Leslie Robinson

Master of Fine Arts in Interior Design

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The Amaza Lee Meredith Center for Interior Architecture is a mixed-use resource facility focused on Black American students interested in design careers, especially in architecture, interior design, interior decoration, and related fields. (Relative to their representation in the U.S., the number of Black students and practitioners in these fields is staggering low.)

Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), the center’s namesake, was the first black Modernist designer known to practice architecture and interior design.

The concept for the center is migration, referring both to the Great Migration of African Americans who moved north from the Jim Crow south and to the present-day movement—growth in terms knowledge and skills—of students in the center. To reflect emphasize upward movement, users enter the center by descending to the basement and then traveling upward through the space through a feature stairwell that doubles as student gallery space.