February 1, 2021

Gresham Smith and our fellow members of the AIA Large Firm Roundtable are committed to help change the racial face of architecture. As a firm that prides itself on genuinely caring for each other, our clients and our communities, we must enable our designers to accurately and inclusively represent the diversity of our communities—the diversity that is essential to creating a better world for all.

Using people in architectural renderings is essential for communicating the scale and usability of spaces. Thanks to technology, photo-realistic, scaled figures created by digital content providers are now widely available to be easily downloaded and placed into renderings. They are, however, noticeably lacking one thing: diversity.

In the summer of last year, we called on the design industry’s digital content providers to provide more Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scale figures in their libraries. Read the full letter, signed by Gresham Smith and our partner design firms, below.