Intersectional Histories: How Architectures Were Also Made

Abstract

From a ‘cottage’ in Chile, a ‘tea equipage’ in London, a ‘veranda’ in Mumbai, to a ‘cathedral’ in Strasbourg, this course presents global entanglements of built spaces by tracing architectural actors such as users, critics, patrons, and other makers between, roughly, 1700 and 1900. By combining intersectional history with reception history, we ask: how and by whom were architectures also made?

Objective

This course encourages students to critically reflect on the relevance and critical importance of historical research for the present and the future. By completing this course, students will: - develop an understanding of history as a living practice that shapes our present and future, - deepen knowledge about local and global entanglements of buildings and objects, - learn about concepts such as intersectional feminism, coloniality and decolonization, - become familiar with historiographic methods such as the global microhistory or collaborative reading, - improve both analytical and speculative writing skills.

Content

This course introduces students to intersectional history – how accounts of the past are shaped by intersecting privileges and marginalizations – as well as reception history – how the meaning of architecture is and has been shaped also by those who dwell in it and use it. It draws heavily on the research of the ERC-funded group WoWA – Women Writing Architecture. It will focus, as the project, on the 18th and 19th centuries, complicating European histories within colonial contexts, especially linking to Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. However, it will also reach beyond this time frame to bring in a wider context – up to the Renaissance and into the 20th century. Through a set of lectures which are interspersed with exercises over the semester, students will engage with a diverse set of primary sources – texts, objects, sites – to actively re-think and re-read the past of the built environment. Lectures will present both theories and concepts such as agency, intersectional feminism, critical theory, (de- and post-) colonialism and coloniality, as well as showcase global microhistories of texts, objects, and sites that materialise the approach of intersectional histories. We reflect on what constitutes architecture – or architectures – from the perspective of the user, critic, and patron. In several structured exercises, students will analyse an object, site, or text on both a micro and global scale, producing their own global microhistories over the semester.

Resources