DIALECTIC VII: ARCHITECTURE AND CITIZENSHIP
DECOLONIZING ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY
Table of Contents
EDITORIAL [⤓]
Editorial: Methods for a Reconstructive Pedagogy // Anna Goodman, Shundana Yusaf [⤓]
ACADEMIC CULTURE [⤓]
Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy // Shundana Yusaf [⤓]
The Denizen Architecture Collective // Genevieve Wasser, Tucker Jones [⤓]
FIELDWORK [⤓]
Prioritizing Accountability in Architectural Education // Eric Blyth, Matthew Cranney, Shay Myers, Julia Warner [⤓]
From Postcolonial Critiques to Architectural Postcolonial Consciousness // Séverine Roussel, Philippe Zourgane [⤓]
SPEECH AND DISCOURSE [⤓]
A Reading List for the End of Architecture // Aneesha Dharwadker [⤓]
Teaching Architectural History in a Time of "Perpetual War" // Mrinalini Rajagopalan [⤓]
SCHOLARSHIP [⤓]
Modernity and the Chieftain Continuum // Mark Jarzombek [⤓]
Just as thorny an aspect of this pedagogic ambition is the need for decolonizing architectural pedagogy. Despite absorption of women, colored, and queer voices, the desire to reach out to the destitute, non-moderns, and difference, the studio culture still brings everything back to Western and capitalist modes of governance. Decolonization of education is a wide ranging ethical project spanning numerous disciplines, with the goal of recovering power for different ways of knowing and being, discredited by the universalist truth claims of Western system of knowledge. In our discipline, history of world architecture is one domain that is attempting to relieve architectural pedagogy from Euro-US-centric frameworks of imagining architecture. This highly myopic and narrow imagination is sustained by the myth of the neutral expert—that despite being thoroughly debunked by postcolonial critiques of development—persists in our field with a stubborn tenacity.
To bring this project to architecture requires that we take a hard look at architectural pedagogy’s placement within Cartesian epistemology. What of the cleft Descartes put between mind, matter, and spirit that made the world inert and an abstract proposition, and hence available for exploitation? What of the inability of sustainability efforts and green architecture to unshackle themselves from the foundational framework responsible for the near destruction of the planet? This may require more than the deployment of feminist, race, and queer theory (all also squarely Cartesian). This may mean pushing these theoretical accomplishments further, opening them to the wisdom of non-anthropocentric, in fact cosmocentric epistemologies of indigenous and folk cultures, so thoroughly discredited by dominant scientific thinking. What would architectural pedagogy and praxis look like if they became porous to perspectives based on systems of knowledge that have no place in current corporate design culture? What would its products and value system look like if it created a dialogue between Cartesian feminism, race, and queer theory and their non-Cartesian practices? How do we inculcate an ethos of lateral learning in our curricula without reducing the dominated cultural knowledge to our preexisting frameworks? How can “citizen” architects exploit these openings towards more equitable and sustainable futures? Does this make the idea of global citizenship viable or does it still remain an untenable ideal?
In this issue of Dialectic, submissions address both global citizenship training and the types of architectural practices it might ultimately promote. We want to better understand what happens when design practitioners and students are thrust from the comfortable realm of expertise into a space of compromise, accountability, and ethics. As architects move from one global location to another, what productive lessons are learned from the differently modern people they encounter? Can one learn to be a global citizen without leaving one’s “home” country? What role might architectural “practices without practice” such as public history, preservation, curatorial work, discourse, and research play in broadening our horizons beyond capitalist vision of architecture? In considering these questions, we invite scholars to allow careful observation of lived phenomenon to drive analysis.
Mira (Mimi) Locher
Created as a forum to explore and give voice to diverse viewpoints around important issues of our time, Dialectic was the brainchild of the former chair of the School of Architecture, Prescott Muir. Faculty editors, Shundana Yusaf and Ole Fischer, in concert with students, faculty, and guest editors, have shepherded the journal from its initial introspective beginnings to embracing an international perspective and presence. Dialectic VII: Architecture and Citizenship – Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy builds on the ideas and issues explored in the previous volumes. Dialectic I started with a broad look at the work produced in the School of Architecture. This led to an outward examination of the role of the economy in architectural education and practice with Dialectic II: Architecture between Boom and Bust. Continuing the exploration of pedagogy and practice, Dialectic III: Dream of Building or the Reality of Dreaming focused on the current state of designbuild education, an important and long-standing domain within our curriculum as well as that of many other architecture schools. Dialectic IV: Architecture at Service? built on the previous volume through a critical exploration of the broad role of architecture in society. That exploration led to the fifth volume, Dialectic V: The Figure of Vernacular in Architectural Education, investigating the definition and existence of vernacular architecture as a concept. From the conceptual to the concrete, Dialectic VI: Craft – The Art of Making Architecture, then offered a critical assessment of past functions and future possibilities for the role of craft in architecture.
Craft through building construction serves as one place where we as trained designers can connect to and learn from others in the building trades, both professionals and laypersons, formally trained and self-taught. We are quick to say that we value sweat equity in our design-build projects as a means for the homeowner to feel pride and have a stake in their house construction. We also are quick to say that we value engaging community members in design projects that involve their neighborhoods and families. But are we prepared to accept and contend with the variety of siuations these activities undoubtedly will bring forth for what we regard as architectural practice? Our value of learning from others who may not have formal training but do have vast local knowledge and a wealth of expertise through experience mandates our conscientious consideration of how we interact with others as architects and as fellow citizens. In addition, as educators we must reflect on how we teach students (and in doing so, also teach ourselves) to understand their (and our) individual self when interacting with others. What preconceptions, points of privilege, and prejudices might we be reinforcing – intentionally or not – through our activities? How does our teaching buttress or emasculate certain ideas and actions?
These questions and concepts, along with a nudge from the dean of the College of Architecture + Planning, Keith Diaz Moore, spurred a long hard look into our School of Architecture curriculum. Guided by a curriculum specialist from the University of Utah’s Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and propelled by the pointed questions and comprehensive research of Associate Chair Lisa Henry, the architecture faculty embarked on a journey to re-imagine our undergraduate and graduate curricula. Starting in fall 2016 and continuing presently, our monthly faculty meetings became animated discussions and engrossing workshops engaging the full faculty in the endeavor of redefining what and how we teach architecture.
The first step was to determine how much change we were willing to make. Do we shift a few things in our twenty-year-old curriculum or commit to real transformation? This decision was surprisingly easy to make. No more Band-Aids. We were ready to try something significantly different. We started by defining our “values” – the principles, concepts, and expertise that we believe to be vital to architecture education and practice today. The nine values we defined were agency, community engagement, critical creative thinking, design excellence, environmental resilience, global citizenship, leadership, risk-taking/exploration, and social equity. These overlap and connect to each other in a sort of Gordian knot – tangled yet ordered. These values also closely connect to our College’s “4 Rs” (Responsibility, Resilience, Respect, and Response), the product of a College-wide visioning session, pithily articulated by Dean Keith Diaz Moore.
Once our values were defined, we then discussed and debated how to best incorporate them into a curriculum, what teaching methods would be most effective – and would best exemplify these very same values. This time the result was a bit more surprising, with perhaps even greater impact. The faculty agreed that studio courses should no longer stand alone but must be integrated with history, theory, building technology, and communications. This integration must start with students, both undergraduate and graduate, learning a variety of research methods and applying them to studio projects. This process would entail intensive collaborative planning and teaching by almost every member of the faculty, including parttime adjuncts.
Working in small groups across areas of expertise, faculty defined learning objectives for each curricular area (building technology, communications, history/ theory/criticism, professional practice, and studio) and sorted them according to each semester of the two-year major and the graduate program. Next, the faculty teaching in each topic area used the objectives to begin building assignments and syllabi, in an ongoing process of creating, testing, and revising. In this process, it is easy to loosen our grip on our values as we concentrate on the hard work of preparing and teaching collaboratively, delivering the content required for NAAB accreditation, and meeting the expectations of an R-1 University. Yet this intensely complicated but highly rewarding process of de-centering the studio, this intentional movement away from teaching “Architecture with a capital A” as the “sage on the stage” to train the next generation of “hero-architects,” is the only way forward as we consider our interactions with others and our roles and responsibilities as global citizens and architects.
Signifying a monumental step forward on the rocky path toward curricular transformation and decentralization, Dialectic VII: Architecture and Citizenship – Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy provides a broad set of voices offering critiques and techniques, case studies and conceptual inquiries. On behalf of the School of Architecture, I hope Dialectic VII inspires change for you, just as it inspires and reminds us of the importance of change for—and in—ourselves as citizens, architects, educators, and students in and of the world.
EDITORIAL
METHODS FOR A RECONSTRUCTIVE PEDAGOGY
ANNA GOODMAN, SHUNDANA YUSAF
Anna Goodman
Dialectic Works
V3 Critical Interventions on the Politics of Practice in Community Design-Build
V7 Editorial: Methods for a Reconstructive Pedagogy
Shundana Yusaf
Dialectic Works
V3 The Future of Design Build in the 21st Century
Taking the Pulse of Bluff
A Home Doesn’t End at its Footprint’s Edge
Rosie Joe
V5 The Figure of Vernacular in Contemporary Architecture
V7 Editorial: Methods for a Reconstructive Pedagogy
Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy: Towards Cross-culturalism
2. Resilience: a systemic understanding that polycultures and diversity nurture greater ecological and community resilience;
3. Respect: a respect for the health and culture of all places; and
4. Response: the demand to respond to the grand challenges of our time through innovative and collaborative modes of practice that demonstrate our commitment to excellence and quality.1
As products of modern education, academics and architects are particularly well situated to address the needs of urban and rural poor, African Americans, refugees, LGBTQ youth, and other disadvantaged groups equally subsumed within the purifying project of modernity. The pairing of “architecture” and “citizenship” can nurture, as Diaz Moore sensitively phrases, an "ethic of care" that uses our institutional privilege and the standards of professional “excellence and quality” to address threats to all of our futures. The pairing encourages us to train students in envisioning projects that assuage imbalance and injustice in modern societies. In some instances, injustice might even imply a critique of modernity itself. At Utah and Portland State, like many other institutions where the editors and contributors of Dialectic VII have studied and taught, it is commonplace to find studio projects such as housing the homeless, envisioning Zero Waste kitchens, bringing design excellence to dignify aging, and imaginatively welcoming transgender persons in public bathrooms. However, the moment we turn our attention to the tribal, chieftain, nomadic, and indigenous social arrangements that dot the earth today we see thorny aberrations or uneasy arrangements within the modern fabric. Then, architecture and citizenship become antagonistic terms.
Citizenship embodies a mode of being in the world whose exigencies are at odds with the professional practice for which universities prepare students. Citizenship is a form of involved living defined by passionate forms of relating to others, compromises, ways of knowing (research methods) and ways of working (applied skills). None of these attributes are aimed at contributing to autonomous knowledge.
Rather, they seek to procreate communities in which citizenship is lived. The knowledge and difference produced by citizenship contributes to the survival, mobilization, and resilience of cultures in which it is practiced. In contrast, the professional contribution of architectural academics and designers seldom happens in attending to the needs of their own lives.
Instead, professional disciplines like architecture, based in modern universities all over the globe, are structured not by the interconnectedness of everyday life but by the division of labor, knowledge, and expertise.2 Our field is governed by the logic of scientific truth, efficiency, economy, originality, and knowledge for their own sake as well as for market viability. As a result, the professional and academic practice of architecture as it stands today is structurally incapable of the cultural affirmation of people whose value systems and social organization are at odds with industrial capitalism and modern science. How can one expect contemporary architects to contribute to the self-determination, healing, resistance, and recovery of systems of knowledge that scientific method and philosophical thought (think Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) have discredited as myth, superstition, and ignorance? Are architects not trained as modern "experts"? These are the mercenaries who help “develop” infrastructure in the Andean landscape; “empower” Bedouin women to artistically express themselves; and “teach” Afghan peasantry building skills so they can enter into the 21st-century economy.
The public interest design movement aims to extend modern benefits and expert knowledge to those whom the state and capitalism have so far failed to “serve.” However, the unwitting consequence of this honorable intention transforms to “failed to completely bracket and reorganize for participation in industrialized and commoditized culture.” The closures of thought behind well-meaning intentions like this alarm indigenous researchers like Linda Tuhiwai Smith, whose book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples calls on non-indigenous researchers (e.g., artists, anthropologists, lawyers) to kindly refrain from interfering in indigenous communities.3 It has led the anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin to call for de-professionalization of indigenous researchers and development experts if they truly want to contribute to the well-being of Andean culture. This is required, she argues, to preserve its unique “mode of being in the world, of being a person, of relating to others, both humans and non-humans, as well as different notions of time, of space and of nature.”4 The Eurocentric definition of “development” guiding architecture regards all the cultural arrangements that Mark Jarzombek heuristically calls the “chieftain continuum” as backward, stagnant, and altogether lacking. Fully aware of this, Marie Battiste, author of Decolonizing Education, has committed herself to overthrowing “cognitive imperialism”— namely, having to be successful by somebody else’s standards.5 She places competing definitions of development, creativity, and economic health at the heart of postcolonial education.
Eurocentric architectural education, research, and design methodologies ensure that the minds of those it graduates into the field of architecture are so completely colonized that they channel all their compassion, empathy, and service within the analytical frame of industrial rationality. As a result, wittingly or unwittingly, they reproduce the institutions of industrial and post-industrial capitalism and maintain the status quo. The editors of Dialectic VII responded to the limits of the 4Rs by including the subtitle “Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy.” We hope that Linda Tuhiwai Smith would approve of our attempts to engage disadvantaged groups in modern society who have little to no cultural memory, landscape intelligence, native language, social institutions, research methodologies, and connection to land to fight for an identity outside of the modern world. As researchers indigenous not to the chieftain, but to the modern world, our public interest design movement is well situated. It has the potential to critique disciplinary culture and bring excluded citizens fully into its fold while honoring their diversity and humanity. When really brazen, it can respond to the commoditization of values in industrialized societies and propose nuanced economic and social arrangements.
To become "global citizens," an aspiration shared by the faculty and Mimi Locker, the chair of School of Architecture at the University of Utah, is a radically different undertaking. It requires decolonizing knowledge: decolonizing the architectural mind, academic culture, fieldwork, disciplinary speech and discourse, scholarship, and design methodologies. It takes Keith Diaz Moore’s reference to poly-cultures and diversity as a nod to include all those people that colonized pedagogy has silenced and made invisible in its framework. This is a frighteningly tall order. We offer this issue of Dialectic as an opening to the uncharted territory of “architecture and global citizenship.” This requires a new order of things and the reconfiguration of the order of the 4Rs.
As the first of the four values, Responsibility creates a slippage in the aforementioned critique of professionalism. Responsibility implies policing—or at least self-policing, for example in the form of building codes, licensure, and codes of conduct. These make responsibility and professionalism synonymous. Both are treated as neutral holders of judgment. The issue then becomes how to achieve Responsibility or, even better, accountability while bypassing the mediating abstraction of professionalism. We propose starting with:
2) Resilience as “a systemic understanding that poly-cultures and diversity nurture greater ecological and community resilience.” The precondition of mutual accountability makes resilience a two-way street. This configuration in turn readies us for
3) Response, to mean collaboration not just between educators, architects, and students, but also with communities who hold a mirror to our professional identities (as educators, architects, and students). With respectful and resilient lateral learning, we may arrive at
4) Responsibility in a way that addresses the dangers of the mediating abstraction at the heart of professional training.
2) The challenges and rewards of taking students away from the academy, which we term “fieldwork”;
3) The potentials and limits of speech and discourse-based strategies enacted in seminar and lecture courses; and
4) New agendas for scholarly production.
The first step in pursuing a reconstructive pedagogy is to understand that all academic culture, and the academic culture of architectural education in particular, is a colonial project that disciplines the minds and bodies of students and faculty. As Pierre Bourdieu points out, education is a socializing process that not only organizes students’ sense of personal agency within structural constraints, but which also conveys upon them social capital that enables them with power and privilege outside the isolated world of the academy.6
Architecture schools produce individuals with disciplinary skills, but they also cultivate aspirations in those individuals towards ends, which are, at base, competitive, exploitative, and devaluing of non-expert knowledge systems. Thus, our biggest challenge comes not from the exclusion of women, people of color, and those with other marginalized identities (though those are significant), but rather from an academic culture that produces colonial habits of mind.
Shundana Yusaf, writing from the position of faculty, points out the dissonance that arises when critiques of modernity presented in seminar and lecture courses are inconsistent with students’ experience in the suite of other coursework that make up their education. With her “malleability hypothesis,” she emphasizes that the discipline can tolerate a diversification of approaches and perspectives. In fact, she argues, students can build on the “propensity for open-ended hypothesizing [that] comes from our training in architecture” to turn their critical education into tools of empowerment and creative and collaborative intellectual work. This, she argues, is what will enable the profession to remain relevant in the future.
Genevieve Wasser and Tucker Jones's essay, “The Denizen Collective,” captures students’ yearning for alternative modes of being. The experience of architectural education is colored heavily by a culture of efficiency and self-exploitation—fueled, as the authors point out, by coffee, hyper-critical juries, and all-nighters. Recent graduates of Portland State University’s M.Arch. program, Wasser and Jones reflect on their attempt to pursue new ways of interacting with colleagues, of producing and exchanging knowledge, and of intervening into their school’s culture. Their brief experiment holds within it seeds of an anti-capitalist politics that relies on gifting and collective ownership while also drawing on the potential for free democratic discourse. Yet, as they put it, “without dedicated leadership and organization, there was no system of accountability.” This promising but brief flare of activism, resting on the shoulders of young designers already overburdened by the disciplining requirements of their studies and their impending plunge into the working world, did not produce the lasting change they had anticipated.
A shift in culture, then, cannot come exclusively from students. The nature of financing university education and the pressures to enter professional practice necessarily mean generations of students will continually flow through architecture schools. Continuity and the space to stage creative acts of selfdetermination that fall outside the logics of individual cost-benefit analysis must be—at least in part—organized at an administration level and activated in both coursework and through the spaces, traditions, and social life of the school.
One of the most radical interventions on the structure of typical architectural education comes in the form of forays in design-build education that take students out of the classroom and places them in situations of hands-on learning in which they must negotiate community, material, environmental, and economic concerns in real-time. Given the agenda of this issue, we found it most appropriate to draw a parallel between this type of pedagogy and the rite of passage that fieldwork represents for students of anthropology. Anthropology has been well in advance of architecture in producing deep and sustained engagement with its own colonial foundations. For critical anthropologists like Paul Rabinow, leaving the academy for the field is an experience that allows the researcher not only to assert a problematic identity as neutral outside observer, but more positively, to return with a more profound understanding of their home culture.
We view the design-build studio/workshops described in the essays in Part 2 through this lens. These are not mere forays into professional culture, nor just skillacquisition boot camps. Rather, both practices force students into contact with radically different actors and modes of being: in the case of Design-Build Bluff, with the Navajo people in the Four Corners Area in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, and in the case of RozO architectes office’s “Architecture and Vegetation” workshop series, with a regional ecology that defies modern typological boundaries. Architectural education is, as Michel Foucault notes, a practice of the self; it describes models of relationships between humans, objects, and the environment. What we and the students involved learn from these experiences is that the buildings they create are not just propaganda pieces that celebrate hegemonic ideologies. Rather, these are complex multi-directional engagements with systems of knowledge, actors, and histories of violence that must be acknowledged. Yet, as Blyth et al. point out, these encounters, which seem so far outside the constraints of studio culture, must still conform to the academic calendar and the pressures students feel for portfolio-quality products that will secure their futures once they leave their brief time as sanctioned outsiders.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith might note that missing from the fieldwork conversation are clear indications that researchers/designers are answerable to the communities in which they build. Neither team worked with local researchers or craftspeople as guides, and while RozO architectes office’s workshops intentionally placed European students in the minority, they acknowledge that all their students are the products of modernist, colonial worldviews born from an international academic culture. While the Utah students build for specific clients, the studio in Reunion works on abstract notions of dwelling. For the sake of experimentation, they isolate ecology from the life-worlds of the inhabitants of the island. The architectural “textures” they propose offer compelling ways to describe the complexity of a post-colonial, even post-human, design process, but they also lean towards an abstraction uncomfortably close to the universalism from which they so desperately work to distance themselves. For this group, post-colonial scholarship is highly productive in informing an original process, but indigenous scholarship might offer future directions that re-center the lived postcolonial experience. In sum, the contact cultivated with both practices is transformative for the students involved, but our field has more work to do to disrupt the superstructures that organize architects’ ways of knowing and being in the world.
Beyond fieldwork, the burden of reconstructive education has often fallen on the shoulders of seminar and lecture courses in architectural history and theory. The two authors in this section take this issue of building new syllabi head on, offering similar and complementary strategies. Mrinalini Rajagopalan reenvisions the undergraduate survey of architectural history as a tool to "expand the imagination" of students. She uses three strategies—comparison, widening the lens, and social analysis—to show that canonic narratives of European cultural superiority cannot stand post-colonial probing. Her comparison of an indigenous example with Abbe Laugier’s "primitive hut" as the foundational act of modern architecture reveals Inuit Whalebone House to be far more sophisticated and culturally complex. Likewise, when she expands the lens to study Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical villa at Monticello in the wider context of the slave plantation, the neo-classical architecture belies democracy as a type of egalitarianism built on the “infrastructure of dehumanization.” In scrutinizing the social conditions of production of knowledge at al-Qarawiyyan University, she proves that claiming studio or any other space of knowledge-making as a space of exception is a farce. As she notes, more promising routes to address our challenges follow if we acknowledge the legacies of “modern universities as environments that simultaneously inspire cosmopolitan learning and action while actively perpetuating existing social inequities.”
Aneesha Dharwadker blames the Eurocentricism of architectural theory and design pedagogy for the slippage between responsibility and professionalism. Thinking through the most overt example of neoliberal high-end architectural practice, she shows that envisioning professionalism and responsibility as neutral holders of judgment results in a culture that grants aesthetic and environmentally sustainable status to one of the most expensive houses in the world, located in the city of Mumbai which has the thirdlargest slums in the world. She comes to the same conclusion as Rajagopalan: what narrative strategies do for lectures in architectural history, reading lists need to do for seminars in architectural theory.
She also invokes comparative analysis, widening the lens. “Introduce multiple, and at times productively conflicting, perspectives anchored in other parts of the world.” Comparisons keep authors and practitioners from hiding behind universalizing philosophies and professional abstractions, “especially in postcolonial places that have suffered environmentally, economically, politically, and socially precisely because of imperialist attitudes and actions.” To make visible the "othering" at the heart of these texts, she suggests re-reading Enlightenment giants Kant, Hegel, and Marx with tools offered by post-colonial critics like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, and historical realities of other modernities. Together, these strategies constitute the first steps in decolonizing history and theory coursework. Yet, introducing architecture students to a crash course in post-colonial scholarship leaves open the question of whether scholars—especially minorities and women—will continually be burdened to re-explain basic historical injustices.
To this point, what avenues do we have for positive, productive, post-colonial scholarship today? Mark Jarzombek’s essay offers a powerful model for the production of a different scholarly culture. Attending to a spectrum of political arrangements that he calls the “chieftain continuum,” Jarzombek brings into focus peoples who have been silenced and suppressed by modern scholarship and discourse. Using new and old tools of reconnaissance, he maps the robust trade relations between the proverbially civilized states and chieftain societies until around 300 years ago. The devastation of the chieftain continuum, he insists, “was not caused, however, by some natural transition to a superior form of governance, but by a concerted effort of de-chieftainization”: but by industrial imperialism, destruction of their ecology by mining or deforestation, replacement of shells with coins, and monotheism’s irreverent attitude to nature. Literacy, nation-state, capitalism, and development appear differently when seen from the perspective of these oral societies. Instead, they are understood as forces of subjugation and the destruction of a way of life that made modernity possible. “The chieftain world—with all its grey zones—has to be seen not as something before modernism, but as integral to the modern world and its history, even if this history wants nothing more even today than to finish the job.” This is only one route of scholarly exploration, but it is a powerful one. Another approach might document what researcher Anna Tsing calls the “zone of awkward engagement” between different systems of knowledge, and how both anti-modern and western capitalist approaches can be made equally strange.7
The architecture schools at Portland State University and the University of Utah share a commitment to what they respectively call Public Interest Design and Community-Engaged Learning. Both are aware of the fine line between the transformative potentials of their programs and the temptation to use communitybased design as a mere extension of students’ professionalization. As the critical anthropologist Tania Li points out, they ask at what point does partnership with community groups turn to trusteeship, or “the intent which is expressed by one source of agency to develop the capacities of another.”8
While shifting the content of pedagogy and scholarship is crucial to understanding where particular pedagogical approaches fall in this tricky territory, one key thing to reflect on is how faculty and students understand their own positioning or situatedness.9 To this question, two considerations not yet touched on are important: the genre in which content is being delivered, and the identity of those producing it.
The genres we undertake to express our social or political aspirations say as much as the content of our efforts. How one writes, how one teaches, and how one practices reflect the habits of mind, relationships to others, and methods of communication that need to be considered when formulating alternatives to normative models. As an academic journal following the pattern of peer-reviewed scholarly production, Dialectic itself plays into normative notions of expert-validated knowledge. To counteract this, we work to mentor and exchange feedback with writers, rather than creating an antagonistic relationship between the arbiters of knowledge and those seeking to gain access to the rewards of inclusion.
To the second point, our contributors draw attention to some of the structuring forces that organize critical scholarship today. As contributing authors, we have three South Asian women, all of whom are trained in elite western academies, and one contribution from a linguistically French team. This speaks perhaps to who carries the burden of post-colonial scholarship, with the former English colonies holding a privileged position in “speaking for” a diverse range of global experiences. We also have two teams of recent graduate students, both influenced by experiences in Public Interest Design and design-build education. This might represent, we argue, the success of these programs in augmenting students’ abilities to critically reflect on their own pedagogical experiences and resultant professional positions. It also speaks to the ways their respective programs have encouraged collaborative practice over individual production.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge the glaring omission that resulted from our process and procedures. In short, whose voices are absent? We sorely miss voices from indigenous scholars, a diverse group in and of itself who has significant stakes in the questions we are asking. Their absence is the strongest indication of the preliminary nature of our conclusions. The reason for their absence is first due to their lack of representation in the academy more generally and perhaps also the lack of support these scholars get for their efforts once admitted. In addition, decolonization theory and discussions of race in the U.S.—especially regarding the Black experience—have never found a comfortable ground of exchange. In a field where both of these discussions are highly underdeveloped, we hope that this issue and the one that follows provide a forum for productive exchange between these realms. This issue's silences likely also have to do with the framing of the proposal or the circulation of the brief, which likely appealed to the institutional and intellectual circle surrounding the editors—namely, those emerging from white-dominated, Eurocentric and elite institutions. While acknowledging these absences, we hope our contributions, and especially those of the included authors, encourage a diversification of pedagogical approaches that reach from the scale of the individual scholar to the structuring of entire curricula. The institutional shifts and incentives needed to produce a truly reconstructive pedagogy are difficult but attainable, and we hope our institutions might be models for others who feel the urgency of this proposal. ▪
ENDNOTES
1. Keith Diaz Moore, “Dean’s Welcome,” http://www.cap.utah.edu/our-mission/ (accessed Jan 10, 2018).
2. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin attributes the connection between university and factory to Emmanuel Kant, the grand architect of modern education that today dominates the entire globe. Referring to The Conflict of the Faculties, first published in 1798, she notes:
At the very beginning of his famous work Kant invokes—rather offhandedly—the factory as the model for the university and the organisation of knowledge (fabrikenmaessig) with its ‘division of labour, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee, and all of these together would form a kind of learned community called a university’ (Kant 1979: 23).
Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “From Fieldwork to Mutual Learning: Working with PRATEC,” Environmental Values 11 (2002): 359.
3. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012).
4. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, “From Fieldwork to Mutual Learning: Working with PRATEC,” Environmental Values 11 (2002): 345—67. Quote from p. 347.
5. Marrie Battiste, Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited, 2013); Mark Jarzombek, “Modernity and the Chieftain Continuum” Dialectic VII: 63—73.
6. oy Nash, “Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 11, No. 4, (1990), 431-447.
7. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press, 2005.
8. Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, 2007, 5.
9. The dependence of *meaning (and/or *identity) on the specifics of particular sociohistorical, geographical, and cultural—from Oxford Reference.
DECOLONIZING ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY:
TOWARDS CROSS-CULTURALISM
SHUNDANA YUSAF
Shundana Yusaf
Dialectic Works
V3 The Future of Design Build in the 21st Century
Taking the Pulse of Bluff
A Home Doesn’t End at its Footprint’s Edge
Rosie Joe
V5 The Figure of Vernacular in Contemporary Architecture
V7 Editorial: Methods for a Reconstructive Pedagogy
Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy: Towards Cross-culturalism
The discipline of architecture is robust enough to withstand multiple, sometimes competing interpretive frameworks, amongst which the western rational perspective is but one. As a demonstration, it outlines a History of Architecture undergraduate survey based on a broader conception of technology developed with colleagues at the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, GAHTC. Taking technologies of globalization (communication and transportation) as the lens through which to look at the history of architecture, the course allows students to see thousands of years of interaction and participation among diverse cultures. The theme also enables us to frame the history of Arab & Bedouin architecture in the context of history of media and technology, as opposed to the traditional framework of religion and primitivism. In so doing, the survey undercuts nationalist histories and spurious philosophies of the genius of a special (western, white) people, still at the heart of many survey books. In addition, our teaching material counters the disciplinary disposition to privilege the study and scrutiny of sites of power, like cities, by looking at the relationship between centers of power and the pushback they get from village and first society worlds. Our goal is to present students with different ways of attributing meaning to spaces and materials, forms, and buildings. We demonstrate that the construction of meaning is based in competing theories of self (ontology), of knowledge (epistemology) , and of the universe (cosmology). Taking aim at our profession’s self-understanding, this diversification of forms and roles of architecture across space and time offers a cross-cultural perspective.
Yet, approaching the problem through the vehicle of the survey has its limitations. It is unrealistic to expect students to remember, understand, and parse this radically different perspective without creating structural opportunities in the rest of the curriculum to synthesize, experiment, evaluate, and apply these ideas. The essay concludes with a discussion of changes happening in the University of Utah’s overall strategic planning. These are attempting to address this limitation, to go beyond demonstrating the contingency and impoverishment of modern thought towards the generation of new and more inclusive habits of mind of future architects.
The call for decolonizing architectural pedagogy in this essay requires a preceding consensus among us. We have to agree, in the first place, that architectural education, irrespective of diverse recruitment, is a colonial enterprise. That the 21st-century vocation of channeling the thought and socializing the aspirations of entrants in architectural schools, in every part of the world, is still entrenched in 19th-century colonial mentality. We have to share the cognition that we still dwell and operate out of the fortresses on the seashores of the colonized world, built between the 15th and 19th centuries, to enable the hegemony of Europe over the rest of us. Despite efforts, the knowledge diffused to those allowed entry into its precarious space is still dominated by what education theorist James A. Banks aptly calls “Western traditionalists.” 1
The profession engendered by Western traditionalists is still defined by middle-aged white men. It is undoubtedly graduating many more women and openly transgender people in the profession than in the 19th century, but Nel Noddings astutely notes that these new members have not yet transformed professional standards. To succeed, they have to assimilate to the notion of a “reasonable person,” still informed by male standards of decorum, originality, and looking the part. Likewise, the literature on professional practice, law, codes, and corporate practice is dominated by male theorists. As a result, transgender and “female experience” still “simply disappear.” 2
The tremendous strides we have made in critical theory and humanities-oriented studies of the built environment have been valuable only to a small extent beyond history and theory seminars. They have vociferously critiqued modernity and modern architecture, their repressions and exclusions. Yet, in most coursework and design, we promote modernity, as defined by male European architects and theorists, as the ideal above all else. For decades, postmodern critics have pointed out that formulation of knowledge, even as it has objectivity as the goal, cannot escape being wound up with personal, cultural, and social factors brought into the lab by the researchers. Yet we would be hard-pressed to find courses on building systems, communication, computation, material technologies, green design, and structural techniques to put on the table; the particular values, assumptions, perspectives, and intellectual positions of the educators or authors on the reading list of courses in those courses. Instead everything is taught as neutral and objective knowledge—placing it beyond the pale of critical probing. It would be in the best traditions to find professors who explain why they value technological developments in the European design offices, Western universities, and the most powerful corporate labs over those that are being developed in the mountains of Afghanistan to survive the precarious conditions of its endless war (Figure 1). If both are contemporaneous, both solve immediate afflictions of the modern world, and both are ingenious in contextual response, why is the former enshrined as cutting edge and the latter dubbed as primitive, and left out of syllabi?
Figure 1: Permanent settlement of a previously nomadic Kabuli family of four brothers and parents in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan shows ingenious reuse of airy jute bags and cement bags and other refuse for residences. Courtesy: Author.
Silences of syllabi developed in the tradition of Western empirical sciences indoctrinate students in an insidious ideology. They rhetorically (not scientifically) equate discoveries in nano-technology, self-changing smart materials, and robotic fabrications with “progress.” Here, “progress” has made little improvement on the tradition of the 19th-century concept of history, as a relentless forward march. The presentation of scientific information without a conversation of what is considered worthy of research—how is innovation evaluated, how rigorously is architectural application of material research associated with who benefits, who can afford it—diminishes understanding of the relationship between science and power. The result is training in blindness, bias, and a sense of superiority that has kept “cultural imperialism” and the affluent world’s hegemony alive.3 It also makes it difficult for undergraduates to realize what more and more complex fabrication systems do to the social organization of labor and bargaining rights of unions. The result in this case is a cognitive dissonance between their design intentions and design decisions.
The asymmetrical power of expertise, when veiled under egalitarian ethos of making our artistic services available not just to the paying few but all sections of the global society, crushes fragile ecosystems and ways of being in the world that are at odds with our taste and cognitive structure. And we never realize it. Our curricula’s uncritical appreciation of criticality, lukewarm enthusiasm for difference, and unimaginative love of imagination, has done little more than reproduce colonized minds and imperialistic bodies. Our discipline’s traditional valorization of novelty, monochromatic promotion of diversity of systems of knowledge, and worship of high tech has suffocated the cunning of hand. We are still on the bandwagon of development ideologies, long discredited by critics across the world; however, most architects have not gotten the memo that we need to move from development mentality to dialogue.
Conversations in classroom, workshop, and labs routinely obfuscate thinking through the role of high tech education in the deskilling and amnesia of modern society. The discussion of the ever-increasing dependence of building, repair, and adaptive-reuse on specialists, and the shrinking ability of communities to build for themselves, needs to rise to the surface. As architects get closer to scientists and lab experiments, design development becomes more convoluted. Thomas Schröpfer notes that it develops research and service centers to keep an eye on innovation in materials and structures.4 The more complicated a system, the higher the barrier of entry for previously self-building communities to intervene and take advantage of applications. This leads to what Stephen Moore aptly warns as the disempowering, anti-democratic stimuli embedded in large scale and complex systems of design and construction.5 The double-edged relationship of expertise to the democratic project as elucidated by the historian of science Paul Feyerabend is nowhere more valuable than in a profession like architecture.6
Before moving to make a case for post-colonial, globally multicultural/cross-cultural curricula, it must be said that this snapshot of the state of architectural education is how it appears to someone whose architectural training has taken place in the post-colonial world, and whose intellectual development has been shaped by the American academy. I belong to a generation of architectural historians whose political consciousness has been shaped by scholarship like Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. This is not a view of the center from the periphery. I am located neither at one nor the other. The only authorial voice that I can exercise is of a global citizen, and someone who is implicated in the project of training architects herself. Even as my scholarship, teaching, and disciplinary activism aspire to be grounded in scientific method, I do not speak as a “neutral” but as a “socially situated” scientist who aims to achieve objectivity by placing her subjectivity on the table. Position-taking, it must be remembered, is not simply an exercise of individual will and self- awareness. It is something others allow us. It is a collective feat, valued by peers, and encouraged by mentors, publishers, and readers. That I speak here on this topic suggests that we have arrived at a moment open to the intellectual reciprocity between scholars and educators from former colonizing and colonized cultures. Yet we have much hard work ahead of us that must be done collectively. We have to ensure that the post-colonial voices in history and theory of architecture are reduced neither to the voices of the “other” nor “humanists.” If typecast as the depository of these types of ideas, safely included but contained in such a way as to immunize the rest of the academy from the deeper implications of their critiques, we would only hasten the irrelevance of architects to the future. The profession will fail to resurrect itself and will remain an anachronistic curiosity of yesteryears.
Decolonizing architectural pedagogy requires delivering disciplinary education out of the European fortresses into the larger world. It mandates freeing our mental anchors from the canon of Brunelleschi, Ledoux, Le Corbusier, Rossi, Jean Nouvell, etc. The shift in curricular direction ought to be a shift away from the insular treatment of architectural production as an end in itself. It calls for a broader definition than monuments that privilege certain civilizational narratives above others. Canonic knowledge ought to be replaced with cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives of the built environment.
The irreverence—in fact, abandon—with which cross-cultural pedagogy demands the exploration of disciplinary limits is not a call for dismantling architecture and its institutions. On the contrary; we still stand on the strong and steady shoulders of our disciplinary ancestors. We benefit from the field established by them. Their study and production of great monuments and structural developments established architecture as a profession and academic discipline. Their emphasis of undergraduate surveys on history of artistic influence and technological rationality has not only framed the architect as possessing originality, creative cunning, and a force of historical change, but has also established architecture as an autonomous cultural field.
Far from reducing architecture to just a sign of capital, language, and politics, cross-cultural education rising from the ashes of decolonization is certain evidence of our discipline’s striking malleability. It relies on architecture’s ability to convincingly take whatever shape we give it. If we want it to be just media, it will be just media. Applied art, fine arts, technology, artistic genius, unfolding of the Hegelian Idea, a social production, producer of community, gender, race, class relations, nationalism, publicity, and consumption—it will adapt to all these framing devices equally well. Bringing this malleability to the fore is highly productive. It gives students a variety of ways in which to think about creative labor and the effects of spaces they propose. It is fruitful in making them see vividly the ease with which their strategies can turn against their intentions. History professors, studio instructors, and technology researchers can demonstrate to students the importance of inculcating a habit of separating artistic intentions from both the means of achieving them and historical effects. In this case, it is not the stock of information that they learn but a habit of mind that is of value.
The malleability or tenacity of the built environment to maintain its integrity, no matter what lens is imposed on it, should disarm our impulse to protect our territory. There is no way for theorists and practitioners of yesteryears to know this without the benefit of our excursions into the realm of humanities and social sciences. We can tell them we don't need history of styles, West-over-the-rest mindset, high tech above low tech and passive systems, or a choice between professionalism and social justice to mark our territory. Our territory is not going anywhere. We need not discount one in favor of another. Multiculturalism, like interdisciplinarity, does not threaten but strengthens architecture as a “field.” It enhances its capacity of governing the production and evaluation of its goods (buildings, codes, policies, registration, disciplined speech, exhibitions, etc.) according to its own internal criteria. Changing its rules so minorities in the discipline can see themselves, see difference, learn from one another, argue, and collaborate is vital. Practicing critical discourse, mutual respect, generosity, and listening undermines heroic notions of leadership, but gives pedagogues new tools to train their students as more than hirable technocrats, skilled labor and creative problem solvers; something more relevant than critically acclaimed but rarely hirable artists. Skills and tools for intervening in a multifaceted, ever-changing terrain of professional practice gives architectural students the chance to fashion themselves as socially responsible civic actors.
In pursuing a more robust pedagogy, in 2014 I joined a team of four architectural historians who have replaced the canonic survey that we were taught as students with a survey of global architecture. The thematic focus of our collaborative teaching material is the impact of different technologies of globalization on the history of architecture. Written into the topic of technologies of communication and transportation is interaction and participation among cultures. It undercuts nationalist histories and spurious philosophies of the genius of a special people. In four years we have produced a semester worth of peer-reviewed PowerPoints, lecture notes, handouts, quizzes and their keys, and bibliographies available as open source material for instructors. Our choices of technologies do not begin with world expos, railways, photography, and the phonograph. We do not prioritize modernity or mechanical technologies. Instead, we start with orality of first societies, speech as an early technology of communication. We feature early ships, the connective tissue created between the Indo-European world by the domestication of horses, 3,500 BCE, and the sub-Saharan Africa and Arabia by the domestication of camels 2,400 years later. We make room for medieval roads and first wheels, time keeping, mapping and fairs (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Cover image for undergraduate lecture Survey on Global History of Architecture created by Peter Christensen, Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Itohan Osayimwese, and Shundana Yusaf. Courtesy: Petr Brož, Arian Zwegers, BrokenSphere, and Author.
Figure 3: The ship-shaped pole house of Toraja people in Indonesia called tongkonan. Before Dutch colonialism, tongkonan were the most elaborate of the typology, built only by nobles. Courtesy: Arian Zwegers.
Our world history syllabus puts non-modern systems of knowledge that value the inarticulate, embodied techne on the same pedestal as articulate intellectual knowledge, the episteme. The sacred sections of granaries and pole houses in the rice belt of the Pacific Ocean are given the same due as narrowly functionalist layouts of Sachlich architects in Central Europe (Figure 3). Oral mentalities are put on par with literate attitudes to organizing information and space. Countering the disciplinary disposition to privilege the study and scrutiny of sites of power like cities, we look at the relationship between centers of power and the pushback they get from the dominated village worlds. We think through the competing logics of organization of urban and village communities. The same goes for nomadic and digital technologies, animistic and nationalist production of space, and the trading practices of land-respecting forest people without expansionist ambitions and empire-oriented civilizations.
Our goal is to present our students with different ways of attributing meaning to spaces and materials, forms, and buildings. We demonstrate that the construction of meaning is based in competing theories of self (ontology), of knowledge (epistemology) and of the universe (cosmology). It is the intersection of these three elements that makes the architecture of the Mongolian yurt different from the air-conditioned yurts dotting our national parks. We undo Max Weber’s distinction that he developed in the 1930s between “rational” and “traditional” behavior, so central to the makeup of our modern thinking and architectural education. 7 The diversification of forms and roles of architecture across space and time takes aim at our profession’s self-understanding. It reveals how our ideas of progress and dominating nature are antithetical to that of certain Aborigine tribes in Western Australia. Wade Davis reminds us that:
As recent as the 1960s, a schoolbook by the Treasury of Fauna of Australia listed the aboriginal people as an extant form of wildlife in Australia. What was missing was the failure of British to understand the subtlety of the devotional philosophy that was the dreaming. The whole purpose of life in Australia was not to improve anything. To the contrary it was to do the ritual gestures deemed to be necessary to maintaining the world just as it was at the time of its creation. As if all of Western thought had gone into pruning the shrubs in the Garden of Eden to keeping it just as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful conversation. Had we followed that trajectory as a species, yes, we wouldn’t have put a man on the moon, but on the other hand you wouldn’t be having a conference at Garrison, devoted to climate change. 8
Our disciplinary imagination is firmly grounded in the type of rationality inaugurated by the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment coming out of Europe and has a hard time seeing animistic wisdom as anything but primitive, of the past, outmoded. The disengagement between body and mind inaugurated by Descartes has conditioned us to objectify the world, to see both the world and our bodies mechanistically and functionally. Any paradigm that implicates the soul and material in one another is mistaken for superstitious and archaic. Our response to solve problems of inequity, racism, and environmental degradation is not with questioning the orientation of western technology and inserting a caveat in what we call objectivity, but with more technology and an untenably puritanical view of objectivity.
Figure 4: The drainage system at Lothal, India, 3,700 BCE Courtesy: Abhilashdvbk.
Figure 5: A Bedouin weaver in the Arabian black tent, photographed somewhere between 1898—1946. Courtesy: Photographer unknown.
Sun shrines in Chaco Canyon and drainage systems in Lothal, glazes on Han dynasty miniature houses and the spatialization of Mayan writing on temples in Copan show that animistic traditions are not primitive at all (Figure 4). They are sources of studying the movement of celestial bodies, engineering the land, communicating with ancestors, and preserving historical memory in buildings. Their wisdom is not outdated; they are differently sophisticated than us. Nor does modernity have any monopoly on liberal ideas. My lecture on camel cultures in the Arabian Peninsula reveals that all camel architecture is women’s architecture. The lightweight Arab tents are designed by them, woven by them, and erected by them. These Bedouin women in the most misogynistic part of the Muslim world have tremendous agency as designers, artists, and weavers, but it is exercised on different terms than we find in the west. Without romanticizing Arab nomads or Tuareg semi-sedentary camel herders, my camel lecture poses a question about what we call modern, democratic, egalitarian, or feminist (Figure 5). World history has allowed us to frame a history of Arab and Bedouin architecture in the context of a history of media and technology, as opposed to a history of religion and primitivism.
Yet, if the intellectual labor of the four of us does not elicit lateral learning from our students then all this work was for nothing. But as speculative studios and technology courses, environmental design, and thesis projects open up to learning from landscape intelligence and technics of making and moving material we may find accessible, democratic, and community-empowering technologies. This might enable us to undo the systematic suffocation of difference in modern thought.
One of the most precious ambitions of our global history survey is to demonstrate the contingency and impoverishment of modern thought. We hope to show the closures of the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalizable. What is at stake is the privilege that this form of thought enjoys due to its claims to universality, not whether it is itself a valuable addition to the repertoire of ways of knowing and doing.
Every lecture is divided into five twelve to fifteen minutes segments. Case studies are clearly divided. There is a summary slide at the end of each case study and a takeaway slide at the end. Inserted between case studies are two- to three-minute online quizzes and think-pair-share exercises. All my tests are open book and taken in groups of three. This method has proven not only to be an effective use of peer pressure but a form of active learning, where students argue the material with one another. Global history of architecture is only the smallest, most elementary step towards undermining cultural imperialism at the heart of architectural education. And yet, here the architectural nature of our teaching must be highlighted. Our teaching kits for GAHTC build on a mentality open to speculation. This propensity for open-ended hypothesizing comes from our training in architecture and is an approach we share with our students.
The lecture class exposes students, as if to a language, not of visual styles but a way of thinking about the global history of architecture. Language—as anyone who, like me, has tried to learn in a classroom will tell you—is retained and flourishes only if it is practiced in everyday life, outside the classroom. Likewise, educators are fully cognizant that what happens in a history class stays in history class. It is unrealistic to expect all but the most exceptional students to remember, understand, and parse through the immense amount of information dispersed at lightning speed. Without creating structural opportunities in the rest of the curriculum to carry the ideas and habits of mind outside fast-paced lectures, conduct further reading, synthesize, experiment, evaluate and apply ideas, it is unlikely that global history courses will do much more than inspire some students to pursue architectural history.
As educators come to accept the need for reinforcing critical messages across courses, schools of architecture begin to emphasize integrated curricula and collaborative teaching. In Fall 2018, the University of Utah unrolled a new curriculum with precisely these challenges in mind. Together with two other colleagues, I taught the history class alongside three classes on research methods for designers, architectural communications, and studio. We taught the same cohort of juniors. Even though history was not integrated but taught alongside the three courses whose assignments and messages crisscrossed into one another, the students carried into the other courses, lessons of comparative analysis and horizontal thinking modeled in the history lectures. The result was the appearance of collage-like formulations in studio work. Students superimposed the sectional organizations of Iranian bazaars over Parisian arcades; diagrammed the location of middens in Mesa Verde pueblos and the location of landfill in contemporary cities to think through competing attitudes to trash, personal accountability, and environmental behavior in Utah in the past and present. During material research, a group of students took inspiration from the tent of the Al Murrah people in South Arabia woven out of a composite of goat, camel, and sheep hair. They repurposed trashed grocery bags into yarn and then wove material, only to appreciate the accumulated skill and thought, patience and memory, vision and innovation that has gone into tensile carpets (Figure 6). Students intrigued by the personal networks sustaining refugee camps in Palestine or Sudan struggled to translate their de Certeau-like tactics in the guerilla tactics of their design proposals. History and theory here offer instruments of empowerment, intellectual tools, and social currency. In coming years I hope to populate this segment with many more examples and more sophisticated interfaces. It should be the goal of every syllabus, every class, to close the gap between ethical and practical thinking.
Figure 6: Student work: University of Utah Fall 2018, architecture student work by Stephanie King et al., Berber carpet weave. Courtesy: Author & Pi Guy.
The crisscrossing of ideas throughout the entire semester teaches students how to intervene in unfamiliar contexts. World history and architectural practice in the contemporary context share something in common. Both are vocations of generalists. Both force us to give up the farce of expertise in favor of activist and purposeful lines of inquiry. The idea of multicultural curricula is not to master every culture addressed. This is an impossible proposition. The goal is to operate with the humility of an apprentice. It is only by taking up the stance of a generalist and an apprentice that we can enter cross-cultural dialogue. Generalists and apprentices are defined by their openness to intervene in unfamiliar territories. This situates them uniquely to hold tradition and modernity, the aboriginal and the colonial, feminine and masculine, agrarian and urban, religious and scientific, oral and literate—and all the variety between these dubious categories of categorical difference—as mirrors to one another.
For this we have to teach ourselves to intersect the knowledge of village elders in China, who may be the last bastions of certain building skills, with the ideas articulated in the forty books of a Le Corbusier or Delirious New York. Positioning ourselves as generalists frees us to compare the weaving practices of women builders of the Al Murrah black tent in Southern Arabia with the techniques for designing and making prefabrication screens for a Herzog & de Meuron structure. We see the first embedded in Islamic and pre-Islamic myth and ritual of desert tribes, and the latter in our unquestioned belief in the superiority of technology, despite its near destruction of the planet. The first values the coextension of man, animals, and the world, and the assurance of tradition, and the latter places freedom from orthogonal lines and the excitement of novelty above all. Both are what Steve Marglin calls "organic" propositions—propositions in which the truth depends on the beliefs of agents. 9
Both are distinct from "atomic" propositions, i.e., descriptions independent of belief. However, because mainstream architectural pedagogy is the child of globally dominating economies and polities, backed by hard power, the dominant educational ideology has come to confuse its freedom from spirituality and coexistence with nature with freedom from myopia and muddled beliefs. The claim to objectivity and universality seem to flow naturally from such hubris. Opening ourselves to listening to those who practice spaces and ideas differently than ourselves is critical to the decolonization of our and our students’ minds. A multicultural curriculum is an excellent vessel to make explicit that our discipline’s universalist pretentions are just that: pretentions.
The decolonization of architectural pedagogy probes and refines our various commitments—be they to artistic autonomy, sustainability, digital architecture, community engagement, or public interest—by situating them in wider and more inclusive definitions of modernity, freedom, progress, technology, community, and lifestyle. Our students are currently steeped in the belief that traditional systems of behavior and social organization are objectively sub-optimal and in need of intervention by competent architectural experts. They arrive having internalized claims to universality made on behalf of European Enlightenment, and convinced of the universal desirability of Western modernity. Multiculturalism meddles with their programming so they can see the imperialist impulse of their programming, and hear the critique of modernity and its economic, political, and military armature by competing systems of architecture. The project of modernization has resisted indigenous criticism because of the marginalization of indigenous ideas of progress. We have to see the colonial nature of this practice and how it has subsumed our educational philosophy. Recognition is the first step towards change.
ENDNOTES
1. James A. Banks, “The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education,” Educational Researcher, Vol. 22, No. 5 (Jun. July, 1993), pp. 4—14.
2. Nel Noddings, “Feminist Critiques in the Professions,” Review of Research in Education, Vol. 16 (1990), p. 396.
3. Marie Battiste, Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited, 2013); and Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012).
4. Thomas Schröpfer, “The Future of Materials,” in Schröpfer, T., Carpenter, J., Kennedy, S., et al. in Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality (Berlin & Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012), pp.164—185.
5. Stephen Moore, "Technology, Place and the Nonmodern Thesis," in The Journal of Architectural Education, (Spring 2001): pp.130—139.
6. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd ed. (New York: Verso, 1993).
7. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
8. Wade Davis, “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World,” Plenary Talk at Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, Garrison Institute June 2013.
9. Stephen Marglin, Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance in Stephen Marglin and Frédérique Apffell-Marglin (London: Oxford University Press, 1990), “Towards the Decolonization of the Mind.”
THE DENIZEN ARCHITECTURE COLLECTIVE
GENEVIEVE WASSER, TUCKER JONES
Genevieve Wasser
Tucker Jones
As students of architecture, we are inculcated with the omnipresence of our discipline. We believe in our ability to shape the physical environment and design the stage for everyday and extraordinary encounters. We occupy, think, and create in a special space of distorted reality. But upon entering the architectural workforce, we become minions of the market. Passion, drive, collaboration, and ethics, galvanizing forces in the shelter of architecture school, dissolve beneath the pressure to be recognized as a professional.
The struggles that eventually led to the dissipation of the Denizen Architecture Collective are echoed in the space of transition from academia to practice. Writing from the bridge between the academy and the “real world,” we worry that we will fail to live up to our mission of pursuing extra-capitalist architecture. Efforts to engage other disciplines fall short, and we begin to concretize the belief systems of our clients, whether or not we agree with the ideas for which they stand. This think piece is an exploration of the power of the collective to foster experiments in citizenship and engage with the world beyond the bubble. It grapples with the challenges of moving beyond the cultural confines of academic structure and its pedagogic values.
Using the Denizen Architecture Collective as a point of departure, this paper examines the potential of collective agency and authorship as vehicles for envisioning an extra-capitalist read on the discipline and practice of architecture. We draw on practical and theoretical frameworks to examine architecture’s capacity to respond to moments of social unrest, and in so doing, examine the relationship between citizenship and architecture. Ultimately, we argue for a focus on the collective as a means to redirect the isolated, hierarchical, and apolitical nature of our discipline.
On November 9th, 2016, the front page of The New Yorker read: “The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”1 Following a campaign rampant with racism, sexism, and bigotry, the realization that America had made the choice to elect Trump was nothing short of sickening. To add insult to injury, Robert Ivy, the CEO of the AIA— the organization that represents the profession of architecture at the institutional level—published his letter of support for the Trump Administration.2
As graduate students of architecture at Portland State University, we found ourselves in the midst of an identity crisis. Like so many others living in liberal bubbles, we were completely blindsided by Trump’s victory. In just a short 24-hour period a palpable fog of utter confusion had settled over our existence. But the confusion also presented an opportunity. Conversations in the halls and classrooms of PSU’s School of Architecture revealed solidarity in this existential crisis, and more importantly, interest and energy to take a stance and do something about it.
Thus, in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, an informal group organized at PSU’s School of Architecture. We called ourselves the Denizen Architecture Collective. We were inspired by the name Citizen Architect, particularly given its reference to the work of Sam Mockbee and the Rural Studio. "Citizen" symbolizes belonging to something shared and greater than any one individual, and in turn, having a responsibility to that same shared something. But citizen is also a loaded word. It connotes a power dynamic in its use to describe legal status, and even more alarmingly, it had been appropriated by the President-Elect and other far-right groups to support hateful, nationalist rhetoric. We chose denizen as a replacement because denizen means someone who frequents a place; an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place.3 As such, it does not infuse a topdown binary relationship of citizen/outsider, but rather it suggests a performative condition of belonging.
The Denizen Architecture Collective consisted of graduate students, undergraduate students, and a few faculty members. With meetings open to anyone who wanted to participate, we set ourselves to the task of directing our outrage and disappointment towards productive efforts. Examining our broad frustrations around the divisions in our country and the general apathetic attitude we saw in our generation, we recognized that these same realities were also present in our architecture school community. For example, some of our peers had voted for Trump and we had no idea why. It was rare for graduate and undergraduate students to mingle outside the structure of the classroom, so, in lieu of a strong and unifying school culture, a keep-to-yourself mentality permeated our corridors; we lacked the infrastructure that might support and encourage engagement. (While PSU is home to the Center for Public Interest Design, to which many of us were affiliated, this served more as a curricular activity than an organization for direct action.)
It was through these observations that we established our own community as a site of resistance.
Our position was perhaps most authentically described by the manifesto we established to describe our shared values, some of which were professional and others interpersonal. To begin, in our professional work:
• we will not design walls to keep immigrants or refugees out,
• we will not design torture facilities,
• we will acknowledge and design for the needs of individual users over corporate and political interests,
• we will design spaces for all demographics, with a concerted effort to provide spaces for all nationalities and religions, and
• we will consider multiple publics when designing public spaces.
In social contexts:
• we will be diligent in sourcing information on both sides of an argument,
• we will practice person-to-person eye contact and put away our phones when listening to another speak,
• we will turn our devices off when not using them and unplug devices that do not need to be plugged in, and
• we will recycle our materials and first look to reuse before buying new (we will consume less).
These were not novel statements; on the contrary, the points were quite basic. They were significant in that they expressed our anger, indignation, and protest at the state of our political, cultural, social, and environmental spheres. Each item on the list represented a reaction to a perceived threat to the values that we shared as a collective, and that we hoped to advocate for in the discipline (Figures 1-4).
Figures 1-4: These posters are from the early formative days of the Denizen Collective, prior to having decided on a name. Because they were produced as part of a course assignment with a deadline, we borrowed the name Citizen Architect from Sam Mockbee and the rural studio. The posters reflect the sense of urgency we felt as students in the discipline of architecture. Courtesy: Tucker Jones, Alex Ruiz, Genevieve Wasser.
In his recent essay "Trump and Brexit: Reality in the Balance", Jeremy Till draws on the work of Anthony Giddens to make sense of the political and cultural crisis surrounding the 2016 U.S. election and Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union. 4 Particularly of interest are his interpretations of sustained optimism, pragmatic acceptance, and radical engagement to describe sociocultural responses to the sense of uncertainty generated by the forces of modernity.
Till describes sustained optimism as “a gilded version of a fresh and better future.” The contingencies and context surrounding our messy reality are intentionally overlooked in favor of “the illusion of positive spin.” Sustained optimism serves as a powerful tool of persuasion in campaign politics and is the basis for rationalizing contemporary neoliberal economics as politically neutral. Pandering to this same myth of political neutrality, sustained optimism also plays a role in mainstream architecture rhetoric. Till draws attention to the way in which major design outlets such as Dezeen, Arch Daily, and Inhabitat present buildings and objects entirely detached of any political, economic, or environmental context that might tarnish or complicate the image. This produces a whimsical world for architecture to inhabit, a world conveniently disassociated from reality.
Pragmatic acceptance is the attitude of playing the game because it is necessary for survival, even if it means sacrificing integrity. Radical engagement acknowledges perceived threats and mobilizes against them. Where sustained optimism and pragmatic acceptance are uncritical, and pragmatic acceptance is unproductive, radical engagement is both critical and productive. While radical engagement most holistically described the Denizen position, translating our ideas to direct action required navigating the tensions of sustained optimism and pragmatic acceptance.
Denizen’s most action-oriented endeavor involved installing a coffee cart on the third floor of the School of Architecture, where all the undergraduate studios were located. Coffee is to architecture students as electrolyte infusion is to long distance runners—that is, essential. We hoped that this 24-hour purveyor of coffee might ignite a stronger sense of community within our school. Locating the cart on the third floor was a strategic move to facilitate more interaction between graduate and undergraduate students, particularly given that until then the closest place to get coffee was a couple of buildings away. To expand on the relationship between the coffee cart and radical engagement, let us consider for a moment an Architectural Review think piece entitled “Perestroika of Life.” 5 Author Andrew Willimott explains the concept of the social condenser as a way to encourage human interaction and collective consciousness through spatial design. Since its origins in Constructivist Soviet Architecture of the 1920s and '30s, the social condenser has reappeared time and again as a reaction to social threats precipitated by capitalism and laissez-faire economics. For Willimott, visions of change capable of inspiring social movements must “emerge out of dialogue with utopia.” 6
A collectively created Coffee Cart punctuates the studio corridor, an artful assemblage collectively designed and built from donated student models. On it sits a shiny percolator rescued from the pantry of a faculty member, buttressed by the quintessential accompaniments: snacks, pamphlets, and free studio materials. A donation jar bursts at the seams with wrinkled cash and IOUs from bankrupt undergrads. The Coffee Cart is the water cooler for intellectual discussion and the mainspring of efficacious student movements and blossoming collaborations.
In a 2015 Architectural Review article, Reinier de Graaf argues that our discipline is a tool of capitalism, and an effective one at that. Citing Thomas Piketty’s economic theories, De Graaf describes how capitalism relies on disparity of wealth and inequality to function. Use value is consistently neglected for asset value, and architectural concepts transform in their focus from usability to marketability. 7 Ultimately, he posits that “Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its erstwhile ideological endeavor.” 8 This attitude illustrates what Till refers to as pragmatic acceptance of the problems embedded in our neoliberal economic model.
Take, for example, co-working and maker spaces. These “spaces” are business models marketed as an architectural design strategy that facilitates teamwork and opportunities for cross pollination across a variety of professional fields. However, they are really just boxes of minimal program where workers from different companies sit side-by-side with their faces glued to their laptops and mobile devices. Collaboration and cooperative idea generation are marketed instead of developed thoughtfully. The value of these spaces is determined by the amount of revenue they can generate instead of their potential to create human relationships or enhance the creative process. These contemporary co-working spaces are an example of pragmatic acceptance. Architects are willing to design, and even advocate for the production of these spaces knowing that the “collaborative” language is disingenuous. Architecture adopts the attitude of pragmatic acceptance when directed at increasing the monetary value of these work spaces without genuine consideration for their potential to create an atmosphere of collaboration, which is their stated function.
Conversely, the coffee cart operated outside the conventional marketplace, somewhere between donation-based and a sharing economy. We frame this as an extra-capitalist experiment because the Denizen Collective saw the cart as a mini test site for students and faculty to engage in an alternate marketplace. With no designated overseer, it was up to the greater collective to brew the coffee, clean the equipment, and add to the contents.
Late one fall night, two art students stand at the doors of the architecture school hoping for entry into the building that houses the wellknown Coffee Cart. With nothing else on campus open past midnight, word of the cart had spread quickly among the night owls. An accommodating undergrad with a key card lets the two in and points them in the direction of the Coffee Cart, where a group of students appear intensely engaged in conversation. Drawing closer, the two art students realize they are walking right into a meeting of the minds.
Members of the group sip coffee from an assortment of ceramic mugs as they lay out their latest plan of action for the Denizen Collective. A couple of students from the planning department are explaining their strategies for mapping vacant lots, social services, and spaces in the city that are out of view of the typical police sweep zones. An architecture undergrad explains to the two curious newcomers that they are deep in the midst of figuring out how best to combine their skills and resources to aid a houseless community advocacy group. The two art students are equally surprised and excited to hear this type of talk coming from such an unassuming gathering and settle in to join the brainstorming.
Historically, the box labeled "plays well with others" has been left unchecked on the architect’s report card. Responding to this, the Denizen Collective made it a goal to build relationships with allied disciplines in art and urban planning, in the spirit of formalizing a stronger, more potent collective network. Truth be told, we only made it to the initial stage when we attended a panel discussion about the challenges of planning in Trump’s America. Our reputation as poor collaborators thwarted our attempts at working with the planners, and our reluctance to leave our home in Shattuck Hall meant we had little contact with the art students, despite belonging to the same college.
This experience is symptomatic of a larger issue within the discipline of architecture, which translates into practice. In school we learn how to defend our design decisions and use our pursuasive powers as a tool to convince the jury of the merits of our ideas. Rather than active listening and participating in constructive dialogue, we are conditioned to smile and nod while we rationalize away critiques (sustained optimism) and discredit any non-expert. In addition to an obsession with our own ideas, a culture of isolation is rooted in the architecture school experience. Students spend so much time in studio with one another that there is little chance to broaden their scope of thought beyond the limits of architecture.
The Architecture Lobby (T-A-L) attributes architecture’s reluctance to engage with other players in the building industry to our inability to share credit, and thereby relinquish the claim to sole architectural genius. They are working to decentralize the authority of decision making, alongside highlighting the work of the countless builders, engineers, associate designers, and consultants who are essential to bringing a building into being. 9 Part of this effort involves positioning architects as workers instead of members of an elite social class. This is particularly helpful in discussing the building trades, where there is a separation between the people designing the building components and those putting them together. MAIO, an architectural office operating out of Barcelona, is also working toward an authentic model for collaboration, bringing people from across the world of design and construction to a literal table. This long table is central to their studio, serving as a collective work surface and a symbol of their design ethos. As an act of spatial production, it reflects the ideals of a studio actively working to deconstruct traditional hierarchies in architectural praxis. 10 They established their design philosophy or ideal, then built a space to reinforce this philosophy, which continues to carry through to projects like "the kitchenless city" and "110 rooms," where they push the boundaries of what we consider necessities for our living spaces. This young group of architects and designers prioritizes cross-disciplinary collaboration to inform spaces and built objects that are both flexible and adaptable.
Assemble, a UK-based design group, is another example of a design firm attempting to subvert the traditional role of architect as expert. In the Granby Four Streets development project, Assemble worked with the neighborhood’s uniquely structured Community Land Trust to help bring their longanticipated visions to life. Past urban regeneration efforts had failed because no one took the initiative to engage in dialogue with the people in Granby to find out what they wanted to see. The success of this project lies within the exchange of knowledge between the people of Granby and Assemble. The former shared the spirit of their community as a DIY and resourceful community, while the latter saw beyond the existing structures of communication and generated a spark to an already determined group of people. 11
Five years after its formation, a Denizen alumna returns to the School of Architecture as a guest critic for final reviews. She is delighted to spot the Coffee Cart. The skeleton is mostly unchanged, but the trusty percolator and donated mugs are gone. In their stead, a colorful array of book spines sits atop the basswood model fragments turned cabinetry. On closer examination, the volumes are important texts from electives past. Folders of printouts, carefully catalogued by topic, nestle between these books among the likes of the Whole Earth Catalogue and the Squatter’s Guide to London.
Someone has welded a tablet to the steel frame of the material exchange. She reaches out to touch it and it lights up to display the Denizen Database. Scrolling through the folders, she is struck by the amount of content that Denizen has created since she left. She opens up one folder titled “Alumni Entourage” and chuckles at the cutouts of students past and present who donated their likenesses in poses that are often needed to complete a last minute rendering.
From the outset, the Denizen Collective conceived of the Coffee Cart as an object that belonged not to the group, but to the greater collective of the school. We resisted our temptations as design students to craft a beautiful object, instead opting for the old busted-up AV cart, hoping that this might encourage a principle of collective and transferable ownership. In an essay titled “Returning Duchamp's Urinal to the Bathroom? On the Reconnection between Artistic Experimentation, Social Responsibility and Institutional Transformation,” Teddy Cruz calls for a revolution that would replace a system of economic excess with a system of social responsibility to legitimize creativity and artistic autonomy, thereby freeing the creative spirit from the oppressive grasp of conservative political forces. He argues for humble, small-scale interventions as catalysts for change, where the collective imagination is the creative agent in designing an inclusive urbanism. 12
Ultimately, we hoped that the Coffee Cart could serve as a sort of prototype for this theory, igniting the collective spirit of the school, which then might propel the cart through greater and greater programmatic and physical iterations. We believed that there was opportunity to generate tangible social/political action by drawing on the variety of viewpoints, wealth of knowledge, and diversity of skills available to a cooperative group of energized students. This was intended as an act of resistance to the notion that architecture is a product of isolated individual genius. While the Coffee Cart did not live up to our original expectations as a remarkable object of collective authorship, while in operation, it did serve as a place for informal interaction. Upon reflection, what came out of the Coffee Cart was proportional to the work that went into it.
Beyond the halls of academia, there are greater implications for embracing collective authorship, even extending beyond the architectural profession. For example, T-A-L founder Peggy Deamer explains how architects can change the way we work using common trade tools, specifically BIM, as a way to build stronger community among designers and builders. Instead of focusing on the technology’s ability to streamline the design process, or focusing on its limitations of form making, Deamer argues for a push to generate a library based on the wealth and variety of knowledge among firms coming from seemingly disparate, isolated projects. 13 Deamer goes on to explain how shared information can generate better relationships between every subgroup involved in an architectural project. There are opportunities to bring fabricators to the table at early stages in the design process, and consult with builders in a less formal way than handing them completed design development documents.
As architects we need to stop working in the vacuum we have created for ourselves. Both Deamer and Till point out that the future of architecture becomes increasingly less relevant as the push toward efficiency over quality grows increasingly important. In the current system of production, much of the work we do is subject to the chopping block of value engineering, and it will be important to be a driving force behind the changes to the field instead of passive passengers who see it change without us.
Despite the initial enthusiasm and determination for the Denizen Architecture Collective, we were unable to sustain momentum. As we adjusted to the perceived threats of the Trump Administration, the pressures of school work, volunteering, and assistantships outweighed the urgency of the collective, with radical engagement giving way to pragmatic acceptance.
Not surprisingly, this follows an all too common trend. As Slavoj Zizek points out, historically, instances of horizontal organization have a limited life span. In moments of passionate collective action, people feel a sense of accomplishment around coming together to stand up for their values. After the initial disruption dies down, normal flows resurface. Most people go back to everyday life, but that brief instance of shared experience is so powerful that participants still come away feeling fulfilled. Lack of organization and determination halt the momentum before it ever elicits any real change in the lives of everyday people.14
We might conclude, then, that the dissipation of the Denizen Architecture Collective was likely a foregone conclusion. In our idealistic understanding of the agency of the collective, we were extremely hesitant when it came to formalizing our role. Without dedicated leadership and organization there was no system of accountability.
Here it is important to distinguish that while our experiment in collective agency fell short, other projects based on these same principles (albeit with stronger organization and leadership) are alive and kicking. Most notably, The Architecture Lobby reported that “The effect of the postelection scramble was galvanizing, instantly doubling the member pool, and the lobby is planning a slate of new projects to take advantage of that momentum.”15
Through Denizen, we grappled with architecture’s relationship to a greater purpose. Writing now from the position of the professional world of architecture, we recognize that this is not unique to the school experience. For example, the centrality of the deadline carries through into practice and acts as a set of blinders to the big picture goals and ideals that we hold as recent graduates. We are trained to generate idea after idea and endless iterations of the preferred scheme, each beholden to a new deadline. Disturbingly, these pressures have little to do with the people who will dwell in these spaces.
While the concept of global citizenship acknowledges a greater purpose beyond the confines of architecture, as it relates to architecture it involves instilling the values of knowledge and relationships outside the discipline. It is about understanding how to be a person among other people, and more importantly, other people who are different from you. Difference is not determined by national boundaries; difference is born of a whole spectrum of factors including education, beliefs, regional biases, and so on. Consequently, going abroad is insufficient for learning global citizenship.
Even though the Denizen Architecture Collective was decidedly local in context, it contended with the same issues and taught the same lessons that are central to global citizenship. Flux, contingency, collective authorship, and human interaction are critical ideas in challenging the western ideal of individualism. This collective experiment was our way of reclaiming the idea of citizenship as a performative act of belonging, and more specifically, global citizenship as a means of understanding our common plight as human beings. We must take an active role in the rapidly changing social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of today’s world if we want to see changes that reflect our values. ▪
ENDNOTES
1. David Remnick, “An American Tragedy,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-2
2. Editors, “UPDATED: AIA Pledges to Work with Donald Trump, Membership Recoils,” The Architect’s Newspaper, November 11, 2016, https://archpaper. com/2016/11/aia-pledges-work-donald-trump-membership-recoils/.
3. Definition of Denizen. 2018. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ denizen.
4. Jeremy Till, “Reality in the Balance,” Places Journal, January 2017.
5. Andrew Willimott, “Perestroika of Life,” The Architectural Review, September 22, 2017, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/perestroika-of-life/10023681. article.
6. Ibid.
7. Reinier de Graaf, “Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission,” Architectural Review. April 24, 2015.
8. Ibid.
9. Peggy Deamer, “Architecture and Capitalism,” Interview by Graham Cairns, in Essays. October 1, 2016. http://architecture-lobby.org/writings/.
10. Anna Puigjaner, “Lecture Series,” University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, September, 7 2016. https://vimeo.com/182746033.
11. Nikil Saval, “Assemble: Making Things Happen,” the New York Times. April 19, 2015.
12. Teddy Cruz, Design as Future-making, ed. Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). pg. 139-148
13. Peggy Deamer, “Architecture and Capitalism,” interview by Graham Cairns, in Essays, October 1, 2016, http://architecture-lobby.org/writings/.
14. Slavoj Zizek, “How to Rebel,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCePcSouBOc
15. Samuel Medina, “Is the Architecture Lobby the Bernie Sanders of Architecture?” Metropolis, January 13, 2017, https://www.metropolismag.com/ architecture/architecture-lobby-bernie-sanders-architecture/.
PRIORITIZING ACCOUNTABILITY IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
TWO CASE STUDIES FROM DESIGNBUILDBLUFF
ERIC BLYTH, MATTHEW CRANNEY, SHAY MYERS, JULIA WARNER
Eric Blyth
Julia Warner
Shay Myers
Matthew Cranney
DesignBuildBLUFF, the University of Utah’s graduate Design/Build program, seems to have planted itself squarely in between what we call the mosaic and the monument. It is housed in the School of Architecture, offering the opportunity for first-year Masters in Architecture students to spend a year working with a client to design and build a project. After the first semester designing and developing construction documents, the class moves more than 300 miles south to Bluff, Utah where they spend a second semester building the project as a team. The program was founded in 2000 by Hank Louis as an elective for students to get hands-on experience building their own designs in a place where building codes are much less restrictive (Navajo Nation). Formally integrated into the university’s academic structure in 2013, the typical outcome of each program year is a newly built home for a family in need, designed and constructed by the students themselves.
The Little Water House (2013) highlights the concept of aging in place. Lone Tree (2017) in partnership with Dennehotso Chapter has become the first recognized sweat equity project in Navajo Nation. Cedar Hall (2016) and Fire Mesa (2018) both serve as community spaces in the town of Bluff, Utah. Together, these projects synthesize a new path forward in the practice of Public Interest Design/Build. As four recent graduates of the program, we reflect on our experiences in two completed projects, consider the conflicting goals and limitations that drove our work, and offer strategies toward a better practice of Public Interest Design/Build.
DesignBuildBLUFF is a self-styled Public Interest Design/Build (PIDB) program, integrating the pedagogical approaches of both Design/Build and PID. Students in a Design/Build program are responsible for designing and constructing a project. The process of building gives designers a visceral, tactile understanding of their creation. It provides an opportunity to iterate and adapt their designs as problems arise, and leads to a more informed designer. With the increasing digitization of the design process, there is knowledge to be gained from dealing with the physical constraints of the construction process. Design/Build forces students to be accountable to physical reality, and to work within the constraints of project completion on time and within budget.
Many contemporary academic Design/Build programs have a service component—projects built for non-profits or for disadvantaged clients who would otherwise be unable to afford design services. However, not all of these projects should be considered PID endeavors. We believe that adherence to the five tenets of PID, as defined by Abendroth and Bell, are appropriate criteria for designating work as PID:
1) Advocate with those who have a limited voice in public life.
2) Build structures for inclusion that engage stakeholders and allow communities to make decisions.
3) Promote social equality through discourse that reflects a range of values and social identities.
4) Generate ideas that grow from place and build local capacity.
5) Design to help conserve resources and minimize waste. 1
Whereas Design/Build forces designers to be accountable to the physical constraints of reality, PID asks designers to be accountable to the social context within which they work. It shifts the designer’s role from that of a lone author to that of a facilitator. By adhering to these tenets, a designer will avoid imposing his or her will onto a community. Designers must grapple with their social positions in relation to their clients and other community stakeholders, assess the position of stakeholders in relation to each other, and act in a way that is equitable in the face of structural power imbalances. It is entirely possible for an altruistic, service-based Design/Build project to presuppose a built solution to a community’s problem without doing any community engagement work. It is also entirely possible that a successful PID project might conclude that the solution to a community problem is not a built solution, but rather a social or programmatic solution.
So much of architectural education is focused on the production of monuments, singular breathtaking works. The monument is most frequently celebrated by stylized documentation, removed from time, captured in a triumphant moment. And while the monument has its rightful place, we believe the PID process trains architects to be mosaic makers, to see their projects as nodes within an existing sociocultural and physical mesh, and that it is this greater context that can elevate even the most humble projects into great works. The beauty and power of a successful mosaic is activated through use, and is best observed temporally.
When the maker’s (or fixer’s) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn’t separate from its internal or “engineering” standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that had this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete. 2
We believe that integrating Design/Build into a PID process is uniquely powerful. As Crawford elucidates, a maker’s work is enhanced by iterative exchange with a community of users. Design/Build work benefits from embracing its social context, and simultaneously, PID work is enhanced by being grounded in the tangible. The relationships developed in a community-engaged design process are deepened through the physical process of making, as our case studies demonstrate. DesignBuildBLUFF (DBB) is doing the difficult work of training mosaic makers, and while it has achieved a good deal of success, it faces challenges in fully embracing a PID process.
Unlike most academic Design/Build programs, DBB’s positioning between Design/Build and PID pedagogies affords students the unique opportunity to create and improve spaces in relationship with a community of users. The program’s most recent projects (Lone Tree and Fire Mesa) illustrate that while Design/Build pedagogy is both complicated and improved by a more holistic PID framework, the strict practicalities of an academic setting can restrict students’ ability to engage meaningfully in those wider frameworks.
Figure 1: Lone Tree, completed by DesignBuildBLUFF students in the Spring of 2017. Courtesy: DesignBuildBLUFF.
Figure 2: With nearly $50,000 available through cash and donations, DBB students built a prototype that cost more than three times the budget defined by the Dennehotso Sweat Equity Program for future homes. Courtesy: Authors.
In 2017, a grassroots tribal organization called Dennehotso Sweat Equity Project (DSEP) solicited DBB to design and build a prototype house that would address the dire need for culturally appropriate, affordable housing within the Dennehotso Chapter of Navajo Nation. The project was introduced as an opportunity to create an impact through capacity building and sweat equity, with the potential for the resulting house to become a prototype for future affordable housing development in the region (Figure 1). If the design was suitable and within the given budget, the DSEP project director hoped to build at least eight more houses the following year.
The inner workings of DSEP remained fairly concealed from students. Little was known about the political climate, level of community buy-in, source of funding, or long-term viability of the program. These elements are understandably complex, and given the restricted parameters of a two-semester course (a recurring theme), students were kept at a distance from this level of engagement. Instead, we were directed to focus on a goal within reach: a single home designed for flexibility of use and ease of construction, with special attention paid to cultural appropriateness and opportunities for expansion.
As part of the design semester curriculum, an ancillary lecture course provided the conceptual framework and tools with which to assess and evaluate our design decisions in a holistic way. The syllabus explored sources such as Public Interest Design Guidebook 3 and the online SEED Evaluator, 4 and exposed the downfalls of service-oriented design approaches that had come before us, the dangers of the white savior complex, the importance of community engagement, and the value of recognizing privilege.
In the safe confines of the studio, we considered infrastructural strategies of increasing economic accessibility, reducing environmental footprint, enabling job training, and instilling social support networks. Those elements within our reach, like incorporating natural materials or designing for expansion, were addressed with some success. However, the infrastructural components remained aspirational under the semester’s constraints, and we felt ourselves sliding into the now-familiar traps of service projects that came before us. The client’s budget restrictions could have been viewed as the project’s greatest PID opportunity. Historically, DBB’s annual project budget is $50K ($25K in cash funds, and approximately $25K from in-kind donations including building materials, appliances, and fixtures), while DSEP had budgeted only $15K per house (Figure 2). This money could have been spent a multitude of ways to further the long-term goals of the client: proving (or disproving) the concept of a $15K house, constructing three houses instead of one, or investing funds into expanding the DSEP infrastructure by purchasing tools, covering overhead, or creating and funding necessary positions. All were valid ideas until the realities of the academic calendar set in. Halfway through the build, the team received word that the director of DSEP had been laid off, and the program beyond this house had been put on hold indefinitely.
Figure 3: Scale model from the original Fire Mesa proposal, as presented to the clients, students, and faculty during the design semester. Courtesy: Authors.
Fire Mesa, the most public DBB project to date, did not have the well-defined parameters of a family home. In 2018, the Bluff Service Association (BSA), who operate the Bluff Community Center, saw a community kitchen as the first step toward transforming the Center’s expansive lot into a park with recreation for all: sports and games for children from the elementary school, and walking paths and fitness equipment for the town’s adults. The project brief for the design studio outlined a rentable cooking pavilion adjacent to the community center integrated into a schematic master plan for the entire site. The specifics were to be informed by conversations with BSA and community members. A series of public workshops and frequent studio discussions did not bring a consensus among the student cohort over key questions: what are we designing and who are we designing for?
Lacking clarity, four student teams proposed schematic designs, each addressing the criteria in different ways, and a design with a fifty-foot-long outdoor grill was the winner of a vote among the client, DBB faculty, and students. While it reduced the enclosed rentable kitchen space in favor of an outdoor grill, the winning proposal was the most conceptually clear, although arguably at the expense of responding to the site, program, and community input. The proposal envisioned two rammed earth walls of the kitchen, forming an L in plan and visible upon approaching the site; a grilling surface large enough for multiple families to use at once, also in rammed earth; and a canopy floating over slender columns to cover the grill and small accessory kitchen.
Fire Mesa, from the start, was monumental. It was based upon a simple floor plan and conceptual physical model (Figure 3). The incorporation of rammed earth, while aesthetically stunning, also introduced an immense technical challenge. As the selected design was developed, conversations about overall site strategy and master plan concept fell off as major changes were required to bring the initial proposal within the available budget. While attempts to glean a common vision from community members about the project were inadequate, and challenges in coordinating the construction process were discouraging, it was finally through the most daunting period of the build that we experienced buy-in from members of the community. Offering encouragement and support, many of them donned hard hats and grabbed shovels to move the many tons of dirt it took to build more than 600 cubic feet of rammed earth.
Laboring side-by-side with our neighbors in Bluff, and welcoming many others to see the earth-building process up close, proved to be the most formative period of developing community relationships. Without staging charrettes and workshops to hone in on a collective vision as we had attempted throughout the design process, we were finally able to see a community engaging in the building process as they found value in the project. As Crawford alludes to in Shop Class as Soul Craft,5 it is not until the maker and user are situated in place together that perfection can be conceived. In retrospect, the most collaborative experience of the project—one full of uncertainty, doubt and improvisation—was entirely circumstantial. Fire Mesa was the only one of four proposed designs to include rammed earth, and it seems unlikely that the project would have attracted as much interest from locals and passersby had it not been for the noisy process which produced the striking red walls (Figure 4). This element of happenstance begs the question of replicability. If Design/Build pedagogy is destined to churn out monuments, as DBB has in the past, perhaps there is a way to inject these vital moments of collaboration and community engagement into the construction process as an alternative to putting all the pressure on the design process.
Figure 4: Fire Mesa, completed by DesignBuildBLUFF students in the Spring of 2018. Courtesy: DesignBuildBLUFF.
DBB is constrained by incentives that favor monument-making, along with the continuity of timeintensive relationships required to create productive, community-engaged processes for building “structures of inclusion.” We suggest several strategies for addressing these constraints, broadly categorized as shifting a culture of appreciation, and expanding opportunities for engagement. These strategies are not only applicable to the situations in which DBB finds itself, but to the emergent field of PIDB at large.
DBB, like most organizations of its kind, is held to the standards of their governing institution and the sources of capital that make the work possible. With these two bodies at the helm, any shift in direction must prove its value. Generally, the simplest way to communicate the value of architectural work from afar is through visual documentation, and as students we were often reminded of the weight held by staged photos of our completed project. These images become the most powerful representation of our efforts for our individual portfolios, but are also invaluable to the school. They attract prospective students, increase admissions competition, heighten quality of student output, and ultimately enable improvement via capital acquisition from tuition and donations alike. It is not a selfish endeavor, it is a necessary one. But what happens when there are no settings to stage? What happens when it is a mosaic-in-the-making, an infrastructure and not a structure? Will it be valued in the same way? Will it be enough to continue attracting new students and funders?
In the case of Lone Tree, a beautiful set of photographs now memorializes our efforts on the DBB website, accompanied by text with no mention of the infrastructure necessary to implement all of our innovative ideas. We are instead left with a laundry list of our triumphs and one optimistic nugget: “It is hoped that the plans and principles set forth by this prototype will create a lasting legacy.” With great intentions, we delivered yet another monument for the catalog: a thoughtful, beautiful home completed on time and within an understood budget—a wise contingency plan, in retrospect, when the bigger picture fell away. But if the financial foundation and the academy it serves are only structured to value the monumental—Lone Tree will always be seen solely as a success—then the program will be forever limited in its scope. Any alternative path has to start at the top, with a shift toward valuing the mosaic just as much as the monument.
Alongside a value shift, DBB needs to address the breadth of opportunities it has created for its students and clients on the ground level. Considering the last three projects had the potential to be yearslong engagements, the program’s ability to foster successful extensive relationships with the rural and tribal communities in the months and years that surround its work should be examined.
As it currently stands, there is little room for overlap between project teams from class to class, with few opportunities to meaningfully engage with past students’ successes and failures. Although this may require a deeper level of documentation in some ways, it is possible that simply facilitating an overlap between classes would help to grow this institutional memory. A record of missteps and challenges faced by previous classes, along with an inventory of successful strategies is important to building knowledge. An "onthe-ground" manual of best practices will create the desired communication between different classes.
Similarly, this knowledge transfer is advantageous in building and maintaining client relationships and the strategies for community engagement. If the program is truly moving away from one-off single family homes and toward community-centered projects, it has an obligation to cultivate relationships with organizations such as DSEP or BSA. The maintenance of these relationships is certainly not a straightforward process, but exposure to that messy process is arguably one of DBB’s greatest assets as an academic program. It is through these communications that the groundwork of PID work is laid, and this is a facet of the program that students should be able to take advantage of.
That the program is within the School of Architecture, it is beholden to the curriculum requirements of an accredited graduate degree. With all the restrictions that this imposes, there are also opportunities for new roles to be created within or in collaboration with the program that can fulfill the needs of the project type. If anything, PIDB work should be an embrace of interdisciplinary collaboration, and DBB is poised to take advantage of its well-renowned partners in planning and multi-disciplinary design schools within the College of Architecture and Planning.
The “fundamental pedagogic ambition of Bluff [is] to raise technê (making) to the status of episteme (knowing) ... keep[ing] in check, the academic preference that has grown throughout the twentieth century, for the conceptual over the practical.”6 DBB has expanded this ambition, consciously moving towards an emergent PIDB practice. While students have been made aware of the need for a social technê to complement the physical, it has proven an elusive goal in need of continual reinvention. However, a concerted effort to measure and evaluate these social parameters can give this conversation a shared language for determining what success looks like. It is in this vein that we hope DBB and its peers will continue to push down the PIDB path, serving as necessary conduits to a new practice: one that interrogates the role of the architect in solving the great problems of our generation, and elevates the mosaic as an equal to the monument.
ENDNOTES
1. Lisa M. Abendroth and Bryan Bell, editors. Public Interest Design Practice Guidebook: SEED Methodology, Case Studies, and Critical Issues (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016).
2. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009).
3. Lisa M. Abendroth and Bryan Bell, editors. Public Interest Design Practice Guidebook: SEED Methodology, Case Studies, and Critical Issues (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016).
4. “SEED Evaluator 4.0.” SEED Network, http://www.seednetwork.org/seed-evaluator-4-0/. (Accessed Dec. 3, 2018).
5. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009).
6. Jose Galarza and Shundana Yusaf. "Taking the Pulse of Bluff." Dialectic, 2015, pp. 73–79.
FROM POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES TO ARCHITECTURAL POSTCOLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
SÉVERINE ROUSSEL, PHILIPPE ZOURGANE
Séverine Roussel
Philippe Zourgane
This series of international architecture and landscape workshops, titled “Architecture and Vegetation,” was organized by Séverine Roussel and Philippe Zourgane between 2002 and 2004. The session, "Architecture and Vegetation, Hybrid Home Spaces," that gathered together students from South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar, China, India, France, and Reunion Island in 2004 is presented here as a case study.
In this workshop, participants used vegetation to invent new relationships and new potentialities. In colonial territories, cultivated areas ordered the whole territory, including the city. Plant life had a certain autonomous agency, and the major/minor relationship between built and non-built space was inverted. Linking this inversion to the economic, financial, and political conditions of colonialism and post-colonialism allows us to avoid focusing solely on the planning and iconic architectures of these territories. We entitle this inversion of minor/major relationship as vegetation as a political agent. This foregrounds the ways in which vegetation orders social and economic relations. The use of vegetation today opens new fields not only for sustainable development and ecological purposes, but also for reworking vegetation as a political agent in a different way than it was used during the colonial period.
Questioning the role of architecture in a post-colonial context means also questioning the notion of culture: local culture, common culture, the shared colonial culture, and universal culture. Thus, speaking about decolonizing pedagogy is not primarily about positioning Western knowledge against non-Western forms of knowledge. It is instead about breaking the structures of domination put in place by the colonizing powers and recognizing the legitimacy of the precolonial cultures. We envision building upon all the above-mentioned layers of culture and engaging a singularity in the process of becoming, a process of "creolization" instead of "globalization."
There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial West.”
Between 2002 and 2004, Séverine Roussel and Philippe Zourgane (RozO architectes office) organized a series of international architecture and landscape workshops titled “ARCHITECTURE AND VEGETATION” on Reunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean. The workshops emerged from the recognition of the fading links between former colonies and colonizing countries that in turn revealed new arrangements, new trading routes, new aerial and shipping trajectories, and new fluxes. The boom of new global cities in the Indian Ocean region—Dubai, Guangzhou, Mumbai, and Singapore—has led to new configurations. Europe is no longer the center of the world, as it was in the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries. Young architects have to reinvent themselves in this context, to situate their design potentialities in this new web of relationships. The aim of the workshops was to draw a new map for contemporary architecture, one that would replace the frame of reference from a Western-centric reference point to a multi-focal approach organized around the Indian Ocean. The workshops brought together students from countries situated throughout this region—students who share a common history, a common climate, a colonial history, and a new global economic situation—alongside some students from Europe. It offered these students a chance to share experiences and knowledge and to build common methodological tools in architecture.
Architecture and territorial planning have long been tools for colonization. Plantations in the 16th-18th centuries crisscrossed the territory with lines of force, starting from the furrow that organized the slaves’ houses, the technical buildings, and the fences that made up enclosures. These lines, along with the network of roads and the city, created a matrix for the spatial organization of the colonial territory. The city was only an epiphenomenon of the plantation: the technical space connecting ships, stores, and warehouses, and, incidentally, the residents of the governor and local administrators. The city depended on the plantation, rather than the other way round. In the first phase of colonization, when plantations flourished, segmentation of spaces corresponded to the segmentation of social and racial groups and production. To each task corresponded a production tool: each human being was assigned a geographic location.2
During the second colonial period (19th-20th centuries), colonizers transformed the landscape as one strategy to pacify the colonized people. These transformations included the management of urban centers and management of the colonial territory at various scales, from village units to the scale of the whole colony. Trees, crossroads, natural springs and gathering points, signs, writings, micro-architecture, as well as administration buildings such as schools, courts, and town halls suppressed indigenous ways of organizing the landscape and constructed a new landscape over them. The simultaneous transformation of the different scales of landscape was a strategy of colonial warfare and a tool of assimilation and acculturation.3
Questioning the role of architecture in a post-colonial context means also questioning the notion of culture: local culture, common culture, the shared colonial culture, and universal culture. Many of the new colonized elite abandoned local education systems and formed the first global universal elite, developing the universal intellectual knowledge that we all share today while helping to extend Western culture to the rest of the world.4
Thus, for us, speaking about decolonizing pedagogy is not primarily about positioning Western knowledge against non-Western forms of knowledge. It is instead about breaking the structures of domination put in place by the colonizing powers and recognizing the legitimacy of the pre-colonial cultures. We envision building upon all the above-mentioned layers of culture and acknowledging the singularity of our shared experience of becoming, a process of creolization instead of globalization.5
Edouard Glissant defines creolization as “the meeting, the interference, the shock, the harmony and the disharmony between cultures, throughout the worldearth.”6 Globalization, in turn, is “harmonization to the bottom, the reign of multinationals, the standardizations, the uncontrolled ultraliberalism in global markets (a corporation advantageously relocating its factories in a distant country, a patient doesn’t have the right to buy drugs for the best value in a neighboring country) … the negative side of a wonderful reality that I call Globality.”7
The workshop series “ARCHITECTURE AND VEGETATION” addressed the following issues: Can we develop an architecture pedagogy that supports this singularity as opposed to universality? Can we take advantage of multiculturalism to engage singularity and speak of creolization processes in architecture? How can we encourage this creolization to occur?
Figure 1- Photo of the whole group of students on the workshop site. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
In 2004, this two-week workshop took place in Hell Bourg village in the Cirque de Salazie, on Reunion Island. 8 Directed by Séverine Roussel and Philippe Zourgane, with the support of the “Cité de l’Architecture” represented by Fiona Meadows, it gathered together fourty-four masters students (Figure 1) from nine faculties of architecture:
• Witwatersrand Faculty of Architecture (Johannesburg - South Africa)
• Nairobi Faculty of Architecture (Kenya)
• South China University of Technology (Guanzhou - China)
• Shenzhen Faculty of Architecture (China)
• Ahmedabad Faculty of Architecture - CEPT (India)
• L’École Supérieure des Métiers et Arts Plastiques (Antananarivo - Madagascar)
• Reunion Island branch of ENSA Montpellier (France)
• ENSA Clermont Ferrand (France)
• ENSA Montpellier (France)
Students were invited to design and build a 1:1 scale model of an experimental house. To help students draw on their research and intuitively shared knowledge of tropical architecture devices, they followed a set of rules: each room of this house had to blur the inside and outside, and vegetation had to be used as an architectural material.
The workshop comprised one week of design and one week of building. Students were divided into seven groups composed of students from different universities, with each group in charge of a different room of the house. Diversity in the groups was key to ensure sharing of knowledge and technologies. Students from northern countries were in a minority in each group (Figure 2).
Figure 2 - Week of design process. Students during the one week design working in groups to make models and sketches of their projects. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 3 - Building of the scale 1 model - Gastronomica. Students, during the one week of building, build a full scale model of their Gastronomic room using bamboo, prefabricated metal sheeting and green mesh shades. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 4 - Gastronomica. The Gastronomica room nearly finished is partially sheltered by giant bamboos on one side and is framing the large landscape on one end. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Frantz Fanon wrote, “Every colonized people — in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality — finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” 9 Decolonizing pedagogy accordingly requires the deconstruction of dominant global standards (mainstream architectural language) to incorporate diversity, to move forward, and to connect with singularity.
The program of the house consisted of the following seven rooms: one kitchen/dining room, one living room, one bathroom, two bedrooms, and two tropical lofts. A majority of the rooms’ designations were the same as those used in standard housing worldwide, suggesting the existence of a universal common usage of those rooms, and a common way of life. The decision to include a room that is not typically included in Western housing was made purposefully, to draw attention to the need to question those designations and to question ways of living and uses. The site is not an abstraction; it has peculiarities and a history, and from them the project arises.
The situation of the house in the countryside privileged vegetation as a design element. Plant life was central to colonial and modernist spatial operations. It has been the subject of botanical study, a source of wealth via spices or coffee, a field of production for agricultural plantations, and an exotic subject for literature and travel tales. During the 17th and 18th centuries, vegetation had a central position in the whole of Western society, being acclimatised and modified in botanical gardens. In the 19th century, vegetation became associated with a strict calculation of productivity and of the number of human beings needed to service the industry.
In colonial territories, cultivated areas ordered the whole territory, including the city. Plant life had a certain autonomous agency, and the major/minor relationship between built and non-built space was inverted. Linking this inversion to the economic, financial, and political conditions of colonialism and post-colonialism allows us to avoid focusing solely on these territories’ planning and iconic architectures. We entitle this inversion of minor/major relationship as vegetation as a political agent. 10 This foregrounds the ways in which vegetation orders social and economic relations. Vegetation orders financial flows, flows of human beings, and flows of intellectual ideas and personnel. In our post-colonial world, the role of vegetation in territorial planning and architecture allows designers to invent new relationships and new potentialities.
The workshop was situated in the hot and humid mountains, near a spectacular pond. The site held giant bamboo, cryptomeria trees, chayote lianas, hibiscus, and the remaining stone wall ruins of an old house. Students set up their living spaces in close connection with all the existing elements. Building materials and vegetation, micro- and macro landscape, were given the same level of importance and were considered as a pre-existing architectural frame and the potentialities from which the project emerged. This approach was a far cry from the modernistic tabula rasa.
The choice of materials included galvanised steel sheets, green mesh shades, plywood, transparent tarpaulin, wood battens, bamboo canes, and other natural materials. Our focus on materials reflects a belief that material choice can be one means to activate students’ political awareness due to the economic, political, and social networks involved in the procurement and distribution of particular materials worldwide. All our chosen materials are low-tech, lightweight, and affordable, making them popular for low-cost and informal construction in countries on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Lightweight materials are valued for their low thermal inertia and as filters, external skins, sun protections, visual protections, and internal separation screens. We view the use of these materials falling somewhere between the construction of space and what we refer to as “texture.” Following different social and environmental rhythms, these materials allow houses to be transformed for a single event or over a longer period as a family grows, not incidentally, fulfilling the modernist architectural fantasy of the modular, transformable dwelling. Architectural types such as the “garden house” suggest human dwelling spaces while seamlessly merging with the surrounding vegetation. In these ways, buildings are less enclosed structures than part of the textures made up of building fragments and cultivated biological features knitted together by untamed vegetation.
Given these precedents, the workshop set students the task of reinventing human uses by using vegetation as an architectural tool. Through this process we were able to draw several important conclusions.
First, students’ work questions standard domestic programming—living rooms, bedrooms. In some cases, students updated traditional practices (such as sleeping outside in summer, an outdoor kitchen, or an outdoor shower) that had disappeared in contemporary housing. In other cases, they were eager to design spaces in tune with the climate and nature.
In one experiment, the living room, re-named Alive Living Room, was not designed as the living space for a family but as a space to enjoy the refreshing breeze that offers an escape from humidity. Transparent swing panels allow the regulation of air flow without hiding the view. The room was built in the shade of a clump of giant bamboos to protect the corrugated sheet roof from heat.
The kitchen/dining room, named Gastronomica, was designed with two cooking areas: the main kitchen area outdoors, and an indoor one for use in case of rain. The design of the space allows the table to easily be rotated for use completely outside (to enjoy the warmth of sunshine in winter or the fresh night air in summer) or in an outside-but-covered situation (protected from direct sun in summer) (Figure 3, 4).
The bathroom, Mossy Bath, was built in the portion of the site that contained ruins. It includes a sun bath area and an outdoor shower. The design sought a direct connection between sun and skin, wind and skin, moss and skin. The large bath space can be shared by several persons, subverting typical expectation of privacy and use (Figure 5).
Figure 5 - Mossy bath. The Mossy bath room was built in the ruins on the site . Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 6 - Building of the scale 1 model Threshold loft. To build the full scale model of the Threshold loft, students transformed the natural slope of the site to create a succession of levels and thus literally inhabit the topography. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 7 - Theshold loft. The Threshold loft establishes continuity with the adjacent spaces formed by the vegetation. This space is a modulation or variation, not a break. Ceiling heights elongate the height of the trees’ branches. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
A room named Possible Loft revisits the traditional veranda, as it is disconnected from other rooms. It provides shade, frames the landscape, and accelerates air flow. Another room named Threshold loft was built on the slope, with a succession of levels to literally inhabit the topography. This space is defined by its quality of light, type of humidity, and seating for small groups. It establishes continuity with the adjacent spaces formed by the vegetation:—it is a modulation or variation, not a break. Ceiling heights elongate the height of the trees’ branches (Figure 6, 7).
The students created a house in which the placement of each room on the site considered climactic comfort, taking advantage of the existing topography, vegetation, views, draughts and breezes, and areas of shadow
This typology is common on Reunion Island in spontaneous housing districts. It required the design of a new spatiality that the students named The Link—a covered path connecting all the rooms together (necessary in case of rain) (Figure 9, 10).
Figure 8 - General model at the end of the design week. Picture of the whole house model at the end of the one week design. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 9 - Design documents The Link. Selection of sketches and models presented by the group of students in charge of the general coherence of the house project. This group proposed a new spatiality that the students named The Link. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 10 - The Link. One portion of the full scale model of the covered path connecting all the rooms together called the Link by the students using bamboo structure. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Figure 11 - Building of the scale 1 model - Possible Loft. Students build the full scale model of Possible loft which is a large space free of pillars whose structure revisits a traditional Chinese structure assembled flatwise on the ground and then raised in the upright position with the force of only a few persons. Courtesy: René Paul Savignan.
Structural design mixed different concepts. The Gastronomica model used a complex grid structure; lightweight materials and lightweight structures from the Indian Ocean were mixed with high-tech knowledge. The group that realised the Possible loft model designed a structure combining different knowledge bases to design a large space free of pillars. In the absence of scaffolding, one of the Chinese students taught the others about a traditional Chinese structure that is assembled flatwise on the ground and then raised in the upright position with the force of only a few persons (Figure 11).
In general, students’ contributions did not bear a direct relationship with their own countries. In fact, in a context where Western standards are omnipresent and developing one’s own singularity is difficult, such contributions can’t emerge. Becoming aware of one’s own culture is a slow and nonlinear process. We intend the word culture to describe one that is current and constantly evolving. Embracing culture in this way is less about reconnecting with one’s own culture than it is about standing back from our everyday lives to understand changes in our own culture at a given time.
Our practice and pedagogy strive to redefine architecture. We speak about substances instead of forms; a pure substance is not defined by its limits but by its quality. We advocate for an architecture that intermingles nature and artifice, inside and outside spaces. We design hybrids that are no longer objects but rather textures characterized by a logic of sensations.11
This architecture doesn’t produce recurrent and well-identified typologies, but substances constantly changed by new habits, new desires, or newcomers who bring a new cultural background. Creolization processes are thus activated in architecture.
Borrowing the concept of non finito/non cominciato, which Giulio Carlo Argan uses to describe Michelangelo Buonarroti’s practice, our design work and teaching focuses on the activation of potentials, not on a tabula rasa, but within a constantly evolving field which is never “complete.”12 It offers an alternative way to mix concepts and thoughts without hierarchy, making room for a field of possibilities organized by forces and individual design concepts.
The workshops focused on exploring new bodily capacities, and students had to work through a nonformal approach. The result is an architecture that is fluid, following use and body movement: a hands-on, non-formal approach whose theoretical grounding resides in the design process itself. A new identity emerges from these bodily encounters, from a reconstructed memory, from our new living conditions. Perhaps we have to think about our identities as no longer overdetermined by the perpetual dualism imposed by Western modernity (such as colonizer/colonized, white/black, or dominant/dominated), but instead a being constructed in a much more fragmented way: a becoming Creole that mixes experiences, cultures, and political consciousness without hierarchy. ▪
ENDNOTES
1. Homi Bhabha, The location of culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 28.
2. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de La Relation, Poétique III, (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1990), 78.
3. Philippe Zourgane, "Programming the landscape," in Destroy, Build, Secure, Readings on pacification, Edited by Tyler Wall, Parastou Saberi and William Jackson, (Ottawa: Red Quill Volume, 2017).
4. The spreading worldwide of the universal culture outside Europe began with the first colonial movement (XVI-XVIIIth century) with key words of the enlightenment such as democracy, freedom, equality; key words that remained an abstract set of tools in the colonial space.
5. We borrow our conception of the process of becoming from Achille Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre, (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2013), 42—143.
6. Edouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997), 194.
7. Edouard Glissant, La cohée du Lamentin Poétique V, (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2005), 15.
8. The book Architecture and vegetation. Hybrid home spaces is archiving this workshop. French version: Monografik Edition, Paris, 2006. English version : David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg, 2006
9. Fanon, Frantz, Peau noire, Masques blancs, (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 37. “Tout peuple colonisé — c’est-à-dire tout peuple au sein duquel a pris naissance un complexe d’infériorité, du fait de la mise au tombeau de l’originalité culturelle locale — se situe vis-à-vis du langage de la nation civilisatrice, c’est-à-dire de la culture métropolitaine. Le colonisé se sera d’autant plus échappé de sa brousse qu’il aura fait siennes les valeurs culturelles de la métropole.” English version, Pluto Press, London (1986); new edition published 2008.
10. Philippe Zourgane, The Architectural Free Zone: Reunion Island and the Politics of Vegetation, unpublished Ph.D. Goldsmith College, London, 2013.
11. For a more in-depth discussion of this concept, see Gilles Deleuze, Qu’est ce que la philosophie?, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991) and Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logique la sensation, (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981).
12. Giulio Carlo Argan e Bruno Contardi, Michelangelo Architetto, (Milano: Mondadori Electa, 1990).
A READING LIST FOR THE END OF ARCHITECTURE
ANEESHA DHARWADKER
Aneesha Dharwadker
Decolonizing design pedagogy begins with disassembling the Enlightenment-based canon. In architectural education, colonialism can no longer be marginalized, because it catalyzed many of the advancements held up as disciplinary paradigm shifts. One such example is the Industrial Revolution and its resultant urbanism, fueled by raw cotton from colonial India and American slave plantations.
The first part of this paper surveys contemporary writing relevant to architecture today, highlighting moments where deeply embedded orientalist tendencies emerge. Scholarship under scrutiny ranges from the celebrated (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which mentions colonialism, parenthetically, only a handful of times, and Saskia Sassen’s essays on the global city, which have overlooked the globality of colonial port cities) to the mundane (the ARE 5.0 Review Manual, which still frames urban development as a self-supported western phenomenon). These and other works contribute to the enduring illusion that colonialism—capitalism’s “midwife”1—is unrelated to how our buildings, cities, and geopolitics operate today. I argue that they are in fact inextricable.
The second part offers “A Reading List for the End of Architecture” as a tool for decolonizing pedagogy: a potential semester-long syllabus, but also a manifesto. Organized into fifteen themes paired with guiding questions, the list juxtaposes works by G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and other canonical theorists against works by Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Kamel Daoud, Gayatri Spivak, Tristram Hunt, and other contemporary thinkers disputing the persistent power imbalances that ultimately manifest architecturally. Proposed themes include “Embedded Racism in Architecture Theory,” “Historiography and the Hegelian Dialectic,” “Architecture as Colonization,” and “Architectures of Exclusion.” The list seeks to equip students of the built environment to dispute and reinvent their disciplines.
“Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the world today.”
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)
“Modern thought is a colonial enterprise.”
"Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy: Towards Crossculturalism," Dialectic VII (2019)
In 2010, the world’s largest and most expensive home was completed as the Antilia Residence in Mumbai. Academics have paid some attention to the building, but over the past decade it has received primarily journalistic coverage. 2 Antilia has been heralded in mass media through a series of architectural superlatives: its height (568 feet) and cost (one billion or more USD), the largest known for a single-family residence; its sprawling, luxurious program (covered parking, corporate offices, multiple private gardens, and a fourteen-story, 35,000-square-foot residence); its lavish interior décor; its parking capacity (160 cars); its working staff size (600); or its number of planned helipads (three, with at least one constructed). It was designed by Perkins + Will, who beat out a slate of other high-profile firms in a competition for the project. 3 Hirsch Bedner and Associates, an American firm with offices in fourteen countries, consulted the clients—the Ambani family—on the interior design, and an Australian company, CIMIC (then known as Leighton Holdings), executed the construction. Though embedded in the Mumbai skyline, Antilia seeks an otherworldly mystique: it is named after a mythical island west of Portugal supposedly settled by Iberian Christians in the 8th century.
This is the postmodern, postcolonial, post-recession sublime. With effectively limitless resources, an Indian industrialist can hire a Chicago-based architect, a California-based interior designer, and an Australian contractor to labor for years, producing the ultimate spatial symbol of globalization and concentrated capital with a name inspired by Mumbai’s earliest European colonizers. The historic, cultural contexts of Mumbai and India are invisible in the architectural organization, aside from the unsuccessfully-executed concept of vastu shastra, 4 an architectural planning concept derived from early modern Indian design treatises which connected the earth to the cosmos through layered square and circular geometries; 5 certainly, South Asia’s essential role as a formerly-colonized territory goes unacknowledged. The architecture erases any possibility of difference—its hanging gardens, offset floor plates, and glass walls could exist anywhere with enough investment in irrigation, structural systems, and air conditioning. The presence of unrestricted capital here reduces design agency to technical expertise and client-centered detailing, and any sense of moderation, public obligation, or social ethics is lost. The environment is an obstacle rather than an inspiration.
In Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta writes:
The notion of what is a luxury and what is a basic need has been upended in Bombay. Every slum I see in Jogeshwari has a television; antennas sprout in silver branches above the shanties. Many in the middle-class slums have motorcycles, even cars. People in Bombay eat relatively well, too, even the slum dwellers. The real luxuries are running water, clean bathrooms, transport and housing fit for human beings. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you live in the suburbs, you’ll either curse in your car, as you drive for two hours each way toward the center, or asphyxiate in the train compartments, even the first-class ones. The greatest luxury of all is solitude.6
Since 2004, when Mehta’s book was published, Mumbai has gone from a maximum city, full of these kinds of contradictions, to a truly hyperbolic urbanism. The population of its Metropolitan Region is now more than twenty million people, packed into 1,600 square miles (an area smaller than Delaware). By 2015 there were nearly 3,300 “clusters” of slums across the city. 7 Dharavi, which alone shelters around a million people, registers in photography from space. 8 While the breadth and internal complexity of this landscape is itself a startling phenomenon, more sobering are the adjacencies of these zones to their wellappointed neighbors. For instance, a network of about three square miles of slums lies immediately next to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, now famous for its international Terminal 2 constructed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in 2014. The view flying into this terminal is a sea of corrugated plastic and metal roofs, India’s dominant signifier of an incremental and particulate urbanism.
In this context, Antilia embodies how global forces—labor, capital, materials, technology, and expertise—converge to produce architecture that ultimately fails the public and the environment. The price, as it were, of solitude. The dubious ethics of the program, perpetuating extreme wealth through real estate in a postcolonial city that cannot adequately house all its people, are legitimized because the building is sustainable and, in the words of the architect, “interesting”; sustainability, especially, is used in this case as a self-justifying end. 9 Yet if a “green” building still generates monthly energy bills in the 100,000 USD range and encourages the high carbon footprints of its inhabitants, any technological progress it claims is superficial. 10 The Guardian has aptly christened this genre “surreal estate.” 11
How did we get here? What confluence of architectural epistemologies, ethical frameworks, and design practice methods made this project acceptable, even desirable and defensible? What disciplinary-scale failures had to occur for designers to offer their services so eagerly to such clients? Economic inequality and a neoliberal turn in high-end architectural practice play a significant role, but architectural theory and design pedagogy are also complicit. Antilia’s gross incongruity in its setting reinforces that contemporary architecture theory, and the way it is taught, is still too narrow to accommodate the postcolonial conditions that will continue to be the sites of prominent design projects in the future. The universalizing impulses in canonical architecture literature, which is rooted primarily in a Germanic Enlightenment-based body of work, translate into universalized forms, programs, materials, and technologies in built work. To unsettle these deeply embedded tendencies, the teaching of architectural theory can be “decolonized” to introduce multiple, and at times productively conflicting, perspectives anchored in other parts of the world.
This essay explores one method for decolonizing design pedagogy: rethinking the core architecture theory syllabus. The syllabus presented here merges design history, historiography, and philosophy into the larger category of theory, suggesting that each of these paradigms cannot be sufficiently contextualized without the others. We can no longer read architecture “history” written from a Eurocentric or universalist perspective without examining the underlying biases of the authors; likewise, practitioners today can no longer depend on universalizing philosophies like sustainability to exclusively guide their project designs. In postcolonial contexts, these universalist attitudes have been responsible for creating and perpetuating the very crises—economic, cultural, social—that architects and urban designers are now attempting to solve through technological remedies. Antilia, for instance, is an antihistorical, ethically-compromised, and resource-heavy building masquerading as a symbol of sustainability in a deeply troubled urban context. By restructuring the pedagogy of architecture theory, we can push back against the catastrophic impulse to design and build in universal terms. The proposed syllabus maintains a sequence of Enlightenment-based works, but places them in context and in contradistinction to literatures that challenge their authority.
Confronting the Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism at the center of architecture theory requires two key actions. The first is to re-read early canonical works, like those written by Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or Karl Marx, using new mechanisms of critique. Postcolonial studies in particular offers a set of tools and epistemological reframings that empower architectural scholars to take on this challenge; these include embracing multiple modernities around the world, as suggested by Jyoti Hosagrahar in her extensive study of urbanism in Delhi.12 Though four decades old, Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, continues to offer intellectual tools for understanding and dismantling the epistemological imbalances in literature, art, and historical writing that emerged from imperialism and colonialism. Two decades ago, Gayatri Spivak unpacked the subjective agency and othering in postcolonial or subalte rn conditions, equipping us to re-read Kant, Hegel, Marx, and their intellectual descendants like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze with an equal clarity.13 Franz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Paul Gilroy—giving representation to the most deeply suppressed voices in history, those of Africans and the African diaspora—describe the psychic impact of colonization on the colonized. Juxtaposing these works within the frame of architecture theory, rather than depending on the canon alone to continue carrying the full intellectual weight of the discipline, is the first act of decolonization. It is the first act of acknowledgement that our disciplinary mind is a colonial one. It is the first act of acknowledgement that a colonial mind is not a healthy and just place from which to operate.
As a second step, we need to critique the ways in which imperialist positions, seeded in the current theoretical canon, continue to shape scholarship on globalization, urbanism, and design today. The impulse to imperialize and universalize the European experience is most evident when we examine what is ignored, diminished, or consciously suppressed in literature dealing with late capitalist architecture, urbanism, geography, and global space: namely, voices, perspectives, geographies, and histories of the world that has evolved in a manner not commensurate with Europe. When this massive body of knowledge is missing from required design curricula, and harbored in specialized elective courses instead, students assume that Eurocentric architectural concepts and solutions are universally appropriate defaults. If you are from any other part of the world, from rural economies, part of the pastoral cultures, the inability to find yourself in the canon leads to self-censorship. Cultural captivity leads to identification with the cultural values and discourse of the culprit. Philosopher George Yancy calls this epistemic violence.14 When architecture students are exposed only to that early European canon, and contemporary scholarship that only builds upon and reinforces it, the discipline becomes caught in a cycle of misrepresentation and myopia. Far from making knowledge an instrument of empowerment, it destroys the ability of architects to operate successfully in unfamiliar contexts. The theoretical framework and educational scope of the discipline continue to be limited in this way.
There would be no capitalism or modernity without imperialism and colonialism. As Ania Loomba writes, European colonialisms “produced the economic imbalance that was necessary for the growth of European capitalism and industry. Thus we could say that colonialism was the midwife that assisted at the birth of European capitalism, or that without colonial expansion the transition to capitalism could not have taken place in Europe.”15 In its spatiality and economic structure, colonialism transformed the way the globe operates: it activated the transition from a mercantile to an industrial global economy and depended upon a decentralized or outsourced means of production. The effects of colonialism did not end with post-war decolonization, and they are certainly not limited to colonized spaces. For example, Manchester and Liverpool would not have undergone such dramatic urban transformations during the Industrial Revolution without a massive influx of raw cotton from colonial India and American slave plantations. To bring the issue closer to home, the United States is nothing but an amalgam of colonialized territories. Native Americans continue to this day to be colonized. This is not a condition merely of the past. It very much shapes our present. Therefore, examining the way in which today’s literature continues to suppress this history is essential.
Four very different thinkers are briefly reviewed here to demonstrate how the problem of suppression infiltrates architectural thinking in its economic, sociological, formal, and technical dimensions. The influential Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines capital movement and accumulation primarily within the boundaries of the French nationstate. Although this is noted only in passing in the book, France was the second largest modern empire, and went through an internal transformation due to its external colonial activities, particularly during its second wave of imperialism (1830-1980). One cannot analyze France’s economic history, and 21stcentury capital in general, without taking the extent of imperialist expansion into account. The central point missing from Piketty’s analysis is that modern capitalism, and the vast inequalities it has produced, would not have existed without colonialism. The book’s meticulous detailing of land ownership and capital accumulation within France suggests that the empire’s economy operated within the geographic boundaries of the metropole. This type of writing is an epistemic violence. As in a multitude of other literatures, colonial activities are treated in Piketty’s work as side effects of empire rather than as its catalysts—that colonialism “happened” elsewhere and therefore had little effect on the colonizer and capitalist modernity at home. Piketty perpetuates the conceit of colonial enterprises. His influential books sustain the untenable view that capitalist modernity developed the metropole (home state) through global-scale flows of people, resources, and capital to and from their hinterlands (colonized territories). His well-respected work continues to mask those very flows and suppresses their contribution to modernity.
Piketty focuses on what is tactile and traceable in terms of capital flow and accumulation, like receipts, income tax forms, and land deeds. But the inverse, which is also significant, is missing: the capital saved by the colonial empire through exploitative activities like slavery, indentured servitude, or appropriated natural resource extraction. In 1878, Dadabhai Naoroji termed this concept the “drain” theory of colonialism.16 In short, the capital not spent by colonial governments on labor wages or natural resources that were, in effect, stolen, produces a drain of resources from the colonized territory. This amounts to an extraction of capital that is untraceable but still essential to the structure and narrative of modern capitalism. Naoroji’s theory focused on British India in detail, but in concept applies to French activities in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean as well.17
Saskia Sassen’s The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, and her subsequent works suffer from similar limitations—namely, an unwillingness to center colonial activities in discussions of capitalism and globalization. On multiple occasions, Sassen has argued that globalization is a recent phenomenon, hinging on the free flow of financial resources and services across international borders. Cities overtake nation-states as the primary spatial actors in this new context, functioning as interdependent but essentially equal nodes in a planetary-scale web. However, when examined in the context of colonialism, the author’s foundational hypotheses for what constitutes the contemporary “global city,” described primarily as a result of 20th-century policies, actually rely on centuries-old patterns of inter-regional and colonial behavior.18 Before European oceanic exploration, cities in China, South Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean behaved very much in the way Sassen describes, as specialized hubs of goods and services connected by evolving forms of infrastructure. During colonialism they received an influx of foreign capital, but this exchange was not between two equal economic actors; rather, it was between two entities with an extreme power imbalance. Sassen’s framework does not make room for this historical phenomenon as a catalyst for contemporary conditions, nor does it allow for a pre-20th-century globality centered somewhere other than in Europe. The repeated refraction of globalization through the lens of the European nationstate limits Sassen’s conceptual apparatus and diminishes the complexities and alternatives offered by other, older conditions.
Patrik Schumacher’s work on parametricism links this instinct for omission directly to current architecture practice. Schumacher’s mission to totalize (or, in his words, unify) the discipline stretches across time and space. He frames architectural history and theory through modernism, postmodernism, and deconstructivism as a series of ideas and works leading inevitably to parametricism, the most extreme distancing yet of architects from direct authorship over their work. Schumacher’s seeming neutrality, achieved through the computer screen, again masks privileges and attitudes that arise from Eurocentric, i.e., selfcentric, thinking and education. He dismisses what he calls the “garbage spill” of a pluralistic urbanism (he does not identify Dubai, Mumbai, or Shanghai specifically, but makes it clear that this designation refers to cities outside the Cartesian definitions of order).19 Combined with his views on public housing in London and the free market, this reveals his inability to see beyond, and therefore critique, the order/chaos, Occident/Orient, civilized/barbaric and other binaries outlined by Said and others.20,21
The problem of omission extends even to the most mundane of publications: the ARE 5.0 exam study manual, by David Kent Ballast and Steven E. O’Hara. This primarily technical guide contains a chapter on urban history, again compressed into a worn narrative beginning with Rome, making its way to London and Paris, to New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Radburn, and finally concluding with New Urbanism. Although this book is specifically for designers studying to pass American licensing exams, it is yet one more example of how a Eurocentric history becomes “history,” positioning itself as harmless and factual. The omission of urbanisms from other parts of the world is at this point taken completely for granted.
A Reading List for the End of Architecture (or, How to Think about Things)
1: The Shadows of Enlightenment
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett. Publishing Company, 1987. pp. 97-123.
Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question, What is Enlightenment?” In Schmidt, James. What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. pp. 7-47.
2: Orientalism and Universalism
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. pp. 1-27, 111-115, 139-147, and 412-427.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. pp. 1-28 and 201-254.
Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968. pp. 35-69 and 148-167.
3: Historiography and the Hegelian Dialectic
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet and M. J. Inwood. London; New York: Penguin Books, 2004. pp. 82-97.
Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan. Historiography in the Modern World: Western and Indian Perspectives. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2016. pp. 1-11, 157-166, and 679-702.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. pp. 198-227.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. E-book. pp. 3-20 and 79-86. https://muse.jhu.edu/.
4: Labor, Capitalism, and Industrialized World Order
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley. New York: J.W. Lovell Co., 1887.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes and Ernest Mandel. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990.
Achcar, Gilbert. Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013. pp. 68-102.
5: Colonialist Landscape, Postcolonial Outlook
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Bantam Books, 1902.
Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. pp. 1-57.
6: Constructing Estrangement
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1946.
Daoud, Kamel. The Mersault Investigation. Trans. John Cullen. New York: Other Press, 2015.
7: Hidden Theories of Architecture and Landscape
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. pp. 1-40.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pp. ix-xxii, 3-28, and 199-241.
8: Reconsidering the Paradigm Shift
Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd., 1902.
Garnier, Tony. Une Cité Industrielle: Étude Pour La Construction Des Villes. Paris: C. Massin & cie, 1932.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. pp. 217-251.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pp. 83-135.
9: The Discipline of Architecture
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. The Prisons: (Le Carceri): The Complete First and Second States. New York: Dover Publications, 1973.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. pp. 195-248.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter From Birmingham City Jail. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1963.
10: Reframing Globalization
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. pp. 3-36, 171-196, and 329-344.
Piketty, Thomas. “The Metamorphoses of Capital.” Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. pp. 113-139.
Bayart, Jean-François. “The Paradoxical Invention of Economic Modernity.” In Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. pp. 307-334.
Hunt, Tristram. Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014. pp. 3-18, 141-182, and 261-302.
11: New World Orders
Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Pelican Books, 2018. pp. 1-78 and 147-187.
Khanna, Parag. Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. New York: Random House, 2016. pp. 35-60 and 327-345.
Bélanger, Pierre, and Alexander S. Arroyo. Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.
12: Superimpositions
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: World Books, 1967.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Random House, 2006.
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Random House, 2000.
Figure 1: Proposed reading list, page 1. Source: Aneesha Dharwadker, 2018.
Figure 2: Proposed reading list, page 2. Source: Aneesha Dharwadker, 2018.
In an architecture classroom, the reading list can be a powerful mechanism for unraveling entrenched disciplinary assumptions and filling in knowledge that has been systematically suppressed. The following proposal suggests “a reading list for the end of architecture,” not arguing for the end of the discipline, but rather for a disciplinary realignment, putting elements of the architectural theory canon in a new context (Figures 1 and 2). This reading list takes the form of a semester-long syllabus, and if deployed as an introductory theory seminar or a history of architecture course; it would equip students to question the disciplinary establishment and the hegemony of Enlightenment-based ideas early in their careers. The list is built around the idea of comparative reading, or juxtaposition.22 It places canonical theory in context by offering perspectives from other disciplines as vehicles for critique. Equally important, it establishes difference and embraces its ambiguities. As a material practice, architecture risks continued complicity in social inequality by remaining in a reactive stance—designing to client desires or developer pro formas—rather than deploying self-initiated social and ethical agency. Learning architecture through epistemologies of difference, like those offered by postcolonial studies and related subjects, is one way to encourage more progressive, issues-based design practices capable of operating at a heterogeneous planetary scale. At this point in time, the exclusion of this material hampers the full global and historical consciousness of the discipline.
This reading list grapples with some of the same issues that the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) has encountered. One issue worth noting is that the burden of robust global knowledge falls disproportionately on scholars and practitioners of and from subaltern, postcolonial, or still-colonized environments. Battles against white supremacy have been led by people of color; battles against sexism by women; battles for trans rights by the non-conforming. Likewise, with respect to issues of architecture, globalization, and decolonizing design pedagogy, the intellectual labor is carried out by the historically silenced, specifically for an audience that is only now, in an era of tattered American politics, coming to terms with the limitations of its own history and values.
Decolonizing practice will expand architecture into a set of activities that can sensitively and appropriately respond to today’s spatial, infrastructural, and urbanistic crises all over the globe. To achieve this we need to decolonize theory, and to decolonize theory we need to decolonize pedagogy. Reexamining the universalizing thrust of architecture’s 19th-century foundational theory, questioning its presence in today’s scholarship, and expanding design pedagogy to accommodate contrasting viewpoints are all tangible ways of altering how architects perceive and intervene in the world. Architecture practice increasingly demands a level of self-reflection that I believe is becoming possible now due to our unique confluence of politics, digital media, and expanding diversity in the discipline. Decolonizing pedagogy offers a way of un-making the biased structures of the world that can seem immovable.
As global design practices continue to expand their footprints and impact, it is important to emphasize that the sites of intervention for new architectures have radically shifted since the 1980s. Firms like SOM, Foster + Partners, Safdie Architects, HOK, Gensler, AECOM, and of course Perkins + Will now have branch offices in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. These firms are planning entire communities and urban infrastructure systems for Delhi, Jeddah, Rabat, Jakarta, Abuja, Ahmedabad, Nairobi, Mumbai, and Van Phong Bay. These new sites of intervention have intersected with colonialism in a variety of ways, especially under British and French regimes. If architects aim to be successful in designing for these places, the discipline must absorb the knowledge of postcolonial spaces, and the epistemologies of postcolonial studies, into its most basic pedagogical activities.
Important work is already being done in various smaller-scale urban, academic, and design practice contexts that takes up this urgent task. One recent example is the renaming of the public Square du Bastion in Brussels after Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence fighter and politician.23 It is a highly unusual move; we are far more likely to see streets in Cape Town and New Delhi named after Dutch and British colonial figures. But this acknowledgement of a colonial past through the naming of public space in the European metropole is a step toward shifting colonial and postcolonial discourses into a new physical space.
In design academia, the work of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Ananya Roy, V. Mitch McEwen, Parag Khanna, Vikramaditya Prakash, Rahul Mehrotra, and the GAHTC, among others, encourages architecture, landscape, and planning to confront multiple modernities and the issues that arise from different forms of colonization. The 2018 United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, “Dimensions of Citizenship,” included several participants in both the physical and online exhibitions who dealt directly with the manifestations of race, colonialism, and inequality in space and across time. In design practice, we can see the emergence of several young individuals and organizations who clearly have progressive aims, who want to rethink the tendencies of large-scale corporate practices by specifically choosing to work on underrepresented sites, programs, and themes, and who do not necessarily follow a capitalist bottom line: MASS Design Group, Assemble, Borderless, Latent Design, f-architecture, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Rebuild Foundation, Project H Design, studio:indigenous, and Léopold Lambert’s The Funambulist are a few examples among many.
Paul Gilroy wonders in Postcolonial Melancholia what contemporary medium might unify people across differences (particularly racial, but also economic and political). My answer will always be architecture. But it must be an architecture greatly expanded from what we see today, carried out by diverse practitioners who balance technical expertise with strong ethical and political positions; practitioners who leverage local conditions rather than ignoring or transcending them, and who work toward greater specificity and difference. In a time of increasing inequalities everywhere, including the built environment, architects’ responsibilities are expanding even as our agency shrinks: decolonizing pedagogy is one mechanism that can empower us to reverse this trend.
ENDNOTES
1. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 4.
2. Antilia is cited as an example of questionable architectural ethics in Mohsen Mostafavi, “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?” Harvard Design Magazine 32 (Spring/ Summer 2010) 124—135. It is also included as a case study in Gianpaola Spirito, Sabrina Leone, and Leone Spita, Eco Structures: Forms of Sustainable Architecture (Vercelli, Italy: White Star Publishers, 2009). In popular media, it has appeared in TIME, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Forbes, and other less impactful online publications.
3. Perkins + Will (Chicago), Foster + Partners (London), SITE (New York City), WilkinsonEyre (London and Hong Kong), and Ken Yeang (Kuala Lumpur) all competed for the commission. See: David Sokol, “Perkins + Will Debunks Antilian Myths,” Architectural Record, 18 Oct. 2007. Accessed 19 July 2018. https://www. architecturalrecord.com/articles/4017-perkins-will-debunks-antilia-myths?
4. Mridu Kullar, “In India, $1 Billion House by Perkins + Will Not Fit for Sleeping In,” Architectural Record, 12 May 2012. Accessed 19 July 2018. https://www. architecturalrecord.com/articles/2577-in-india-1-billion-house-by-perkins-will-not-fit-for-sleeping-in.
5. Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011), 347.
6. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 124-25.
7. Clara Lewis, “First Ever GIS Study Shows 3,293 Slum Clusters in Mumbai,” The Times of India, 17 Nov. 2015. Accessed 10 Nov. 2018. https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/city/mumbai/First-ever-GIS-study-shows-3293-slum-clusters-in-Mumbai/ articleshow/49810365.cms.
8. Jim Yardley, “Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home,” The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2010. Accessed 18 Nov. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/world/ asia/29mumbai.html. “Mumbai, India.” Visible Earth (EOS Project Science Office, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2004). Accessed 18 Nov. 2018. https:// visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=4446.
9. David Sokol, “Perkins + Will Debunks Antilia Myths,” Architectural Record, 18 Oct. 2007. Accessed 19 July 2018. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/4017- perkins-will-debunks-antilia-myths?.
10. Sudhir Surywanshi, “Mukesh Ambani’s First Power Bill in Antilia—Rs 70L,” The Times of India, 25 Nov. 2010. Accessed 20 July 2018. https://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Mukesh-Ambanis-first-power-bill-in-Antilia-Rs70L/ articleshow/6986001.cms.
11. See: Jason Burke, “Mukesh Ambani, India’s Richest Man, Builds World’s First Billion Dollar Home,” The Guardian, 13 Oct. 2010. Accessed 20 July 2018. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/mukesh-ambani-india-home-mumbai.
12. See: Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Hosagrahar writes: “In places that the Europeans condemned as ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional,’ urban forms and institutions transplanted from the metropole contended with customary spatial practices as well as local responses to the cultural upheavals. My interest is in this process of indigenization. The emergent built forms …though not identical to the ones idealized in Western Europe, were nevertheless modern. This work therefore seeks to acknowledge the plural forms of modernity and to legitimize its many interpretations” (2).
13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
14. See: George Yancy, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 64 Iss. 34 (May 25, 2018).
15. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 4.
16. See: Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty of India (London: Vincent Brooks, 1878).
17. For a detailed summary of French imports and exports to its colonial markets during the mid-20th-century, see Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “Did France’s Colonial Empire Make Economic Sense? A Perspective from the Postwar Decade, 1946-1956,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. XLVIII No. 2 (June 1988): 373-385.
18. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xix-xxii.
19. Patrik Schumacher, “Parametric Order—21st-Century Architectural Order.” Lecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Feb. 2012.
20. See: Amy Frearson, “Patrik Schumacher Calls for Social Housing and Public Space to be Scrapped,” Dezeen, 18 Nov. 2016. Accessed 20 July 2018. https://www.dezeen.com/2016/11/18/patrik-schumacher-social-housing-public-space-scrapped-londonworld-architecture-festival-2016/.
21. See: Patrik Schumacher, “Only Capitalism Can Solve the Housing Crisis,” Adam Smith Institute, 2016. Accessed May 2018. https://www.adamsmith.org/ capitalismcansolvethehousingcrisis/; and Patrik Schumacher, “The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Urban Order,” in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 19-44.
22. For a recent discussion of comparativity in relation to postcolonial critique, see Revathi Krishnaswami, “Postcolonial and Globalization Studies: Connections, Conflicts, Complicities,” in The Postcolonial and the Global, ed. Revathi Krishnaswami and John C. Hawley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4-5.
23. Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu, “The Naming of a Brussels Square After Congo’s Patrice Lumumba is Stirring Ugly Colonial Memories,” Quartz, 2 July 2018. Accessed 18 July 2018. https://qz.com/1319417/dr-congos-patrice-lumumba-gets-a-brussels-square-name-in-king-leopolds-shadow/.
TEACHING ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY IN A TIME OF "PERPETUAL WAR"
MRINALINI RAJAGOPALAN
Mrinalini Rajagopalan
The undergraduates in my classes at the University of Pittsburgh were between three and five years old when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. They might have started high school when Tahrir Square was the center of a massive revolution, and gone to prom just as historic Aleppo was turned to rubble. Whilst many have never left the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. where they grew up, cities like Mosul and Pyongyang and exurban places such as Guantanamo Bay and the U.S.-Mexico border are part of their global imaginaries as well as vocabularies. This is a peculiar cosmopolitanism, produced by the aggressive military domination of large parts of the globe by the U.S. It is a knowledge of the other that implicates the self as perpetrator of large and small wars. What does it mean, then, to teach architectural history to a generation that has only known the world as it exists in a state of perpetual war? Do architectural historians in the U.S. have a moral and ethical imperative to respond to the exigencies of this moment in their writing and teaching? If so, how can academics and practitioners recognize our complicity in creating the conditions of such estranged cosmopolitans even as we prepare students to live, work, and play within a complex world shaped by U.S. aggression?1
My theoretical rudder for this essay is the framework of cosmopolitanism. I borrow the term “perpetual war” in the essay title from philosopher Bruce Robbins, who uses it to critique Immanuel Kant’s exegesis on cosmopolitanism. Kant articulated cosmopolitanism as an allegiance to the entire human race as opposed to one’s own tribal, ethnic, or national communities—a moral and ethical posture of fraternity that would lead to “perpetual peace” in the world. This early model of global citizenship, and in our contemporary parlance a set of basic human rights, was based on the shared humanity of the world’s peoples. Robbins has challenged such rosy Enlightenment thinking, instead arguing that cosmopolitanism today emerges from perpetual war—a paradoxical condition of knowing others intimately but only as a threat to oneself or in the very act of destroying them.2,3 Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has articulated cosmopolitanism as the loyalties that an individual owes to humanity as a whole. She points out, however, that such a capacious worldview is often at odds with, or at least exists in an uneasy relationship with, nationalism—which demands allegiances that are both geographically and historically determined.4 Anthony Kwame Appiah has defined cosmopolitanism as the ethics of engagement with difference. He asks: What do we owe those who look, speak, and live differently from us and how do we reconcile such boundless obligations with the demands of our local communities, the nation-states that we carry passports for, or the proscriptions of our religious identity?5 These questions have profound ramifications for students who are training to design in unfamiliar environments and for clients and communities who are vastly different from themselves. It has become especially urgent for designers to cultivate responsible imaginations of the past when revanchist nationalisms around the world co-opt both history and space to service their agendas.
In this essay I ask how architectural history courses might provoke would-be architects, planners, and civil engineers to think deeply about the ethics and politics of intervening in built environments. More specifically, I believe that curricular offerings of architectural histories should be mindful of three traps that design students are prone to: that the history of built form and design evolution are entirely separate from geopolitical context and influence; that citizenship (the privilege to receive and enact enfranchisements) is separate from the autonomous expression of a designer; and that the classroom (or architectural firm) is a space of exception that absolves students (and later professionals) from responsibilities to a larger world. I argue for new presentations of architectural history that encourage students to develop humanistic imaginations alongside design creativity, with imaginations that will empower them as responsible interlocutors in their contemporary built environments.
Several recent textbooks have taken up the work of democratizing and globalizing architectural history beyond a Hegelian narrative of progress that proceeds from primitive to civilized and one that locates architectural innovation to a single genius, usually a literate white male.6,7 Yet many other texts in the discipline perpetuate a specious teleology from past to present, low tech to high tech, vernacular and anonymous to monumental and authored, unfamiliar to familiar. Can students then be blamed for seeing themselves as the torchbearers of the next phase of architectural evolution, or of assuming that innovation and avant-garde design are the only paths to keep the wheels of progress running in the right direction?8 Such an understanding of architectural history becomes doubly problematic when seen in the context of contemporary geo-politics, where the very real struggles of First Nations and Indigenous peoples to claim resources and rights are frequently dismissed as atemporal or antagonistic to the universalizing logic of capitalism. How might architectural history curricula encourage students to think of multiple trajectories of building that develop horizontally across disparate temporalities? What sort of narrative imagination is required to hold these chronologies in equal regard and how might professors equip them with such an imagination? I offer a reading of a first-society structure as a beginning to such an understanding.
Like all disciplines, architectural history is attached to its origin myths. The 18th-century abbé, Marc-Antoine Laugier, explained that Greek classical architecture, the apogee of built aesthetics, could be traced to the primitive hut, rudimentary shelters erected by early peoples consisting of four supporting columns and a pitched roof (all made with unfinished tree branches). In Laugier’s appraisal, while the Parthenon is a sophisticated evolution of the primitive hut, the latter constituted a universal language of rationalism and aesthetics. At the heart of Laugier’s discussion in his Essay on Architecture (1755) is the prowess of early man [sic] to harness and shape natural resources (tree branches) into a shelter built along the principles of an ideal form (free-standing columns supporting a roof pediment). Such was the articulation of architectural beginnings borne out of European Enlightenment assumptions: the triumph of culture over nature; the universalism of aesthetic and form; and, most importantly, the individual builder who determines the course of architectural history to come. A key motif in this allegory is that of human exceptionalism and the distinction between humans and environments.
The primitive hut becomes one origin of civilization precisely because man [sic] is able to separate himself from his natural environment and exercise control over it.
An alternative to this teleology would be a consideration of the Thule whalebone house within the continuum of design experimentation and building skills. Remnants of semi-subterranean whalebone houses built by the Thule between 1000-1600 CE have been found in various parts of Alaska, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic Circle (Figure 1). As Peter Dawson and Richard Levy have shown, building with whalebone would require considerable knowledge of engineering, for the material, though strong and light, is not uniform in terms of shape or dimensions.9 Whalebone was a precious commodity and the Thule used as much of the mammal’s skeleton as possible in the construction of the house.
Figure 1: Thule Whalebone House, c. 1000 CE, Greenland; built by ancestors of modern-day Inuit in Northern Alaska who migrated eastward, across the Arctic to Greenland. It is near the community of Resolute and part of remnants from about six other houses. Courtesy: Timkal
Figure 2: Charles Eisen, engraving for the frontispiece of the second edition of Abbé Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, trans. Essay on Architecture, 1753. Courtesy: Public Domain.
The distinct shapes of each whalebone, however, made every Thule whalebone house unique in its formal and structural properties. Cranial bones of whales (broad at the base of the head and tapering towards the snout) were similar to tripods and were best used as vertical members, and jaw bones (mandibles) were used as ridgepoles to span across the two lobes. Smaller rib bones could be used for interstitial spans and to support the weight of the hide, sod, and turf that would cover the entire house. The process of building a whalebone house was complex: the pits for the houses could not be dug in advance, as it was not certain that the available whalebones could span the depressions once dug. Instead, the bones were first arranged to achieve the optimal ratio of structural stability and inhabitable space and the areas for the pits were marked out. The skeletal structure was then dismantled for the pits to be dug, and subsequently re- erected over the completed pits.10
Architectural lessons from the Thule whalebone house abound: for one, such building was a collective act requiring sophisticated communication between hunters, tanners, and builders; second, it was premised on specialized knowledge related to accessing and utilizing resources, an understanding of the laws of physics and structural systems, and the skill to arrange available bones to ensure safety and comfort; and third, this architecture arose from a multi-species dialogue between humans, animals, and flora. In its sophistication, the Thule whalebone house dismantles Laugier’s myths of the “primitive” and that of a singular “man” as the first author of an ideal architectural form (Figure 2). In this example, genius—if such exists— is widely distributed and cannot be located in one temporal moment, much less a single persona. In stark contrast with Laugier’s universalism that divides human and environment, the example of the Thule whalebone house presents an entry into discussions of the Anthropocene and planetary ecology. A critical view of human exceptionalism and natural resource extraction will be vital to future designers of the built environment.11
Everyday undergraduates across campuses in the United States perform quotidian acts of citizenship: they exercise sovereign control over their bodies, participate in free speech, and make choices based on their free will. Many architectural students also enact their role as designers within this larger set of enfranchisements, often without critically understanding the specific privileges that allow them to do so. Needless to say, the diversity of the undergraduate student body at any North American university means that such privilege is fraught with race, gender, and economic status. The persistent absence of minorities such as African-Americans, women, and non-literate subjects in architectural histories only exacerbates the divide between design and citizenship.12 It is vital for future designers to understand that social enfranchisement and disenfranchisement are spatially reproduced and to calibrate their own interventions within these milieu responsibly.
Figure 3: Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Home and Estate, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1753. Courtesy: Martin Falbisoner.
Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello is one example of the manner in which design perpetuates an unequal field of power relations (Figure 3). Jefferson is seen as the consummate American innovator and designer. His estate at Monticello, and later his design of the University of Virginia, drew on Greek classical architectural form to communicate his democratic and republic idealism. There is a sufficient amount of mythologizing in these statements to warrant critique. Yet, the founding father’s estate illustrates how sovereign self-determination and dehumanization were both embedded in the design of Monticello.
Dell Upton argues that Jefferson designed his residence and arranged the rooms and décor in his house as a way to announce his belief in selfdetermination and democracy. The vantage of his own house was such that it looked down on Mulberry Row—the slave quarters—and allowed him to survey his property, which included land as well as enslaved human beings. Where the spaces in Jefferson’s house were distinguished by function (the salon, the library, or the dining room), the slave quarters accommodated multiple functions: cooking, dressing, sleeping, and tending to children in one undifferentiated space. Where Jefferson’s house was designed with an eye towards spaces that were more public and others that were intensely private, the arrangement of the slave quarters further dehumanized the residents, placing women, men, and children in a forced intimacy with little care for prevailing social norms of comfort, privacy, or propriety. In a dazzlingly ingenious, if heartless design, Jefferson invented a system of pulleys and dumbwaiters that fueled the fireplaces in his bedroom. Slaves fed the coal into dumbwaiters in the basement of the house but Jefferson’s designs kept them out of his sight and their bodies out of his spaces. Upton articulates it succinctly when he says that plantation houses such as Monticello were “technologies of the self, tools for defining their owners." In contrast, the accommodations on Mulberry Row were the infrastructure by which slaves were turned into technologies of labor and reproduction that serviced the master’s needs.13 Monticello’s spatial choreography was designed to reproduce the power relations between master and slave, enfranchised and disenfranchised, and literate and laboring. The design of democracy was thus built and maintained on the infrastructure of dehumanization.
The substantial links between racial theories and modern architectural theory and production has provoked an ethical reckoning within the discipline.14,15 To operate responsibly as a designer today is to recognize this history of uneven enfranchisements and its persistent ramifications for the built environment. Curricular reform initiated by scholars such as Kathryn Anthony at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have actively shown how design “naturalizes” the discrimination of women, racial minorities, and persons with atypical bodies.16 Her 2010 congressional testimony on the restroom gender parity act serves as a model for how designers can bring critical awareness to the politics of the built environment.17
Figure 4: Classroom as a space of exception, Undergraduate Studio at the University of Utah, Fall 2018. Courtesy: Stephanie King.
Figure 5: Courtyard of Al-Qarawiyyin mosque and madrassa, Fez, Morocco, established in 859 CE. Courtesy: Lietmotiv.
Too often undergraduates see their classrooms and studios as rarefied environments that exist entirely outside a broader socio-political milieu (Figure 4). This fiction is insidiously reproduced by popular rhetoric that the “real world” is fundamentally separate from college life and environments. Studios frequently cultivate an ambience of pure abstraction and creative largesse, encouraging students to ignore histories of place, capitalist networks of profit and loss, or racial and gendered inequities that might be operating on site. Instead, context is defined in terms of “tangible” data such as topography, transportation networks, desirable views, or space management.
As future designers, it is imperative that students be cognizant of their studio and larger campus environments as spaces of production: not simply the production of ideas, but also of social realities. Jonathan Massey, dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, poignantly notes that the structure of architecture studios, with late nights and time-intensive coursework, necessarily excludes non-traditional students such as parents, persons with disabilities, or those who must work to pay for college.18 Massey rightly points out that such exclusions of class and social rank are further exacerbated in the architectural profession, creating a vicious cycle of elitism. How might architectural history be employed to shed light on such issues?
We may consider the al-Qarawiyyin mosque, and later madrassa, as an example of how discursive spaces such as academic campuses actively reproduce the prevailing social order of the time. In 859, a wealthy and educated woman, Fatimah al-Fihri, established the al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, modern-day Morocco (Figure 5). Soon after, the Almoravid and Marinid sultans (12th and 13th centuries) expanded the scholastic program of the al-Qarawiyyin mosque and madrassas to make it the leading center of learning in the medieval Mediterranean world. 19 One way to present this building as a historical case study would be to focus on the hypostyle hall of the mosque, the intricate muqarnas over its main mihrab (prayer niche), the minaret, and courtyard of the mosque. An equally important history of al-Qarawiyyin, however, focuses on its conflicted nature as producing some of the greatest male thinkers of the time while denying the same opportunities of scholarship to women.
The madrassa would go on to produce a remarkable list of alumni including Maimonides (12th-century Jewish philosopher), Ibn Khaldun (14th-century historian), and Leo Africanus (16th-century geographer). The madrassa even hosted early modern versions of international scholars such as the Flemish Nicolas Cleynaerts who studied the Qoran there in 1540. It is hardly surprising, then, that in addition to making significant discoveries in humanistic and scientific thought, these men also forwarded cosmopolitan principles of ethics and citizenship that continue to guide our contemporary society. Since its founding, however, al-Qarawiyyin was also a space of male authority, one that perpetuated patriarchal power, belying its establishment by an educated woman patron. In fact, it was only in the 1950s that a woman scholar, Fatima al-Kabbaj, was admitted to the University of al-Qarawiyyin. 20 Such are the paradoxical legacies of modern universities as environments that simultaneously inspire cosmopolitan learning and action while actively perpetuating existing social inequities.
How then do we get students to excavate the histories, known and unknown, of their own habitus? Their habitus, which includes not only the university as an institution, but also the space of creativity (the studio or the classroom); as not simply the space of knowledge acquisition or ideation, but also that of social and political agency? Such a critical appraisal might require students to see themselves less as “experts in training” but rather as thinkers and experimenters engaged in dialogues with fellow citizens in big and small communities. It might warrant a rethinking of the design studio as more than a space of creative expression, but also of political agency. It might require more honest discussion regarding all creative decisions as being shaped by the biases and prejudices of their authors. Critical architectural histories can help students build such narrative imaginations of their creativity as deliberate interventions in a complex web of histories, social patterns, and political action. A recent publication by Hélène Frichot provides a model here. 21
In How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool , Frichot proposes a feminist methodology for critiquing the surrounding built environment, especially those elements that might seem natural or obvious to the reader. She encourages users of her instruction manual to engage in creatively co-authoring their spaces, thereby exposing the patriarchies embedded in them. 22 A gross definition of cosmopolitanism shared by the many philosophers who have spoken and written on the subject might be framed thus: cosmopolitanism refers to the ethical imperative to provide all humans basic rights, dignity, and dialogue. Cosmopolitanism has had a sturdy impact on the humanities and is increasingly being incorporated into undergraduate curricula, albeit under different titles such as diversity initiatives, ethics courses, requirements for global coverage, and language training. The fields of architecture, landscape, and urban history too have recalibrated themselves along the question of what we owe those who do not share our national, racial, ethnic, or religious affiliations. In the field of design, however, there is still much work to do in terms of critically incorporating humanistic ethics into disciplinary epistemologies. Models of humanitarian design solutions for vulnerable populations suffering from poverty or dispossession as a result of natural disasters (Habitat for Humanity, Architecture for Humanity, Rural Studio, etc.) are still framed within Eurocentric norms of charity—the vulnerable benefitting from the largesse of the privileged and in turn being dependent on or at least beholden to their benefactors. While we would be remiss to diminish the value of a functioning shelter for a family struggling to survive in Alabama or Aceh, we cannot ignore that such models do little to subvert prevailing power structures and might well reinforce them. 23 Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative departure point, one where charity is replaced with dialogue, pity with respectful curiosity, and assimilation to the dominant order with a recognition of difference as meaningful and indeed necessary for a just social system.
To come of age in a time of “perpetual war” is no doubt an ethical burden, but one that might fuel new cosmopolitanisms. It requires that architectural histories—indeed all histories—recognize their complicity in forms of brutalization, oppression, and inequality over time. It demands new forms of design agency from architects built on a deep and engaged humanistic pathos for the other. ▪
A gross definition of cosmopolitanism shared by the many philosophers who have spoken and written on the subject might be framed thus: cosmopolitanism refers to the ethical imperative to provide all humans basic rights, dignity, and dialogue. Cosmopolitanism has had a sturdy impact on the humanities and is increasingly being incorporated into undergraduate curricula, albeit under different titles such as diversity initiatives, ethics courses, requirements for global coverage, and language training. The fields of architecture, landscape, and urban history too have recalibrated themselves along the question of what we owe those who do not share our national, racial, ethnic, or religious affiliations. In the field of design, however, there is still much work to do in terms of critically incorporating humanistic ethics into disciplinary epistemologies. Models of humanitarian design solutions for vulnerable populations suffering from poverty or dispossession as a result of natural disasters (Habitat for Humanity, Architecture for Humanity, Rural Studio, etc.) are still framed within Eurocentric norms of charity—the vulnerable benefitting from the largesse of the privileged and in turn being dependent on or at least beholden to their benefactors. While we would be remiss to diminish the value of a functioning shelter for a family struggling to survive in Alabama or Aceh, we cannot ignore that such models do little to subvert prevailing power structures and might well reinforce them.23 Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative departure point, one where charity is replaced with dialogue, pity with respectful curiosity, and assimilation to the dominant order with a recognition of difference as meaningful and indeed necessary for a just social system.
To come of age in a time of “perpetual war” is no doubt an ethical burden, but one that might fuel new cosmopolitanisms. It requires that architectural histories—indeed all histories—recognize their complicity in forms of brutalization, oppression, and inequality over time. It demands new forms of design agency from architects built on a deep and engaged humanistic pathos for the other. ▪
ENDNOTES
1. Architectural historians have struggled with similar questions for some time now and sought to globalize and democratize the discipline by calling attention to the European and North American biases that have shaped it by dismantling the myth of the “master” architect, and by illuminating the racial, gender, and class limitations of the architectural canon. See, for example: Hosagrahar, J. (2002). “South Asia: Looking Back, Moving Ahead-History and Modernization.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61(3): 355-69, Baydar, G. (2004). “The Cultural Burden of Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education 57(4): 19-27; Gürel, M. Ö. and K. H. Anthony (2006). “The Canon and the Void: Gender, Race, and Architectural History Texts.” Ibid. 59(3): 66-76; ibid., Upton, D. (2009). “Starting from Baalbek: Noah, Solomon, Saladin, and the Fluidity of Architectural History.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68(4), Rabbat, N. (2011). “The Pedigreed Domain of Architecture: A View from the Cultural Margin.” Perspecta 44: 6-11, 190-92; Zandi-Sayek, S. (2014). “The Unsung of the Canon: Does a Global Architectural History Need New Landmarks?" ABE Journal 6; and Jarzombek, M. (2015). “Architecture: The Global Imaginary in an Antiglobal World.” Grey Room 61(Fall): 111-12. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11, Gwendolyn Wright called for architectural history to recognize modernism’s entanglement with colonialism and the exigency of historicizing contemporary U.S. imperialism. Wright, G. (Spring 2002). “Building Global Modernisms.” Ibid.(7): 124-34.
2. Kant, I. (1970). Perpetual Peace. Kant's Political Writings. H. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Robbins, B. (2012). Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism From the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
4. Nussbaum, M. (1994). “Patriotism and Cosmpolitanism.” Boston Review XIX(5): 3-16.
5. Appiah, A. K. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
6. James-Chakraborty, K. (2013). Architecture Since 1400. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
7. Jarzombek, M., V. Prakash and F. D. K. Ching (2017). A Global History of Architecture, Wiley.
8. Nasser Rabbat has pointed out that architecture as a discipline is mired in the “framework of an uninterrupted and cumulative progression in which each circumscribed historical stage is defined in relation to the sequence of preceding stages, and is in turn influencing the formulation of succeeding ones, down to the present.” Rabbat, N. (2011). “The Pedigreed Domain of Architecture: A View from the Cultural Margin.” Perspecta 44: 6-11, 190-92. pg. 6.
9. Dawson, P. C. and R. M. Levy (2005). “A Three-Dimensional Model of a Thule Whale Bone House.” Journal of Field Archaeology 30(4): 443-55.
10. Ibid.
11. A recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (2017, Vol 71. Issue 2: Environments) was dedicated to the intersection between design and the Anthropocene. See especially, Gannon, T. (2017). “Strange Loops: Toward an Aesthetic for the Anthropocene.” Journal of Architectural Education 71(2): 142- 45, Mans, J. and T. Fisher ibid.”The Itinerant Architect: Toward a Land-Based Architectural Practice.” 252-60.
12. For more on this, see the commentary regarding the representation of minorities in architectural history text books in Gürel, M. Ö. and K. H. Anthony (2006). “The Canon and the Void: Gender, Race, and Architectural History Texts.” Ibid. 59(3): 66-76. See also, Weisman, L. K. (1994). Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-made Environment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
13. Upton, D. (1998). An American Icon. Architecture in the United States. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
14. Davis, C. L. (2010). “Viollet-le-Duc and the Body: The Metaphorical Integrations of Race and Style in Structural Rationalism.” Architectural Research Quarterly 14(4): 341-48.
15. Lopez-Duran, F. (2018). Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
16. Anthony, K. (2017). Defined by Design: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age, and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
17. A video of Anthony’s and others’ congressional testimony pertaining to H.R. 4869, Restroom Gender Parity in Federal Buildings Act, may be found at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uZAgzUqicU&feature=related [Site accessed December 9, 2017]
18. Massey, J. (2018). How Can Architects Build the Equitable Discipline we Deserve? The Architect's Newspaper.
19. Landau, R. and F. M. N. (ed.) (1958). “The Karaouine at Fez.” The Muslim World (Wiley Online Library) 48(2).
20. Joseph, S. and A. Najmabadi (2003). Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Economics, Education, Mobility, and Space, Brill.
21. Frichot, H. (2016). How to Make Yourself a Feminist Tool Kit, AADR.
22. The persistent erasure of women from the architectural history canon and their subsequent marginalization in the professional realm has most recently been taken up in Stratigakos, D. (2016). Where Are the Women Architects? Princeton, Princeton University Press.
23. Siddiqui, A. I. (2017). “Architecture Culture, Humanitarian Expertise: From the Topics to Shelter, 1953-93.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76(3): 367-84.
MODERNITY AND THE CHIEFTAIN CONTINUUM
MARK JARZOMBEK
Mark Jarzombek
In the article, I explore a more balanced accounting of these exchanges. The last 300 years have not been favorable for that chieftain world, and not just because of the horrific decimations brought on by disease and colonialism, and not just because of the advances of so-called Western secularism. Modernization, nationalization, monotheismization, and assimilation, whether forced or unforced, all played a part in depriving the chieftain world of its place in the geo-political system of wealth production. And yet the residual but persistent energy of the chieftain world is not hard to find. In fact, the more one looks, the more one realizes that the global presence of the chieftain world—though missing, mangled, and often still much maligned— brings into visibility modernity’s historical, political, and conceptual limits. It is the "optic" that allows us to comprehend the geo-political, unnaturalness of modernity, for it produces an agonism that now more than ever has no clear end in sight.
In the early 1940s when Uncle Billy was a little boy, he ran into Living Solid Face in the woods about Piscataway Creek. Covered by brush, the guardian spirit resided on a large boulder over the tributary of the Potomac River, only fifteen miles south of Washington, D.C. Grandpa Turkey decided to call the Smithsonian scholars from the Bureau of American Ethnology to the site so that it could be officially recorded that there was still an old Piscataway chiefdom territory marker in modern times. When the scholars arrived, they debated about the boulder face’s age. To resolve the academic question, they decided to have it removed for further study. They came back with workmen and a jackhammer. As they attempted to remove it, the face disintegrated to dust. Living Solid Face refused to be captured that day.1
When we think of the modern world, the word chieftain does not come to mind as a key determinant of the conversation. But if we were to move the clock back by only a few centuries, the situation would have been markedly different. In the 16th century, the proverbial civilizations of the world in China, India, Asia, North Africa, and Europe constituted a fraction of the global economic territory. Huge zones were under the control of chieftains of various sorts. In fact, had Europeans not risen to such dominance by the 19th century, the world today might not look all that much different from that of the 16th century. This is not to say that things would have remained static, but that the terms of modernity would have been significantly different. Today, the chieftain world that once so prospered—and that was still very much in play in some parts of the world, even into the 19th century—is for all practical purposes gone, beaten back not just by colonialism, but also by the combined globally scaled forces of monotheism, nationalism, modernization, weaponization, and, more recently, by the globalization of the various commodity industries and their internationally sanctioned resource appropriation. Without much of a written history of its own, the place of the chieftain world in our historical narratives is further sorely undervalued.
What do I mean by "chieftain"? The question is a trap, because anthropologists have identified so many variations. No doubt, chief doms at the upper end of the register have a well-structured, hierarchical organization, usually based on kinship, in which power and wealth were controlled by the senior members of select families or "houses," forming an aristocracy relative to the general group. The word "tribe" usually indicates something less structured. Instead of dividing and subdividing, I will cautiously move in the opposite direction of generality, using chieftain not as an anthropological term, but as a semiotic indicator of a way of knowing the world. It had certain attributes: kin relationships, orality, ancestor cults as well as strong attachments to nature spirits and mountain deities. And though we often emphasize the proverbial chief, this world had complex layers of ritual specialists, shamans, elders, and dream-interpreters, along with warriors, slaves, and transportation specialists, not to mention clan members of various sorts and ranks. It was this complexity and its elasticity—usually in the form of village networks—that enabled the chieftain world to develop and prosper for so long. Most remarkably, whereas the world’s city-based empires had to focus on ecological zones that could support grain surplus, chieftain cultures could be found in a wide variety of ecological zones. They were the masters of the savannah, tundra, steppe, plains, oceans, mountains, and rain forests as well as, of course, the rich assortment of foods that could be generated in these places.
And yet we know so much more about civilizations, associated as they usually are with the category state, because they held the keys to their own narrative in the form of writing; but any reasoned understanding of history can show that the absence of historical records should not lead us to see absence itself. “At one time in human prehistory, chiefdoms were the most complex of all human social organizations.”2 The author is referring to the Neolithic period in Europe around 3,000 BCE, but the irony is that the chieftain world did not shrink in size with the arrival of so-called "historical" cultures. On the contrary, it thrived. In the 13th century CE, and even perhaps well into the 17th century, there were significantly more "prehistorical" people on the planet than "historical" ones, but one would hardly get a sense of this from civilization-centric histories.
From that perspective, one also misses a rather remarkable historical dynamic, for the issue here is not the proverbial encounter between civilizations and the chieftain societies at their periphery, but the difference in regard to the scale of the chieftain world between the beginning of the first millennium CE and its end. In the first century CE, huge amounts of global territory were either still empty or only lightly populated by First Society people. A thousand years later, by the 13th century, the chieftain world had filled out many of these areas (Figure 1). Where once there had been little in the way of a social footprint, there were now vast arrays of village networks, chiefdoms, and chiefdom-derived kingdoms. By the 13th century, chiefdoms had even redefined the core identity of civilizational DNA. The once terrifying Normans were kings of England; the Mongolians were rulers of China; a former Viking territory was now known as the Grand Duchy of Moscow; and the fearsome Huns were the proud sovereigns of the Kingdom of Hungary. Former Mongolian slaves, the Mamluks, ruled Egypt. If we add the kingdoms in southeast Asia, the Bantu in Africa, the Polynesians in the Pacific, the Mississippi Mound cultures in the Americas, and the rain forest cultures in the Amazon Basin, to name only a few of the dominant chiefdoms and chiefdom-descendent societies, we begin to get a sense of the enormous scale of the chieftain world at the end of the first millennium CE.
Figure 1: History of dechieftanization from 200,000 BCE - 2,000 CE. Courtesy: Author.
Figure 2: Jedburgh comb made from a single piece of walrus ivory c. 1100 CE. Found in Jedburgh Abbey. The carving shows a man fighting a dragon. 5 cm wide by 4.34 cm long. Courtesy: Christian Bickel.
Figure 3: Chinese imperial queen's headdress (Ming Dynasty) with blue tiantsui leaves and birds, gold dragons, pearls, and polished semi-precious stones. Located at the Ming tombs museum complex. Courtesy: Leonard G.
And yet if we tell the history of that period, we will inevitably talk about the Empires of Rome, Charlemagne, or Asoka; the various dynasties in China; the Rise of Islam, and so forth. The great tribal- chieftain continuum that filled out much of the rest of the world more or less disappears from textbooks except when it involves references to invasions. The problem of how to come to terms with this vast history is so profound that it shatters any untampered confidences in the disciplinary protocols of history.
We come now to the critical question. Why did the chieftain continuum expand so dramatically in the first millennium CE? Most scholars, when they talk about expansion, mention population growth, and sometimes the culture of budding and migration. As important as these may be, we should not overlook another key factor: luxury trade. Today, luxury commodities are almost all manufactured and engineered—a watch, an automobile, an airplane. Civilization produces its own luxury objects. Even gold and diamonds are industrial products. It is, therefore, difficult for us to imagine a world where large parts of the luxury economy were unmanufactured commodities, diamonds from the rivers of Borneo, scented woods from Southeast Asia, gold and slaves from Africa, furs from Siberia, pepper from Timor, turquoise from the American southwest, and on and on; the list is enormous. Until the arrival of the Europeans to these various parts of the world, these luxury goods moved from tribes to more hierarchical chiefdoms to the various kingdoms and ports where they were then placed into the flow of global trade. As contact with distant civilizations increased, the desire economy emanating from the civilizational centers worked its way with increased potency upstream to even the farthest forests or shores. Though no one can really measure just how much of the global economic wealth was controlled by chieftains in the 16th century, at the beginning of the colonial period, a good starting position would be at least on the order of fifty percent by that time.
Somewhere between their source and their final use, most of the goods were crafted in some way, but the initial product was made by nature, so to speak. But in no case was it free for the taking in the sense of John Locke. Local tribes and chieftains monopolized resources and knew the appropriate natural, ancestral, spirit-world rhythms, and the related costs that allowed acquisition to take place. Take amber, for example, a commodity that stood at the apex of the Roman luxury market. With gold in short supply, since so much of it was used to purchase luxury goods from India, amber became a currency all unto its own. Though easy to mine along the shores of the Baltic Sea, its acquisition and delivery up the chain of command to the local chieftains was regulated through tightknit clan relations. There can be no doubt that the wealth it generated among the Baltic and German chiefdoms played an important role in strengthening the power of the chiefdoms there—with, of course, eventual negative consequences for the Romans. The Vikings, who came to control the amber trade a few centuries later, did even better. They learned that African elephant ivory was one of the most expensive luxury items in Europe, reserved almost exclusively for church bibles and sacred ornaments. With such a market, why not offer a cheaper substitute: walrus ivory? Who in Paris could possibly tell the difference? But walruses are not native to Scandinavia. The closest places were Iceland and Greenland, and the Vikings made a killing not just on pillaging, for which they are more famous, but in selling walrus ivory (Figure 2). In other words, the Vikings did not just rely on local sources of wealth, but colonized parts of the world to monopolize the niche market. 3 Long distance trade in lightweight luxury goods was even more important to the expanding world of Southeast Asia during the first millennium CE. The empires in India and China increasingly gorged themselves on the wealth coming out of the rain forests: cinnamon, pearls, diamonds, and bird’s nests were just the better-known luxury commodities that also included rattan and the gall bladder of a long-tailed monkey (Semnopithecus pruinosus) , known as bezoar stones. The Chinese court had a particularly strong taste for the iridescent blue feathers of the kingfisher bird, which were used as a crown ornament for the emperor or as an inlay for hairpins, headdresses, and fans for panels and screens (Figure 3). The most expensive commissioned pieces used feathers from a particular species of kingfisher from the forests of Cambodia. So great was the trade of these feathers that it was a major wealth-generating element for the Khmer, who used that wealth not just for their extravagant temples and palaces—show-off pieces in the regional stage, Angkor Wat being just one of them—but for the gold and silver that they in turn imported as architectural decoration. Who today thinks that one could trade gold for a few feathers? One of the several famous Chinese crowns that have survived into the modern era, such as the one worn by the Empress Dowager Xiaojie of the Ming Dynasty and exhibited in the National Museum in Beijing, was decorated with figurines of phoenixes, dragons, clouds and flowers using gold, azure kingfisher feathers, pearls and other precious stones. The gold probably came from Borneo, the feathers from Cambodia, and the pearls from either the Philippines or Sri Lanka. Trade in bezoar stones existed well into the late 19th century, when an English naturalist and adventurer in Borneo noted with some astonishment:
A curious industry is the collection of galiga, or bezoar stones, which are also mostly secured by the Orang Poonan [Borneo’s forest tribes]. These galiga are highly prized for medicinal purposes, and are sold at fabulous prices to the Boegis [Celebe traders from Sulawesi who settled in Koetei], who resell them to the Chinese.4
Also from Borneo, even as late as 1911, Chinese merchants would buy a pound and half of crystalized camphor, valued by the elites for its medicinal and aphrodisiac properties, for two ounces of gold, roughly equivalent to $50 dollars. 5 One can only imagine its even higher "palace-value cost" in China. 6
There is an important dynamic in all of this that the banal world ‘trade’ fails to convey. The chieftain world needed its own type of oil in the system, one that is, however, extremely hard to document given that we are discussing oral cultures. A good deal of the upstreaming of wealth—often ignored by historians of "trade"—went into the clan network. The chieftain elites also needed goods for the obligatory ritual exchanges and feasts, and for the construction of the aura of prestige itself. They needed mortuary shrines and in some cases, temples. Many goods were deposited in lakes and streams as gifts to guardian spirits and ancestors where they obviously remain invisible to history. By the 12th century or so, this exchange system had become so robust that both sides needed the other.
Figure 4: Traditional Camphor extraction in Taiwan. Courtesy: National Taiwan Museum.
Figure 5: The mastery of extreme landscape by Chieftain world. Courtesy: Author
At the core of this exchange was an important asymmetry. If "natural" items went downstream, it was often manufactured goods that went upstream, valued not simply for their practical uses, but as prestige commodities. In the civilizational centers, manufactured goods could be easily produced in surplus for the explicit purpose of trade: bronze caldrons, beads, silver beakers, weapons, and cloth. The Chinese of course had silk and bronze. On December 29, 1378, Chinese records indicate that envoys from Pahang, an entity on peninsular Malaysia, arrived with a set of typical Southeast Asian gifts including frankincense from Yemen, as well as camphor and red (proboscis) monkeys from Borneo (Figure 4). In return, the envoys received “patterned fine silk.” 7 Romans exchanged wine, the liquid equivalent of silk in terms of civilizational effort, for iron bars. Celtic iron was of course made through a process akin to industrialization, but the Celtics did not make finished weapons for the Romans. Furthermore, the smithing of metal in local workshops hardly compares with the labor and land policies necessary for wine cultivation. Examples are numerous. When Europeans showed up in the Americas, they often exchanged axes and liquor for animal hides. Vikings traded their amber, slaves, and walrus tusks for, among other things, silver, coins, fine fabrics, silk, and wine. Forest chiefs of Sri Lanka exchanged the rubies they panned in the mountain rivers—and that were destined to be one of the cornerstones of Indian luxury—for rice that was grown by the valley kingdoms partially for just such trade.
One of the reasons the chieftain supply chain prospered was because of the fundamental inefficiency of states to master anything other than a rather small zone of ecological reality. The civilizational powers before the era of colonialization did not have the wherewithal to get to the source of most of the luxury goods they wanted. A civilization-centric history will thus fail to recognize the systemic inability of urban-based empires to handle mountains, forests, steppes, deserts, and oceans, the natural habitat—and vast it was—for the tribal-chieftain world. Stated differently, the states of the first millennium CE were incapable of dealing with the world outside of the Holocenic norm that privileged a taxable mixture of agriculture, crafts, and resource acquisition. Civilizations stayed away from zones that were too hot, too dry, too wet. The genius of the chieftain world, by way of contrast, was the claim it made to non-normative environments . There is a direct relationship between civilization’s inability to transcend its ecological zones and the escalating value in the first millennium CE of exotic luxury items from distant shores.
The chieftain world’s capacity to master difficult ecologies, a capacity that constituted its bulwark against civilizational encroachment, would be challenged first by European colonialists and then by the escalating forces of industrialization. Before then, the chieftain world had specialized in the extreme landscape conditions that are so typical of much of the globe’s surface (Figure 5). Those chieftain cultures that lived in the boundary conditions with civilizations came to be locked into the systems of exchange that flowed through them. Instability was a guarantee, with raids and counter-raids marking the entire history along the contact zone. Inevitably, contact zone chiefdoms had to imperialize or tribalize. They had to match force with force, or be subsumed by those who could.
For example, no sooner had the English arrived in Jamestown than the various small cultural units in the area, despite the fact that they were linguistically and culturally diverse, united into a powerful chiefdom— the Powhatan Confederacy, as it is now mostly called—under the control of a Mamanatowick , which has been translated variously as “paramount chief” or “emperor,” but which really means something like "powerful spiritual presence." He was attended by various servants and shamans as well as a fifty- man bodyguard. Though he controlled the chiefs or leaders ( weroance lit: “rich and esteemed”), he embodied different roles. The soldiers represented his military voice, whereas the shamans, his power and right to contact the ancestors. English and European colonialists could never quite understand what to them seemed like a particularly inefficient way to govern. This was because the Mamanatowick was not a ruler in the European sense, but an expediency in troubled times. He was in charge of the distribution of maize through tribute payments, community labor and domestic production. This allowed him to quickly mobilize an army.8 The English also did not realize that it was their presence that created this system. This partially explains why historically, chiefdoms that survived the longest rose to prominence well outside of civilizational force-fields, proliferating in other words in southern Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands and in parts of the Americas.
The last 300 years, of course, saw the denouement of this whole system. The obliteration of the chieftain continuum was not caused by some natural transition to a superior form of governance, but by a concerted effort of de-chieftainization. A key factor was the need to appropriate the sources of wealth. It was a globally-scaled, multi-institutional, multi-century project: death by a thousand cuts. The Dutch took away the diamond fields in Borneo to make Amsterdam the new global center for the diamond market. In the Americas, the white colonizers killed off the buffalo to drive the Plains Indians from the land. In South Africa, the Dutch and English took the gold mines. Ivory trade is now banned, and natural camphor, one of the leading luxury items brought out of Borneo, was replaced by a manufactured product. Coins have replaced beads, shells, and amber. The unrelenting deforestations in Brazil, Indonesia, and Borneo continue to have the easily predicted side effect: the de-population of the landscape. Machines of almost unimaginable scale have made even the most inhospitable landscape cough up its wealth. Gold is no longer panned along forest rivers, but is instead industrially mined and shipped. Monotheism played a huge role in disconnecting locals from ancestral cults. This form of de-chieftainization is hardly over. It is still preached by Christian and Islamic fundamentalists whose efforts are often directly associated with the politics of nationalization and modernization. I need only refer here to the Joshua Project or to Wahhabism. But most importantly, wealth is no longer generated from "exotic" natural goods, but from manufactured goods. In 1954, Peter Abrahams, the renowned South African novelist, phrased the drive toward modernization with the following words: “The moral codes of tribal man were adequate to his time. The needs of modern man, the conditions under which modern man lives, demand new structures and new values.”9 Nothing could better summarize the civilizational arrogance of the modernist mindset. But the chieftain world refused, and still refuses, to just go away, forcing the matrixes of civilization to perfect the conspiratorial strategy of stabilizing the rough encounter with its former economic partners to its advantage, and always with an eye to the eventual demise of chieftain sensibilities. The classic way in which chieftain cultures were tamed—apart, of course, from disease and conquest—was to convert polities into tribes, a word that inevitably connotes an administrative problem rather than a societal shaping of the world.10 As Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has pointed out with wry poignancy, “[E]very African community is a tribe, and every African a tribesman, meaning that thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation.”11 Another way was to translate former chieftain people into "ethnic groups."12 In some cases, communities uphold "traditional" life-styles and are even occasionally protected by the cultural elites when it suits national imperatives. But from an economic point of view, the role of former chieftain communities in the great, global flow of luxury commodities is zero, making it hard for us even to imagine what a prosperous chieftain world once looked like.
Figure 6a: A Rumuvan ceremony, probably photographed in Lithuania, reviving the pagan religious practices of Baltic people before their Christainization in 1387. Courtesy: Mantas LT
Figure 6b: Neo-Paganism in Sweden. Heathen altar with large wooden idol of god Freyr, associated with Nordic mythology. Courtesy: Gunnar Creutz
Figure 7: 2017 fashion shoot of a model dressed in Native American tribal chief clothing. Courtesy: Public Domain, photographer unknown
And yet, the residual but persistent energy of the chieftain world is not hard to find. 13 I live, for example, in the state of Massachusetts, named arbitrarily after one of dozens of former regional chiefdoms that have long since ceased to exist. Chieftain imaginaries are continuously evoked, heroically and even nostalgically, in cinema, such as in Avatar ; in sports, such as the Kansas City Chiefs; or in avant-gardist art. Somewhere in all of this, one would have to mention the increasingly formidable cultural space of Contemporary Neo- Paganism, which has been defined as “a collection of modern religious, spiritual, and magical traditions that are self-consciously inspired by the pre-Judaic, pre- Christian, and pre-Islamic belief systems of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East” 14 (Figure 6). It has strong parallels with Neo-shamanism, a movement in its own right, especially in Eastern Asia and South America. And in Peru, the Pachamama cult—as a combination of survival, revival, and New Age Mysticism—is experiencing a pronounced popularity. These are not just curiosities and fads, but part of sustained critiques against the conspiratorial teleology of "civilization."
The chieftain world, with all its gray zones, has to be seen not as something before modernism, but as integral to the modern world and its history, even if this history wants nothing more even today than to finish the job. But now that the inconclusiveness of that project is apparent, modernity, once seen as a set of irreversible universalizations (nation, religion,culture, language, modernization, government, and even, but most importantly, civilization) has been forced to retrench itself into a compromise position with the ancient chieftain world that, in various types of translations, resides at multiple institutionalized, cultural, and psycho-cultural registers within modernity. Modernity, from that perspective, is not some "unfinished" project, but stuck in an asymptotic position in its relationship with the chieftain past. It has stripped the chieftain world bare of its economic and political purpose, but has not succeeded in equal terms in regards to culture. In some contexts, that past survives in a type of political "old-age home," awaiting its eventual termination in the quietude of assimilation and structural forgetfulness. In other places, it survives as an uneasy, inter-political, marginalized alliance with centralized authority, or as a curiosity among the great nation states; and yet in other places, it is being vigorously reformatted into the welcoming embrace of ethno-centrism, tourism, and nostalgia (Figure 7). And finally, in some places it carries the label "terrorists" and embodies the cult of resistance. So instead of seeing the chieftain world as a residual "peripheral" to modernity, or as some historical (anthropological) "pre- modern," or as something that can be conveniently packaged in the form of tradition, we can see how it brings into visibility modernity’s historical, political, and conceptual limits. The chieftain world is the optic that allows us to comprehend the geo-political un- naturalness of modernity, producing an agonism that has no clear end in sight. ▪
ENDNOTES
1. Gabrielle Taya, “Keeping the Original Instructions,” Native Universe: Voices of Indian America, edited by Gerald McMaster, Clifford E. Trafzer (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008) 73-83 [p. 82].
2. Yamilette Chacon, The Contribution of Status Lineages in the Rise of the State: A New Theory of State Formation, (Dissertation in the Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, 2014), 9.
3. Bastiaan Star, James H. Barrett, Agata T. Gondek, Sanne Boessenkool, “Ancient DNA reveals the chronology of walrus ivory trade from Norse Greenland,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Published 8 August 2018. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0978). Historians know that the about forty tusks payed the equivalent to a year’s worth of tax to the king of Norway, for a clan. That is twenty animals that one clobbers to death on the beach, not hard to do.
4. Carl Bock, Headhunters of Borneo, A Narrative of Travel up the Mahakkam and Down the Barito (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1882), 205.
5. Edwin Herbert Gomes, Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo: A Record of Intimate Association with the Natives of the Bornean Jungles (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911), 239.
6. It was so precious that in the early 18th century, the camphor trees in Formosa—now Taiwan—were owned by the Chinese state and the penalty for chopping one of them down was nothing less than death. “The Camphor Industry,” Meyer Brothers Druggist 22/2 (1901), 51. See also: Mark Jarzombek, “Borneo: The River Effect and the Spirit World Millionaires” in A History of Architecture and Trade, edited by Patrick Haughey (London: Routledge, 2018), 80–114.
7. Geoff Wade, translator, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: an open access resource, (Singapore: Asia Research Institute and the Singapore E-Press, National University of Singapore, 2017), http://www.epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/reign/hong-wu/ year-11-month-12-day-9, accessed July 23, 2017.
8. The above is condensed from: Jayme A. Sokolow, The Great Encounter: Native Peoples and European Settlers in Americas, 1492-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 86; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 114.
9. Peter Abrahams, “The Conflict of Culture in Africa,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 30/3 (July 1954), 304-2, [p. 312].
10. See for example: Virginius Xaxa, “Tribes as Indigenous People of India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 34/51 (Dec. 1999), 18-24. According to Peter Berger, the use of terms like “tribe” and “tribal” is not even clear among anthropologists. Some would prefer not to use either or only within "inverted commas." See Peter Berger, “Feeding Gods, Feeding Guests: Sacrifice and Hospitality among the Gadaba of Highland Orissa,” Anthropos, 106/1 (2011), 31-47.
11. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, “The Myth of Tribe in African Politics,” Transition, Vol. 101, No.1. 16-23, [p. 17].
12. Leonard M. Helfgott, "Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” Iranian Studies, 10/ 1-2 (Winter-Spring, 1977), 36-61, [p. 36].
13. The last time Robert Carmack uses the word “tribe” in his otherwise excellent book Anthropology and Global History, from Tribes to the Modern World-System (2015) is on page 128 in a book that is about 360 pages long. The implication is that "tribality" has been phased out of the modern world-system.
14. Ethan Doyle White, Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Brighton, Chicago, and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press. 2016), 6.