Mabel O. Wilson, the Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, has given an interview for the Black Imagination podcast, in which she discusses her time at the AA. Wilson spent a term studying at the AA during her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia. In the interview she spoke of the cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom that she experienced at the AA, and the profound impact it had on her architectural thinking. Read an except from the interview:

‘I mean one of the first boundaries for me was my undergraduate education, it was very rigid… I got very frustrated because I didn’t realise I just wasn’t being intellectually stimulated, so I left for a semester and went to London, to the Architectural Association. And just found my people, it was cosmopolitan, there were people from all over the world, we would travel, we saw film and we read theory and philosophy. You could bring your own cultural experience to your work, and that’s what was missing for me, in my undergraduate education.’

‘There was a woman in my unit from Nigeria, and then I could see, she made a space about certain social rituals from her people in Nigeria. And I was like “Wow, you can do that?” You can actually have cultural expression in your work and not have it ruled by “Its got to look like a Palazzo or a Villa”, you know, it was a much more, it just said “there are other modes of expression”’

Listen to the rest of the interview