CAMERON A. AVERY

“A prophetic aesthetic calls us to talk about what it means to raise generations of architects with a multicultural sensibility who will think about architecture not just as a profession but who will think about spaces that everyday people inhabit and about our accountability toward making those spaces wonderful and inhabitable space.” — bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics —

a Mixed Worldview: The Racial Phenomena of Ambiguity
RESEARCH

OVERVIEW

M.Arch.
Spring 2026
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Ravin SoA Student Design Award
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This project was featured in a faculty-curated end-of-semester exhibition of work from across the Ravin School of Architecture.

Excellence in Architectural History
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

ACSA Design for Aging Competition, Submission

bell hooks defines aesthetics as “more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty” — it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming. In its recent history, architecture has not aimed to view aesthetics in the same way. Practice has tended to privilege resolution. For those whose identities resist singular categorization, this can produce a particular spatial experience: the sense of being adjacent to belonging rather than inside it, and of navigating environments not designed with ambiguity in mind.

This project asserts that multiracial identity, as a phenomenological condition, offers architecture a framework for recovering that capacity. To occupy an in-between state is to navigate spaces of belonging, refusing the default tactics of legibility, homogeneity, and resolution. Instead, it proposes an architectural practice grounded in heterogeneity: translating the interstitial, the blended, and the unresolved into spatial form. 

The site is not incidental. Berea College in rural Kentucky — the first interracial and coeducational institution in the South — carries within its land a history of contested belonging. Identity has always been negotiated in public here. An intergenerational living facility proposed here pairs an aging population with emerging adults, treating the cross-generational threshold as a site where identities — racial, generational, experiential — are not reconciled but held in productive tension. Durability, self-determination, and care are embedded not as programmatic afterthoughts but as architectural values made legible in form.

CAMERON A. AVERY