Jan Lorenc is a Polish-American designer and author. Born in Jaśliska, Poland in 1954, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 8. He formed Lorenc Design in 1978 in Chicago, and later moved it to Atlanta in 1981.
Whitney Moore Young Jr. was an American civil rights leader. Trained as a social worker, he spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one that aggressively worked for equitable access to socioeconomic opportunity for the historically disenfranchised. Young was influential in the United States federal government's War on Poverty in the 1960s.
The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park covers about 35 acres (0.14 km2) and includes several sites in Atlanta, Georgia related to the life and work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Within the park is his boyhood home, and Ebenezer Baptist Church — the church where King was baptized and both he and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., were pastors — as well as, the grave site of King, Jr., and his wife, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King.
The Atlanta–Fulton Public Library System is a network of public libraries serving the City of Atlanta and Fulton County, both in the U.S. state of Georgia. The system is administered by Fulton County. The system is composed of the Atlanta Central Library in Downtown Atlanta, which serves as the library headquarters, as well as the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, and 33 branch libraries.
Leila Ross Wilburn (1885–1967) was an early 20th-century architect, one of the first women in Georgia to enter that profession.
Judith Dupré is a writer, structural historian, and public speaker. She is the New York Times bestselling author of several works of narrative nonfiction on art, design, and architecture. She has been described as “a scholar with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style.”
The Millennium Gate Museum is a triumphal arch and Georgia history museum located in Atlanta, on 17th Street in the Atlantic Station district of Midtown. The monument celebrates peaceful accomplishment. The design was a collaboration of Rodney Mims Cook Jr and Hugh Petter of ADAM Architecture to refine the 10 winning entries from a design in competition in 2000.
Cecil Abraham Alexander, Jr. was an American architect, principally a designer of commercial architecture, best known for his work in Atlanta, Georgia. He worked with the firm FABRAP, which, in 1985, became Rosser FABRAP International and later Rosser International. Together with other architects of the firm, he "shaped the skyline of Atlanta".
Susana Torre is an Argentine-born American architect, critic and educator, based in New York City (1968–2008) and in Carboneras, Almeria, Spain. Torre has developed a career that combined “theoretical concerns with the actual practice of building” and architectural and urban design with teaching and writing. Torre was the first woman invited to design a building in Columbus, IN, “a town internationally known for its collection of buildings designed by prominent architects.”
John Saunders Chase Jr. was born in Annapolis, Maryland, to John Saunders Chase and Alice Viola Hall. He was an American architect who was the first licensed African American architect in the state of Texas. He was also the only Black architect licensed in the state for almost a decade. He was also the first African American to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which reviewed the design for the United States Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Women in architecture have been documented for many centuries, as professional practitioners, educators and clients. Since architecture became organized as a profession in 1857, the number of women in architecture has been low. At the end of the 19th century, starting in Finland, certain schools of architecture in Europe began to admit women to their programmes of study. In 1980 M. Rosaria Piomelli, born in Italy, became the first woman to hold a deanship of any school of architecture in the United States, as Dean of the City College of New York School of Architecture. In recent years, women have begun to achieve wider recognition within the profession, however, the percentage receiving awards for their work remains low. As of 2023, 11.5% of Pritzker Prize Laureates have been female.
Merrill Elam is an American architect and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a principal with Mack Scogin in Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects where their work spans between buildings, interiors, planning, graphics and exhibition design, and research.
African-American architects are those in the architectural profession who are African American in the United States. Their work in the more distant past was often overlooked or outright erased from the historical records due to the racist social dynamics at play in the country, but the black members of the profession—and their historic contributions—have become somewhat more recognized since.
Ellamae Ellis League, was an American architect, the fourth woman registered architect in Georgia and "one of Georgia and the South's most prominent female architects." She practiced for over 50 years, 41 of them from her own firm. From a family of architects, she was the first woman elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) in Georgia and only the eighth woman nationwide. Several buildings she designed are listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). In 2016 she was posthumously named a Georgia Woman of Achievement.
Mary Lane Morrison was an American writer, historian and preservationist. She was the curator of the Georgia Historical Society, a member of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the state of Georgia and was a director in The Victorian Society, founded in 1966. She also wrote John S. Norris: Architect in Savannah, on the architectural work of John S. Norris, and edited Historic Savannah: A Survey of Significant Buildings in the Historic and Victorian Districts of Savannah, Georgia.
Rainy Hamilton Jr. is the American president, owner, principal in charge of architecture and co-founder of Hamilton Anderson Associates, a multidisciplinary architectural firm that integrates architecture and site design as the basis of sustainable architecture and planning projects. HAA is one of the largest African-American owned architectural firms in the United States.
The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) is a professional organization for individuals practicing architecture and allied professionals to advance justice and equity in communities of color.
Charles Francis McAfee,, , is an American architect, building material manufacturer, and housing activist. He was the founding president of Charles F. McAfee Architects, Engineers, and Planners firm which was headquartered in Wichita, Kansas. McAfee has had a distinguished career, and has been considered one of the most important African-American architect in the United States for his social activism in designing affordable housing. He was a mentor to many of Black architects, including two of his own daughters.
Cheryl Lynn McAfee,, , is an American architect. She is the CEO of McAfee3, an architecture firm founded by her father Charles F. McAfee. In 1990, she was the first women to receive an architecture license in the state of Kansas. McAfee was named one of the "Top Women Architects" by Ebony magazine in 1995. McAfee led the design and construction of sports venues of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. She is also known as Cheryl Lynn McAfee-Mitchell.
Pascale Sablan is an American architect and designer. She is an associate principal at Adjaye Associates and became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2021. Sablan advocates on behalf of women and BIPOC people in architecture as the founder and executive director of Beyond the Built Environment. She previously worked for FXFOWLE and S9 Architecture.
