Architectural Studies graduate and national prize-winning essayist Gealese Peebles is off to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University to pursue a Master of Landscape Architecture.
“It’s no surprise that Gealese would go to a top-notch graduate school like Harvard,” says Brett Tippey, Program Coordinator for Architectural Studies. “Throughout her time as an Architectural Studies student Gealese always demonstrated the highest levels of intellectual depth, academic rigor and creative inquiry.”
Peebles graduated magna cum laude in 2021 from the BA in Architectural Studies in Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED), with a minor in Art History. As an undergraduate student, Peebles was a natural at research and writing, and in the studio she learned to apply these skills to the design process. Her urban design project to revive Cleveland’s East 185th Street Corridor was inspired by her research of the Collinwood neighborhood’s rich history and demographic makeup.
As a senior at Kent State, Peebles took a course on 20th century architecture where her research broke new ground and eventually won a national award. Instead of writing the typical report on a standalone building or a heroic architect, Peebles wrote an essay that criticized architectural historians for overlooking Norma Merrick Sklarek, the first African American woman to earn professional licensure as an architect in New York and California. In the essay Peebles pointed out that, in the grand historical narratives, historians rarely include minority architects like Sklarek. And when they are included, historians often discuss the obstacles they faced on account of their race but ignore the innovative architecture they produced. Soon after graduating from the BA in Architectural Studies, while working as a full-time designer at EDGE in Columbus, Ohio, she submitted the paper to Columbia University’s Avery Review Essay Prize. In a crowded field of competitors that included seasoned PhDs and tenured professors, Peebles won the second-place prize. Her essay, titled “Norma Merick Sklarek: Erasure by Inclusion” was published in Avery Review and is, to date, the only scholarly analysis of Sklarek’s legacy.
What drove Peebles’ interest in Sklarek? In her own words, “there is comfort in knowing that your experiences and circumstances are not unprecedented or individualized, so I investigated the history of fellow Black women who wanted to help shape the world. Looking back I realize that I was hoping to find kinship, pride, and motivation in discovering the names of those who made a place for me in this field. I was not disappointed.”
Peebles credits CAED and the BA in Architectural Studies as key parts of her development as a researcher and an academic. “My undergraduate career has given me plenty of productive practice in conducting academic research at the professional level. I knew not only how to find and utilize my resources, but also ways to verify any information I came across.” Her undergraduate experience in CAED gave Peebles the confidence she needed to pursue the Master of Landscape Architecture in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.