“I Was Asked to Stand” | Steidl Lecture
Pascale Sablan, FAIA, NOMA, LEED AP, With over 13 years of experience, she has been on the team for a variety of mixed-use, commercial, cultural & residential projects in the U.S., Saudi Arabia, India, Azerbaijan, Japan, & UAE. Most notably the Bronx Point Project, with 540 residential units, a community facility, and the first brick and mortar Universal Hip Hop Museum.
Pascale is the 315th living African American female architect in the United States to attain her architectural license. To engage the culture, Pascale has given lectures at Institutions, such as the National Museum of African American Heritage & Culture and the United Nations Visitor Centre. She lectured and engaged students with lectures at Universities and Colleges all over the US; Columbia University, Georgia Technical College, Harvard University, Tuskegee University, Pratt Institute, Parsons | The New School, Madison Area Technical College, and California Polytechnic State University.
She is the Founder and Executive Director of Beyond the Built Environment, LLC, positioned to uniquely address the inequitable disparities in architecture by providing a holistic platform aimed to support numerous stages of the architecture pipeline. To impact the culture, Beyond the Built Environment, elevates the identities and contributions of women and BIPOC designers through exhibitions, curated lectures, and documentaries that testify to the provided value of their built work and its spatial impact. Pascale curated SAY IT LOUD exhibitions at the AIA New York, in Center for Architecture Gallery, SXSW Conference 2019, A'19, and NOMA 2018 Unbounded conference which was all paired with relevant programming speaking to the mission.
The SAY IT LOUD - United Nations Visitors Centre, exhibition created a tremendous opportunity for exposure and echoing the call to action to the leaders of our world. After her speech at the opening of our exhibition, the United Nations generously offered to transform this exhibition into posters, translated into 8 languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Kiswahili), and distributed to their information centers worldwide. SAY IT LOUD - United Nations exhibit has been displayed in Bujumbura, Geneva, Harare, Lagos, Lome, Nairobi, New Delhi, Minsk, and Yaounde.
She has been recognized for her contributions to the industry with several awards, including the 2021 AIA Whitney M. Young. Jr Award for her advocacy efforts and ascended to the AIA College of Fellows, the youngest African American to receive that honor. She was featured in the Council of Tall Building & Urban Habitat Research Paper, in the same company as Jeanne Gang and Zaha Hadid. She was named Building Design + Construction 40 Under 40 and was featured on the cover of the September 2017 issue of their magazine. In 2020 Pascale was voted President-Elect of the National Organization of Minority Architecture, the 5th woman to hold this position of leadership.
Mrs. Sablan holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University.
