The Summer of 2020 brought discourses on decolonization, antiracism, and intersectional feminism to the fore of architectural pedagogy. Students rightly demanded an approach to the teaching of architecture that acknowledged the colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal roots of the discipline and looked to construct new histories that take on decolonizing, antiracist, and intersectional approaches. This course aims to examine how these approaches shape the history of architecture and its teaching.

The survey of architecture performed in typical architectural history courses is intimately related to the colonial survey of land; each survey produces a resource (architecture in the survey course and property in the land survey) that allows colonialism to profit from the land it seizes. The survey of great monuments necessarily imbricates architecture with privilege, capital, and exploited and racialized labor, basic components of racial capitalism and white supremacy. These definitions of the discipline favor the white, male, and wealthy artist independent of the systems of production and reproduction of human and non-human agents that sustain the planet. In order to teach a history of architecture that is decolonizing, antiracist, and intersectional, we must relearn and reconstruct the discipline.

This experimental seminar will assay histories of architecture that aim to unsettle the discipline; its aim is to produce a syllabus or syllabi for undergraduate and graduate lecture courses in architectural history, and/or develop pedagogies, assignments, and feedback.

The course will be cross-listed with a parallel seminar taught by Andrew Herscher in the Architecture Department. As an experimental course, all enrollments will require permission from the instructor.