Selwyn Q. Bachus II joins Omaha by Design as an architectural designer with the passion to positively affect the city’s urban fabric through advocacy and activation.
As the organization’s inagaural Design Fellow, Selwyn believes that high-quality design and uplifting spaces should be accessible to every citizen, every day. In order to push Omaha towards a protopian future, he believes that the voices of underserved communities need to be heard and documented, then the city must reflect on the role it has played and adapt to best support every Omahan.
Selwyn is a current Master in Architecture student at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a 2019 graduate of the Fay Jones School of Architecture+Design at the University of Arkansas.
Over the course of this Summer, Selwyn will be participating in crafting the Affordable by Design Housing Playbook, attending community meetings addressing neighborhood urban design activation, and advocating for people-centered design excellence throughout the city through public and philanthropic means.
Aspects of design that Selwyn finds exciting include computational fabrication, color composition, and community engagement. These interests were preceded by childhood experimentation with art in various mediums, and it was these early experiences that led to his decision to pursue a career in design. Architecture allows him to continue a childhood love of artistic experimentation and expression, while also crafting concrete ideas that can positively affect the built environment and the communities it contains.
After earning his masters, Selwyn wants to develop a teaching, working, speculative and philanthropic model of practice and pedagogy. A design collective based on alliances with minority communities, and an educational model that inspires young minority designers through appropriate representation at the university level. He also wants to speculate on community-based design-build projects, focused on manipulating low-cost materials for aesthetic pleasure and delivering projects at a low building cost through community volunteerism.
His 1st year work from Harvard can be found in the portfolio linked here:
His undergraduate portfolio can be accessed here:
Projects are explained in greater depth through extensive writing, project videos, and final review recordings on his website:
Selwyn appreciates however much of his work you look into, and looks forward to discussing it with you alongside the future of design excellence as the standard in Omaha!