This seminar begins with the premise that the modern built environment has been shaped in relation to migration, diaspora, and displacement. In this class, we will explore the ways in which settlement and migration are enacted in relation to one another, tracing the ways in which architectural knowledge is created alongside transience, marginalization, and domestic insurgency.

This course poses the question of how projects of land, terrain, and territory enfold laboring bodies and gather around, legislate, and flow through settlement. Linking the architectures of colonization to modernization's damaged ecologies, we will trace the ways in which those spatial orders have been disrupted and re-imagined, proposing new methodologies for the design of planetary futures.

This course brings a decolonizing perspective to spatial histories of German modernism. It offers a critical history of modern architecture in Germany as framed by the global networks of European, and specifically German, colonialism, which gave shape and form to the 19th and 20th centuries, and which continue to contour the world today.

The seminar is always given by a guest lecturer at the institute gta and deals with topics ranging from the history of architecture through the history of the city to the history of the landscape from the early modern period to today.In HS20 the seminar explores the history of modern architecture and planning as a medium of territorial thought and transformation since the1880s.

What do we mean by the terms colonialism, imperialism, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and coloniality, and how do they intersect with and unsettle studies of the built and spatially imagined environment? Using postcolonial thought as our lens, this course introduces students to the core ideas and key methodological strategies that inform inquiries into the colonial past and its enduring present.