Greg Minott Strives To Make Boston’s Design Scene More Diverse

It seems that a career in design was always in the blueprints for Greg Minott, cofounder of the Back Bay–based firm Dream Collaborative. The son of a real estate broker and an engineer, he began studying architecture at 16 and soon landed his first gig—a bank renovation in his hometown of Mandeville, Jamaica. But that’s not to say his journey has been without its challenges: After finishing graduate school and moving to Boston for a job, he realized how whitewashed the field was—and how badly it needed diversification. “I was in a firm of 200 to 300 people, and there were just two of us that were minorities,” Minott says. “That was a typical experience, and I didn’t feel like I belonged in Boston.”

So after winning a design competition for the redevelopment of then-Dudley Square in 2008, he and his business partner Troy Depeiza decided to create the firm they wanted to see: one that mirrors the city’s intersectionality and engages all of its communities. Diversify the designers, he suggests, and we’re one step closer to a city that will work for all of us.

When you were creating Dream Collaborative, what was the vision for forming a different kind of architecture firm?

One of the things Troy and I wanted to do was create a more diverse firm than we’d seen previously. I grew up in a very diverse setting and I received such a rich education there, so from early on I saw the value in bringing different cultures together. Once I entered the architecture profession, though, I saw something different; firms weren’t very diverse and the leadership certainly wasn’t. Also, in Boston, which is quickly [growing as] a majority-minority city, I felt so strongly that to really understand and design for what the city would be like in the future, we needed to have a different engagement strategy for how we find out what the community needs and deliver that to them. The model of a client and master architect creating these plans in a vacuum and then putting them into the world felt outdated to me. There needed to be more of a community-based process around design. So that became the ethos of the company.

Why do you think Boston’s architectural scene is lacking in diversity?

For this city in particular, that [sense of unwelcomeness] is an issue that I’ve heard of time and time again. And there is such a limited pool in architecture to begin with. [According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, less than one in five new architects identified as members of racial or ethnic minority groups in 2019.] So we have to be more intentional about looking at the life cycle of an architect in Boston, from seeing that initial interest starting in elementary school to ensuring that they can compete once they get to college. Firms are waking up to the reality that they have to be more inclusive of the different voices that are in their organizations, which is good. But it’s probably going to take a generation before we see a sizable shift because we’ve got to grow a new cohort of architects.

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Kevin Woo