Topical Questions in History and Theory of Architecture: (Un)settling Territory

Abstract

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.

Objective

Seeking to unearth longstanding entanglements between land and architecture, we will chart the imperial global geographies, the territorial formations, and their knowledge systems, shaped and sustained over the last 500 years by the spatial grammar of colonization—the “rifts of broken earths” created by modernization’s displacements. These formations share a common heritage of practices informed by the same recurring themes that define the damaged ecologies of the Anthropocene, a subject of increasing decolonial scrutiny within studies of the built and landscaped environment. Those themes include entrenched forms of racialized violence, land alienation, environmental degradation, and large-scale species loss, narratives of modernity archived by the land and landscape. Thinking alongside Kathryn Yusoff and Swati Chattopadhyay and engaging Indigenous spatial ontologies and Black feminist- and postcolonial counter-mapping, we will trace the ways in which those territorial orders have been disrupted, unsettled, and re-imagined, proposing new methodologies for the design of planetary futures.

Content

This course opens with the hypothesis that the historical dynamic of deterritorialization that is fundamental to imperial and colonial structures—the unit of the global, formed by empire and capitalism—has taken shape through design and architectural interventions, stressing the need to better understand modern architecture’s land histories. Postcolonial theory further underscores the necessity to shift how we read design’s participation in capitalist transformations of the environment, its long history of “development thinking.” Thinking within and across differences, the readings for this course share a core set of decolonial practices, new patterns of thought, to chart the spatial histories of these transformations. Working with an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach and privileging marginalized voices and geographies, we will explore these interventions and developments with perspectives offered by recent movements in Black studies, critical feminist geography, Indigenous environmental history, and multispecies studies. Engaging these perspectives serves to shift how we understand who and what has shaped the architectural past, while unearthing long-standing but overlooked entanglements between land and the built environment.

Resources