interest urban travelers. Black Travel Profiles include: Brooklyn Circus Founder, Ouigi Theodor. Up In Air Life Founder, Claire Soares. Fashion Influencer, Jason Andrew and Blogger A.V Perkins of A.V Does What. This issue also includes interviews with International D.J., DJ Super Nova and street artist and designer Jerry Gant. This is Black Travel!
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SKLAREK<br />
The “Rosa Parks of Architecture”<br />
By Alexis K. Barnes<br />
If you were among the 74,937,004<br />
passengers that traveled through<br />
the Los Angeles International Airport<br />
(LAX) in 2015, then you may<br />
know Norma Merrick Sklarek - or at<br />
least witnessed some of her work.<br />
Her designs and supervision helped<br />
create terminal 1, which opened just<br />
in time for the 1984 Olympics. Perhaps<br />
you visited the United States<br />
embassy in Tokyo, Japan. She was a<br />
part of that meticulous and modern<br />
building as well.<br />
A Harlem native, Sklarek’s professional<br />
marks are left throughout<br />
southern California and San Francisco<br />
areas. Her hands helped bring<br />
the brilliant blue glass siding of West<br />
Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center,<br />
better known as the Blue Whale, to<br />
life. Her designs birthed the elevated<br />
six-story San Bernardino City Hall<br />
building and the 2.5 million square<br />
foot fashion center known as California<br />
Mart.<br />
“Architecture should be working on<br />
improving the environment of people<br />
in their homes, in their places of<br />
work, and their places of recreation.<br />
It should be functional and pleasant,<br />
not just in the image of the architect’s<br />
ego,” Sklarek said in Brian Lanker’s<br />
1989 book: I Dream a World: Portraits<br />
of Black Women Who Changed<br />
America.<br />
The black architect lived a life of<br />
“firsts.” She was one of only two<br />
women in her 1954 graduating class<br />
at Columbia University’s School of<br />
Architecture. After 19 potential employees<br />
turned her down, Sklarek<br />
took a job at New York’s Department<br />
of Works. She would later tell the<br />
Palisadian Post in 2004 that employers<br />
were not hiring women or African<br />
Americans so she “didn’t know which<br />
was working against me.”<br />
She passed the four-day New York<br />
state exam on her first try in 1954,<br />
earning a license as the first African<br />
American woman architect, then did<br />
the same in California in 1962.<br />
In 1980, the American Institute of Ar-