COURSE CANCELLED

Lina Bo Mardi at MASP

ARC3702H S
Instructor: Aziza Chaouni
Meeting Section: LEC0101
Wednesday 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This seminar aims to bring to students the voices, lives, contexts and work of architects they seldom encounter throughout their academic training.

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 second seminar in the Voices We Seldom Hear series will focus on introducing students to architects in the Global South working to reimagine 20th century post-colonial 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. In addition, post-colonial modern heritage in the Global South can teach us design lessons relevant to contemporary practice such as passive ventilation systems, use of local affordable material in innovative manners, integration of local craft etc…

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 attempt to fully immerse in-situ students within unique modernist and brutalist masterpieces across the Global South, in Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Burkina Fasso, Kosovo, India, Ghana, Senegal and Uruguay, as invited guest speakers will lead live streamed lectures on their conservation work and activism.

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.