This course is based on a simple conceit: that all architecture is storytelling, stories whose yarn is inevitably and ultimately intertwined with the weave of global colonialism. But, most often, architectural storytelling is designed to tell half the story, either deliberately leaving out or unable to imagine these lingering connections. Under the shade of the latticed canopy of the Jean Nouvel’s Louvre, Abu Dhabi, sits a collection of French mahogany furniture. The canopy's sprawling shade is celebrated as the melding of two cultures, combining the cultural capital of Paris with the traditional heritage of the desert. What is not imagined, or acknowledged, is that this mahogany was stolen from Haiti during the violent French colonial occupation of the island to build not only the French naval fleet but also the fashionable bureaus, chairs, and desks that inhabited the social spaces of the new empire, denuding the island to the extent that its barren landscape can be differentiated from the neighboring Dominican Republic from space. How should we think of this shade in Abu Dhabi that holds the very wood that has left Haiti shadeless? Instead of invoking clichéd images of desert oases, could this canopy be imagined--through its design, its materiality, its description--as a manifestation of the very colonial history that has made the Louvre in Paris, and in Abu Dhabi, possible? The goal of this class is to develop an alternative way of reading, understanding, and imagining architecture that pushes against established categories of historical context, precedent, influence, authorship, memorialization, and meaning. We will read fiction, theoretical texts, and watch films to identify different global histories around particular architectural projects and test whether we can imagine a different vocabulary, and politics, of storytelling in design.