KOOZ Your project ‘The Hair Salon: Black Hair as Architecture’ proposes Black hairstyling as a source of architectural intelligence rather than a cultural reference. What criteria allow a practice to become “architecture,” and how does your work challenge the disciplinary boundaries that have historically excluded forms of embodied and vernacular knowledge?

Sheryl Tucker de Vasquez A practice becomes architectural when it organises relationships among bodies, materials, space, memory, environment, and social life. This definition reframes architecture away from objects and authorship alone and toward relational systems. Architecture is not only the production of buildings; it is also the production of enclosure, threshold, atmosphere, protection, orientation, and meaning. Black hairstyling — braiding, parting, wrapping, coiling — performs this kind of spatial work. It creates thresholds, enclosures, and patterned surfaces that mediate climate, touch, and social exchange.

A braid is not simply an image that can be translated into architecture. It is already a spatial operation. It gathers material, distributes tension, produces order, and transforms the body into a site of construction, memory, and projection. The disciplinary boundary that excludes these practices is not neutral. It has been shaped by histories of gender, race, authorship, and institutional recognition. By treating hairstyling as method rather than motif, The Hair Salon challenges architecture’s hierarchy of evidence — drawings, monuments, authored buildings — and insists that embodied, vernacular knowledge is a legitimate source of architectural theory. These practices do not need to become buildings to matter architecturally. They already produce spatial intelligence.

KOOZ There is a risk that translating cultural practices into architectural form can reduce them to aesthetics. How do you ensure that the spatial, social, and political logics embedded in Black hair practices are not lost in the process of architectural translation?

STdV The translation process is not “this hairstyle looks like a building.” It is closer to asking how the logic of a hairstyle might become a spatial system. A braid, for example, is not only a pattern; it is a way of distributing tension, creating continuity, managing parts, and holding separate strands in relation. The architectural question is not how to imitate its image, but how to learn from its operations.

That distinction is critical for me because Black hair has too often been consumed as an image, while the labour, care, and intelligence that produce it are overlooked. The project therefore treats hairstyling as method rather than motif. It asks what can be learned from parting, wrapping, braiding, coiling, protecting, maintaining, and reworking — actions that are spatial, material, social, and environmental before they are formal. In this sense, translation becomes an accountable practice. The work must remain tied to the people and practices from which it learns: to the stylist’s hand, the duration of the appointment, the maintenance required over time, the bodily routines a style supports, and the cultural meanings it carries. The resulting architectural propositions are not aesthetic echoes of Black hair. They are attempts to think with the salon as a site of embodied spatial knowledge.

KOOZ In Firelei Báez’s work, hair often exceeds the body to become landscape, architecture, and a carrier of historical memory. Your project similarly treats Black hair as a spatial and material intelligence rather than a signifier of identity alone. What possibilities emerge when hair is understood as a medium for producing space rather than simply representing culture?

STdV Yes, I see a strong resonance with Firelei Báez’s work, particularly in the way hair refuses to remain contained by the body. In her paintings, hair often becomes atmosphere, terrain, ornament, architecture, and historical force. Báez’s work makes hair a carrier of historical memory and spatial imagination. My project extends that impulse into design, asking how hair behaviors — growth, aggregation, protection, and maintenance — might offer architects new ways to think about scale, memory, and material life. Rather than using hair as a motif, the project asks how its behaviors might produce inhabitable atmospheres: systems that shade, ventilate, protect, and gather.

The methodological move is to treat hair as a medium with rules — growth vectors, tension, aggregation, and maintenance cycles — and then to design systems that learn from those rules. This produces spaces that feel like extensions of embodied practice rather than external impositions. Seasonal hair rituals encode environmental knowledge, but not always in predictable ways. In summer, for instance, many Black women choose tighter or more contained styles to accommodate swimming, heat, humidity, and frequent washing. The style becomes a form of environmental adaptation: it reduces daily manipulation, protects the hair, and allows the body to move more freely through the season. One possible outcome might be a community pavilion whose interlaced roof does not simply resemble braided hair, but performs according to braided logic: distributing tension, filtering light, gathering bodies, and requiring periodic care. Through its visible maintenance and repair, the pavilion becomes a living archive: an atmosphere that remembers touch, labour, and care.

KOOZ The salon appears in your work as a site of care, technical expertise, and collective knowledge production. What can architecture learn from the salon as an institution, particularly at a moment when many public and civic spaces are increasingly fragmented or privatised?

STdV The salon is one of the most important institutions in the project because it holds together things architecture often separates: care and expertise, beauty and survival, intimacy and public life, technique and conversation, labour and cultural memory. It is not only a place where hair is styled. It is an informal clinic, an information hub, an intergenerational classroom, and a civic room. Architectural pedagogy often separates program from ritual, structure from care, and public life from intimate labour. The salon collapses those binaries. Stylists manage ergonomics, time, atmosphere, and social choreography; clients participate in knowledge transmission; the space supports waiting, caregiving, storytelling, advice, and political conversation. Its intelligence lies not only in what is made, but in how people gather, remain, tend, listen, and return.

For architecture, the salon offers a different model of civic space. It suggests that buildings should not only produce spectacle or serve a fixed program, but support ongoing social life: maintenance, ritual, informal exchange, bodily comfort, and trust. To learn from the salon is to take seriously spaces that have long performed civic work without being formally recognised as civic institutions. The salon is not just context for the project; it is a theory of architecture. It teaches architecture how to organise care, how to make room for conversation, how to value maintenance, and how to understand beauty as a practice of survival. If architects learn from the salon, they might design spaces that are intimate, reparative, and socially generative — spaces that do not simply house community, but help sustain it.

KOOZ Your project expands architecture’s archive by centering Black cultural practices. Do you see this as an additive gesture, bringing new references into the discipline, or as a more fundamental critique of how architectural knowledge has historically been defined and legitimised? The deeper question here: why were these practices not already understood as architectural knowledge?

STdV For me, the project is not only an additive gesture — although adding Black practices to the archive is necessary. It is also a more fundamental critique of the frameworks that excluded them in the first place: the academy’s privileging of authored monuments, the profession’s reliance on narrow media of proof, and the hierarchies that devalue domestic, intimate, and feminised labour. By centering salon knowledge, the project reframes authorship, method, and legitimacy. Authorship is no longer limited to the named architect; it includes the stylist’s hands, the client’s memory, the elder’s instruction, and the collective intelligence of practices passed down over time. Method is not only drawing, modeling, or fabrication; it is also repetition, apprenticeship, observation, adjustment, and care.

Legitimacy is not granted only by institutions; it can emerge from vernacular systems that have organised bodies, materials, environments, and social life for generations. This has consequences for how architecture is taught and practiced. If the salon is a theory of architecture, then architectural education must learn how to read embodied practices, document oral transmission, and collaborate with experts whose knowledge may not arrive in conventional academic form. A stylist correcting a student’s assumption about tension in a braid can be as pedagogically significant as a structural diagram. The correction reveals something no drawing fully captures: that knowledge can live in the hand, in rhythm, in pressure, in timing, and in the relationship between maker and body.

The project therefore goes beyond simply adding Black hair practices to architecture’s archive. It asks architecture to become accountable to the forms of knowledge it has historically overlooked. That shift changes the archive from a static collection of precedents into a living network of practices, people, techniques, memories, and obligations.

KOOZ Many of the project’s formal investigations emerge from braiding, coiling, and protective styling. Beyond their visual and structural qualities, what social or environmental forms of intelligence do these practices contain, and how might they reshape the way architects think about space, maintenance, adaptation, and care?

STdV Protective styling, for instance, is an environmental concept. It shields the hair from damage, reduces daily manipulation, preserves moisture, and allows growth to continue over time. It is not only a formal strategy; it is a temporal and ecological one. It asks how a body can be protected, sustained, and allowed to flourish under changing conditions. Braiding, coiling, and protective styling each contain forms of intelligence that exceed their visual qualities. Braiding distributes tension through interdependence; coiling stores, gathers, and releases energy; protective styles prioritise preservation, reduced labour, and cyclical care. These practices suggest architectural systems that are modular, reparable, adjustable, and designed for duration rather than one-time completion. This is a significant shift for architecture, which has often privileged permanence, monumentality, and finished form. Hair practices offer another model: one organised around maintenance, adaptation, touch, and cyclical care. A protective style is not meant to last forever. It is installed, lived with, adjusted, refreshed, removed, and remade. That cycle is not a failure of design; it is the design. Translated architecturally, these logics encourage spaces that anticipate change instead of resisting it. They suggest materials that can age, be repaired, or be reworked; assemblies that allow access rather than conceal maintenance; and spatial systems that support seasonal adjustment, bodily comfort, and collective care. The goal is not to make buildings that look like braids or coils, but to imagine architecture as something maintained through relationships over time. In this sense, braiding, coiling, and protection teach architecture to design for life’s rhythms: repair, renewal, rest, weather, growth, and care. They shift maintenance from an afterthought to an ethic, and adaptation from a technical feature to a cultural practice.

Cover image - Image credit: Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez and Maisie Menuez

BIO

Sheryl Tucker de Vasquez is an architect and founding principal of Tucker de Vazquez Architecture, an interdisciplinary architecture research and design firm focused on the unique social and cultural impact of Black culture on the American built environment. She is an associate professor at the University of Houston. De Vazquez was awarded the Houston American Institute of Architects 25-year campus award for her contributions to the development of the Project Row Houses campus, in collaboration with artist Rick Lowe. She is currently working on the Zina Garrison Tennis Academy, and a collection of essays exploring how low-lying and coastal African American communities are confronting climate change.