Tony Chase, son of John Chase, the first Black graduate of UT-Austin School of Architecture, has given the school a $1 million gift in the form of two permanent endowments in service of diversifying the field. One will provide pathways for graduates from historically Black colleges and universities for the master’s program in architecture, and another will recruit professors who “recognize inclusion, collaboration and diversity, and putting communities together,” as Chase puts it.
John Chase, who died in 2012, enrolled at UT in 1950 just after the Sweatt v. Painter decision opened the door to integrate the university; he went on to become the first licensed Black architect in Texas, designing homes, churches, and office buildings for the Black community concentrated on Austin’s Eastside. “I think architecture has an incredible impact on how societies evolve,” says Chase. “Architects that really focus on collaboration and bringing communities together are invaluable,” which is a key component of the professorship endowment; he stresses that it “doesn’t necessarily call for a professor of color, but rather someone that is really interested in promoting the concept of the built environment in a way that celebrates my father’s legacy.”
Meanwhile, the graduate recruitment endowment provides “a benefit to the HBCUs as much as it is a benefit to us,” says UTSOA Dean Michelle Addington. Both Chase and his wife graduated from HBCUs; he says, “The opportunity is also for students at UT to collaborate with underrepresented students that they might not otherwise.”
The school, one of the nation’s best, has been contemplating what Addington calls the “decolonization movement” in the field since at least 2016, when the Race and Gender in the Built Environment fellowship was established, which “strategically [brought] people to the school who were asking questions we hadn’t asked before,” she explains – questions centered on “who are we and whom do we serve?”
The endowments are a continuation of that spirit – “As opposed to saying, let’s have a topical area where everybody has to take the course in this, we’re now embedding people throughout our curriculum and building capacity in our regular faculty,” Addington continues. “Architecture, as it has been taught for 2,000 years, is wholly shaped and determined by its origins in Western Europe – it’s also our precedent for how we think about city design and urban design. That’s a very narrow understanding.”
Since implementing the fellowship, Addington says she’s seen progress already: “When [students] leave architecture school, [what] is most important to them is community engagement.” A decade ago that wouldn’t have been the case, she says; priorities are shifting toward public service and away from commercial success.
Last fall, UT dedicated a Chase-designed building on Navasota Street as an outreach center for the university’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. In 2020, professors David Heymann and Stephen Fox co-authored John S. Chase – The Chase Residence; the first biography of Chase, written by assistant professor Tara Dudley, will be published next year. “I think my dad would be really sort of surprised” about the attention, says Tony Chase. “It does seem that there’s a resurgence of interest in the importance of his life’s work. And that’s great, because he really was a great man, [who] really did do good things. I think he would be smiling.”
This article appears in Guide to SXSW 2022.