ARC3702H F
Instructor: Aziza Chaouni
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Fridays, 10:00am - 12:00pm

What if we took this term’s virtual teaching format as an opportunity to bring to students the voices, lives, contexts and work of architects they seldom encounter throughout their academic training? What if we did so while making it possible for students to ‘travel’ despite the current COVID-19 pandemic?

Indeed, the scope of architectural discourse and its allied fields has notoriously been narrow, revolving around Eurocentric, capitalistic, male interpretations of the built environment.

Yet, architecture as a medium operates on a wider spectrum, and academic discourse must be able to address the different challenges posed by complex identities, geographies, histories, and varied political and socio-economic contexts. The ambition of this seminar series is to introduce students to a wider range of voices from the margins, while critically exploring the intersections between architecture and issues rooted in post-colonialism, gender, and class.

This first seminar in the Voices We Seldom Hear series will focus on introducing students first hand to architects in the Global South working to reimagine 20th century modern heritage public buildings that are under threat. Facing a lack of recognition of modern heritage, often linked to the colonial era, an absence of funds and specialized expertise, limited archives, endemic corruption and at times, informal settlements, these architects deploy remarkable activism to revive heritage buildings for public use. Their efforts are particularly salient in contexts that are in dire need of public amenities and whose collective memory and heritage falls prey to urban development pressures.

Most importantly, by focusing on architects working on the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of 1960’s and 1970s buildings and landscapes seldom known and studied in schools in the Global North, this seminar will propose an alternative take on the historiography of both modernist and contemporary architectural practices.

The seminar will take advantage of the virtual format to fully immerse in-situ students within unique modernist and brutalist masterpieces across the Global South, in Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Kosovo, India, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Uruguay, as invited guest speakers will not only lead live streamed lectures on their conservation work and activism but also offer site visits.

The seminar will be composed of two segments: 1) an asynchronous short lecture that will introduce students to the context of the case studies, and which they can listen to at their own leisure; 2) a synchronous lecture by a guest speaker followed by a discussion session.

Collaboration is critical to the seminar, as we collectively acknowledge the strengths and shortcomings of our respective knowledge and seek to learn from each other and from guest speakers. As such, the class will decide as a group on the content and format of the course final assignment.

Acknowledgements: this seminar would not have been possible without the generous past support and ongoing mentorship of the Keeping It Modern program at the Getty Foundation. Sincere thanks to its director Antoine Wilmering.