Architect James Garrett Jr. Uses Bush Fellowship to Reimagine Spaces for People of Color
Minnesota architect James Garrett Jr., co-owner of 4RM+ULA, is using his 2025 Bush Fellowship to explore how architecture can better serve people of color. His plans include international research in Denmark on solar-powered building materials and a continued focus on creating culturally resonant, community-centered spaces.
James Garrett, Jr. made the long trek to becoming an architect in an industry that presents barriers for people of color. He credits his family for supporting him in completing the journey. As a Bush fellow, he is looking for new ideas to create spaces that meet the needs of people of color.
As a 2025 Bush fellow, he is utilizing his opportunity to explore the intersection between affordable housing and climate change. He plans to travel to SolarLab in Denmark to learn about photovoltaic cladding, a building material they’ve developed to use as windows, roofing and siding that also generates solar energy.
Garrett knew he wanted to be an architect by the time he was five. It began by building Legos.
“My parents did a great job of nurturing my brother and I and the interest that we had,” he says. “There were a few architects in the community here, and they knew them.”
Garrett had the chance to talk to architects like Robert Morgan and Jay Tyson. This level of involvement with Black architects during his youth made entering the industry a realistic goal for him as an adult.
“That was powerful for me,” he says. “It’s something that we’re trying to do with our kids, making sure that whatever their hopes and dreams are, we are able to bring them around to people who look like us [and] be able to sort of have those role models around and available to them.”
These early interactions didn’t break down the existing barriers for aspiring architects of color. He experienced this first during high school when he was told that he couldn’t take an architecture class. Instructors led him to machine part drafting, which they told him was a more realistic path.
They eventually agreed to let him take the architecture class if he finished the machine part drafting courses first. After a couple of years, Garrett realized that he would graduate before he could complete all the classes and move on to architecture.
“It was the ‘Minnesota nice’ way of telling me no,” he says. “I doubt that any of the people who took the architecture class even went to architecture school.”
During the summer of his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, Garrett learned that architecture was not new to his family. While visiting his grandparents, his grandmother sent him to the basement to look for something.
“I started to notice that the columns in the basement that were supporting the ceiling were not typical wood-frame structural elements,” he says. “They were metal posts, and they had these nice details and connections.”
He had been studying wood-framed housing structures at Berkeley, but these were different from what he’d seen. He asked his grandmother if an architect had designed the house.
“My grandpa looked up from his newspaper and he goes, ‘My Uncle Cap designed this house… Cap Wigington.’” He showed Garrett the blueprints for the house by the famous Minnesota Black architect who designed Roy Wilkins Auditorium and the Harriet Island Pavilion.
The typical road to being an architect includes completing undergraduate and graduate school, followed by three to five years to complete the prerequisites for an internship. It takes an additional 3-5 years to pass the exams.
“We’re talking about an 18 to 20-year commitment to be an architect. It pushes a lot of people away [and] into other fields,” explains Garrett. “There’s a reason why there are only so many Black architects, and we’re almost 15% of the population.”
Garrett is co-owner of 4RM+ULA (form plus urban landscape articulation) with his business partners. Their work includes public spaces like the Rondo Commemorative Plaza and the Philando Castile Memorial, and art centers Juxtaposition Arts in Minneapolis and Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul.
“We are most known for our transit work,” says Garrett, “the light rail stations along the green line [and] Target Field station.” They also designed a bus transit station for the city of Rochester and the Mayo Clinic.
In 2021, Nathan Johnson, Garrett’s business partner, applied and was awarded a Bush Fellowship. Garrett observed the effect the opportunity had on Johnson. “The discoveries that he made, the travel that he did, a lot of ideas opened up, and the business started flourishing from that period,” explains Garrett.
This past year, Garrett says, “I felt like the time was right and I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and submit for the fellowship.” He is looking to push the passion that he puts into his work forward.
“This work that we do, it comes from my heart, from my soul,” he says.” “We are interested in saying, ‘What does it look like, what does it feel like, what are the possibilities if we are self-determining what our communities, what our building, what our public spaces, what our streets…look like?’”
While Black communities typically inherit buildings already in existence, he says, “We deserve to have the opportunity to mold, shape and create the types of places and spaces that serve us as people of color.
“That’s very rewarding work, but it’s very difficult work,” he continues. “A lot of times it requires quite a bit of educating, handholding, and sort of walking people through very complex processes that we’ve kind of been shut out of for many generations.”
Find out more about 4RM+ULA at https://4rmula.com/.
Vickie Nash welcomes reader responses at vickie.evans2019@gmail.com.