Dwayne Smith Alexander

Architectural Designer
Urban Architectural Initiatives (UAI)

Dwayne Smith Alexander is an architectural designer at UAI, an urban theorist, singer/songwriter and real estate investor. He has designed affordable housing, civic and cultural structures for the benefit of African American and Caribbean communities.

As a design lead and architectural designer for the past 8 years, Alexander has designed and led construction through to completion for 8 separate affordable housing structures, with an emphasis on “designing for context” where including features and an architectural layout geared towards the experience of minorities in predominant Caribbean areas including Brooklyn, The Bronx, Westchester and Manhattan was paramount.

Alexander’s commitment not only towards inclusive design, but also designing specifically for the various subcultures of the African American community and the Caribbean diaspora afforded him the opportunity to design the new minority youth cultural and creative after school center for The Brotherhood Sistersol located in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem. A program which has trained and sent over 1000 African American and Caribbean youth to college with a high school graduation rate of 95%. The structure was designed to celebrate the unification of black youth everywhere, thus becoming a symbol of Pan Africanism both in the architecture as well as the organization’s program. Smith-Alexander has been seeing this project through construction which is slated to be complete by March 2021.

In his spare time, he has given architectural lectures to art students at The New School and John Jay College with a focus on what it’s like to be an architectural designer in the Greater New York region. With his brother, he began LOEM (League of Exemplary Men) A mastermind group focused on providing education on financial literacy and direct guidance to black men on how to save and invest through the medium of creative real estate & e-commerce.

Alexander graduated from Howard University where he earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree and is a proud member of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA).

He is a proud first-generation Jamaican American based between New York City and the Caribbean region.