Encouraging Access: Central Collective's Juliette Dubroca on Affordable Housing, Analytical Thinking, and Lessons from France

By Julia Gamolina

Juliette Dubroca is an educator, licensed architect, and partner and founder of the architecture studio Central Collective, based in Seattle and New York City. Originally from France, she is a graduate of the M.Arch I at Cornell University. She is a lecturer at the University of Washington and at Cornish College of the Arts. She has practiced architecture in offices in Rome, Paris, NYC and Seattle. She has also taught architecture at Cornell University and Washington State University. Her work on Japan has been exhibited in numerous venues in the US.

In her interview, Juliette talks about navigating the complexities of the profession as an immigrant and arriving at her focus on low-cost housing, advising those just starting their careers not to compromise their personal lives.

JG: How did you grow up, and how did your interest in architecture first develop? What did you learn about yourself in studying it?

JD: I learned violin at the young age of seven, at my local conservatory. The French educational environment, at school and outside of it, left very little room for words like scrappy, imperfection, process, and teamwork. During my childhood, there was only one space which provided me some relief from this archaic pedagogical method — a local daytime summer camp at the beach called club des Pinguoins, The Penguin Club in English. The summer camp was considered an institution and was run by proud and cheery French Communists who revered and idealized pre-war Soviet aesthetics, civics, service to the community, and communist team building exercises.

As a child, I told myself lots of stories, which I doodled on sheets of white A4 paper. This kind of activity was compulsive and meditative at the same time. It was a means for me to take a break from my household and the tedium of French schooling. I never made much of it, until later when I encountered the mess of scrap models and rolls of tracing paper scattered all around the Cornell University architecture studio. Suddenly, my innocuous childhood doodles became as relevant as the mess on the students’ studio tables.

Agriculture land model by Juliette, photography by Zachary Tyler Newton.

DADU, image courtesy of Noa Younse of pixelpatchcreative.

I grew up on a border, at the southern tip of France and the north of Spain, in the Basque country. Although I was oblivious to it while I grew up, that space was politically charged and contested. There were stories of escapes through the Pyrenees mountains, raided farmhouses, separatist flags, and local bombings. The border largely disappeared as an administrative entity in the early 90’s, but interestingly enough, the landscape, urban layouts and cultures of three overlapping Basque, French and Spanish identities were reinforced. Learning the languages and knowing to navigate these diverse and eclectic worlds were formative experiences for me.

I only became conscious of the political implications embedded in the practice of architecture when I visited Berlin during an undergraduate study abroad program. As in my childhood, I was faced again with a city that intended to navigate invisible borders, historical traumas and identity politics through its landscape and urban layout. The city seemed to embrace rawness, unresolved imperfection, multiple layers, and process-like narratives.

What did you learn in studying architecture? How did that propel you forward upon graduation?

My undergraduate school did not have an architecture program, so I petitioned to take my first architecture course at the university across the hill, at Cornell University. My first year as a graduate student there was difficult, but in the end grad school was an amazing experience.

Though my cohort exhibited camaraderie, diversity, and equity, the profession seemed tied to hierarchical ladders of exploitation. I graduated in the middle of the 2008 recession, which certainly tinted my outlook. Though the firms I worked for exhibited shiny nice storefronts and spoke of ideal practices, the internal politics of the workplace reflected contractual work, job insecurity, glass ceilings, and starchitect and male dominated environments. Additionally, I was tied to the U.S. immigration’s own chains, which determined for the next ten years the means of my employment and sometimes lack thereof.

“I think that a number of challenges which impact our profession, and the community at large, are based on the land use code of cities. The land use code, say of Seattle, results in 80% of the land being reserved for single family homeowners who comprise just 20% of the city’s residents. This inequity establishes houses as financial investment rather than just places to live in and call a home.”

— Juliette Dubroca

How did you get your start in the field?

At Cornell University, I designed a low-income housing residential unit for my graduate thesis. My work was a bit at odds with my fellow classmates’ hyper theoretical projects. Being from Europe, I always believed — maybe naively — that there were ways to make great low-income housing. After school, I went to NYC to work at a small firm which specialized in that line of work, but I was rapidly disappointed by the cookie-cutter formulaic responses to the housing problem. They seemed to design for residents whom they perceived as vandalizing brutes who needed to be either surveilled or locked up.

My early career steps are inextricably linked to my immigration visas. My NYC professional life ended when I was unable to complement my employment with a work visa. I went home and worked for two small studios in Paris for several years, until one day in 2014, I received an offer letter from Cornell to teach the first-year studio. In general, during my time in architecture offices, I found solace in all the institutions I taught at, which included Cornell University, Washington State University, University of Washington, and Cornish College of the Arts. In my spare time, I also conducted research, supported by several grants, and produced exhibitions on traditional Japanese architecture with my ex-classmate, Zachary Tyler Newton.

Tell me about teaching at Cornell.

My experience teaching at Cornell under Jim Williamson was eye opening. He had an incredibly thoughtful way of capturing and communicating a pedagogy that I myself had basked in as a student, but this time, I became aware of the internal mechanisms which produce a curriculum. In my opinion, Cornell’s greatest strength lies in the way it teaches its students analytical skills through the medium of drawing. This type of teaching is rare, because it does not gratify the students with a “building” per se, but it is invaluable to become something other than “just another architect.” It is a gift in the sense that it teaches students how to learn, at the institution and outside of it, from a building and from all other non-building things. In the following years, I taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at Washington State University, during which time I emphasized the use of precedents in architectural thinking.

You mentioned navigating through the challenges of immigration visas, something a lot of designers here in New York, and in the states in general face. Where are you now with this?

In parallel to my teaching appointment at Cornell, I worked on compiling a two-hundred-page application with 10 professional letters of recommendation for an O-1: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement visa. The visa was granted to me the following year and allowed my continued employment in Seattle. I then worked for a design-build firm, which was spearheaded by an architect with a developer inclination and a passion for housing advocacy and land use code.

How did Central Collective come about?

In 2020, the City of Seattle put out a call to imagine and design backyard cottages (DADU), as an additional incentive to some recent land use changes they initiated to increase density in single family residential neighborhoods. I was excited by the city’s initiative and took this challenge as an opportunity to think and design the most compact and most affordable housing unit I could. I assembled an all-women’s team of three, consisting of architect Mariana Gutheim and landscape architect and urban planner Erica Bush. Our DADU was unfortunately not selected, but our team’s spirit and passion for creative low-income residential solutions inspired us to think that one day, we could start a firm.

Then, in the very first days of Covid, I was laid off by the high-end residential studio I worked for. Suddenly the finances of starting a practice were within reach. As I received Covid relief unemployment benefits for several months, I was able to start Central Collective with Marian and Erica. I originally started working on one single family house project in the hills of Santa Fe, NM. In parallel, I volunteered as a training carpenter under the supervision of Guy Astley, working with a low-income housing organization, LIHI. Together, we built about half a dozen tiny houses in Seattle in the Spring of 2020 for homeless people. In the past ten months, my two partners have joined Central Collective full-time we have multiplied our client base by ten.

Where are you in your career today?

I am at a point where I can finally start shaping the profession. Also for an immigrant like me, Seattle is a good place to call home. It’s such a growing city with so many immigrants and transplants.

“...an architectural practice should encourage access to people; access to the city, by providing quality housing, and access to the profession, for underserved, minorities and women.”

— Juliette Dubroca

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?

Obviously like everyone, I have had many lows in my career. I incurred many rejections, went back to living with my mother a few times, I failed licensing exams, I lived on other people’s couches due to lack of money. I was also given some shady work contracts, denied visas, was at one point threatened to get reported to immigration services by an employee working at a car rental service…the list goes on.

I think that a number of challenges which impact our profession, and the community at large, are based on the land use code of cities. The land use code, say of Seattle, results in 80% of the land being reserved for single family homeowners who comprise just 20% of the city’s residents. This inequity establishes houses as financial investment rather than just places to live in and call a home. The exorbitant prices — $750,000 median house price currently — prevent many of my peers from buying a residence. This situation also encourages high rents, which in turn produce homelessness in our community. This discourages and penalizes families because the housing stock currently being built is comprised of one bedroom and studio apartments. Thankfully, Seattle is starting to discuss these very issues at the city council level, but it’s early days.

The second challenge I see for our profession is financial. I had the chance to take advantage of safety nets, such as the French unemployment, the American Covid relief, and my partner and my parents’ income when I needed to get over a hump. In my opinion, this sense of financial safety should be reinforced by the AIA. Sure, the AIA should play a role in protecting firms from getting sued by a contractor, but it also should be obligated to protect the young people in our profession from abusive and financially predatory employers. The AIA does provide compensation guidelines, but it should go further in establishing contracts that outline basic things like healthcare benefits, minimum medical leave, overtime pay, etc…

Who are you admiring right now and why?

In Seattle, I admire Susan Jones and Grace Kim. Both women are parents, architects, and have impressive advocacy records. Among many things, Susan Jones re-wrote the International Building Code to include Mass Timber, a carbon sink structural material, and Grace Kim advocated for newly adopted housing reforms to the Seattle City council.

What is the impact you’d like to have in on the world? What is your core mission?

I think that an architectural practice should encourage access to people; access to the city, by providing quality housing, and access to the profession, for underserved, minorities and women.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

My advice would be try not to compromise your personal life over your career. As a French person, I continue to be amazed at the prerogative that most American companies have over their subordinates. The ten-day a year holiday is absurd, and straight from an 1800’s Emile Zola novel! This only succeeds in keeping a lot of us from ever experiencing some of life’s most important milestones, such as pursuing relationships, seeing family, child rearing and bearing, and more.

I find this exchange inequitable, because it only highlights that the older more experienced people in society have great bargaining power over the younger ones. One never chooses to be born, or when to be born, and so it seems very arbitrary to me that one class of people could keep so many tied to their work. This goes for men and women.