GRIOTS REPUBLIC - AN URBAN BLACK TRAVEL MAG - OCTOBER 2016

SKLAREK
The “Rosa Parks of Architecture”
By Alexis K. Barnes
If you were among the 74,937,004
passengers that traveled through
the Los Angeles International Airport
(LAX) in 2015, then you may
know Norma Merrick Sklarek - or at
least witnessed some of her work.
Her designs and supervision helped
create terminal 1, which opened just
in time for the 1984 Olympics. Perhaps
you visited the United States
embassy in Tokyo, Japan. She was a
part of that meticulous and modern
building as well.
A Harlem native, Sklarek’s professional
marks are left throughout
southern California and San Francisco
areas. Her hands helped bring
the brilliant blue glass siding of West
Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center,
better known as the Blue Whale, to
life. Her designs birthed the elevated
six-story San Bernardino City Hall
building and the 2.5 million square
foot fashion center known as California
Mart.
“Architecture should be working on
improving the environment of people
in their homes, in their places of
work, and their places of recreation.
It should be functional and pleasant,
not just in the image of the architect’s
ego,” Sklarek said in Brian Lanker’s
1989 book: I Dream a World: Portraits
of Black Women Who Changed
America.
The black architect lived a life of
“firsts.” She was one of only two
women in her 1954 graduating class
at Columbia University’s School of
Architecture. After 19 potential employees
turned her down, Sklarek
took a job at New York’s Department
of Works. She would later tell the
Palisadian Post in 2004 that employers
were not hiring women or African
Americans so she “didn’t know which
was working against me.”
She passed the four-day New York
state exam on her first try in 1954,
earning a license as the first African
American woman architect, then did
the same in California in 1962.
In 1980, the American Institute of Ar-