Theories, Tools, Terms of Engagement
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South
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Section 1: Theories, Tools, and Terms of Engagement
Theories, Tools, and Terms of Engagement
Theories, Tools, and Terms of Engagement
Extract from the introduction by
Extract from the introduction by
Harriet Harriss, Barry Curtis, and Ashraf M. Salama
Harriet Harriss, Barry Curtis, and Ashraf M. Salama
The section on theories, tools, and terms of engagement features nine chapters that examine some of the key preoccupations and core antagonisms discussed within the introduction in more detail, drawing from historical and contemporary pedagogies that have been operationalized to address context specificity. The section begins with a critique of the term ‘Global South’, by Macarena Gómez-Barris, drawing from her substantial research on decolonialization theory and praxis. By taking the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and a number of pedagogical techniques as critical examples of contents and methods, Ashraf Salama examines whether decolonized pedagogies generate a tool kit that can transform and transpose architectural pedagogy, offering a critique of the impact of Orientalist attitudes and Western authority on architectural pedagogy in the Global South.
Calling for both conceptual and practical effort against the dominance of Eurocentrism in architectural education, George Sefa Dei and Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva eloquently present critical anti-racist and anti-colonial prisms that enable interrogating coloniality and power in education and the ways in which academic institutions can invigorate them. Along the same line of thinking, José Jorge de Carvalho calls for radical decolonization of the epistemic bases of contemporary higher education by discussing a decolonizing movement that began at the University of Brasília in 2010. Such a movement aims to incorporate the vast body of knowledge of traditional communities by directly engaging the masters of those traditions in learning settings. Both chapters can be seen as pleading for a shift from Eurocentricity that characterises academic institutions towards pluri-epistemic modern universities. Likewise, Hannah le Roux discusses the pioneering 1974 dissertation of Saitowitz, who challenged assumptions about professional qualification in the context of the intricate conditions of colonial dominance in South Africa. In evoking the pressures and strains imposed at the dawning of political and ecological awareness in the 1960s and ’70s, le Roux contends that Saitowitz’s thesis provides tactical insight as to how historic attempts to decolonize the curriculum still resonate today.
From an advocacy perspective, Harriet Harriss and Naomi House consider what could constitute an Auto-Pedagogy for Landscape Architecture by sampling, hybridizing, and playfully reinventing principals and processes from auto-ethnography, auto-theory, post-humanism, and Feminist and Queer Theory. In doing so, they destabilize the pernicious and pervasive economic imperatives that have resulted in exploitative actions based upon what we broadly understand ‘land’ to be, and, redefine landscape architecture’s relationship with practices of empathy and care. Working with similar theoretical rubrics, Adam Kaasa calls for incommensurable pedagogy by adopting decolonial thinking and queer theory to unravel spatial metaphors of knowledge production and suggest ways in which architectural pedagogy can dwell in the incommensurate. He calls for the centering of the body in a new architectural pedagogy, apprehended as an entanglement of feeling and structure in which difference is ‘a collective conjuring of embodied presence’. He considers the body, with all its affinities and complexities as an essential pre-condition for an architecture of creativity, participation, and ‘methetic’ (meaning group) sharing and support, drawing on the insights provided by Munoz, that effect a blending of the dawning, unrealised elements of queerness, and the ‘vast, present and vital’ presence of browness.
Expanding the narrative, David Gloster examines how the appropriation and assimilation of East Africa’s cultural motifs into modernism’s Western forms exposed modernism’s colonial complicity and generated outcomes that were at odds with the demands of the local environment and its established political and social systems. Examining similar transpositional tropes, Kiel Moe’s study of the Seagram building forms the basis for a compositional pedagogy of architectural materiality, whereby archaeologically examining the materiality of buildings in the West reveals the exploitative extent of the ongoing terrestrial migration of construction materials from the Global South.
Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA, Ph.D.) is a qualified architect and Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Her teaching, research, and writing focus upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition, and for widening participation in architecture to ensure it remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve, a subject she interrogates in her book, A Gendered Profession. Dean Harriss is also recognized as an advocate for diversity and inclusion within design education and was nominated by Dezeen as a champion for women in architecture and design in 2019. Her latest book Architects After Architecture (2020), considers the multi-sector impact of an architectural qualification. Visit here for more information
Ashraf M. Salama (FRSA, FHEA, Ph.D.) is Full Professor in Architecture and Director of Research at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He has led three of architecture in Egypt, Qatar and the United Kingdom, two of which he has founded and was Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde (2014-2020). With experience spanning across many contexts, he has been the director of research and consulting at Adams Group Architects in Charlotte, NC. He has published 14 authored and edited books including Demystifying Doha, 2013; Architecture Beyond Criticism, 2014; Spatial Design Education, 2015; Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf, 2019; Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies, 2020; and Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism, 2021. He is the UIA 2017 Recipient of Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism. Visit here for more information
Ane Gonzalez Lara is an assistant professor of undergraduate architecture at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Ane is the co-founder of Idyll Studio. Her professional work with Idyll balances social and cultural concerns with extensive formal and material research. She has developed academic research initiatives as part of her studio teaching that have examined the United States-Mexican border and the Korean demilitarized zone. She received her Master equivalent degree from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Navarra, Spain. She is a registered architect in Texas and Spain. Prior to working at Pratt, she taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of Houston. Her research interests include pedagogy, and social and climate justice topics as they relate to the built environment. Visit here for more information
Barry Curtis is Associate Director of Doctoral Programmes at University of the Arts, London. He was previously Professor and Head of Arts Research at Middlesex University, and has taught at the Open University, the London Consortium, The British Film Institute, Birkbeck College and the Royal College of Art. Barry is Experienced Tutor with a demonstrated history of working in the design industry. Skilled in Contemporary Art, Museums, Research Design, Lecturing, and Cultural Heritage. Visit here for more information
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