A

MANUAL
OF
ANTI-RACIST
ARCHITECTURE
EDUCATION
 A
MANUAL
OF
ANTI-RACIST
ARCHITECTURE
EDUCATION

WAI
Architecture
Think Tank
 Index

Introduction
An Introduction to this Manual of
Anti-Racist Architecture Education
4

Before School
On Who gets to be an Architect and
Anti-racism is not taught. Anti-racism is practiced. Anti-Liberation paywalls
10

During School
An Anti-Racist Architecture
Education Spiral
20

After School
Un-Making Architecture
An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto
48
An Introduction to this Manual of Education models pursuing anti-racist practices must respect and protect the “right to opacity” that Edouard
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing,
trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Glissant articulates in Poetics of Relation. The right to opacity stands against the “reductive transparency” that
2010).
commodifies, instrumentalizes and profits from decodifying Blackness or indigenousness or any other form
Anti-Racist Architecture Education of racialization. This “settler move to innocence”, as Tuck and Yang describe, is how mainstream education-
al research reduces indigenous people between “at risk” peoples and as asterisk peoples erasing and then
concealing “the erasure of Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial nation-state and moves Indigenous
There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples nations as ‘populations’ to the margins of public discourse.”
making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too easy
adoption of decolonizing discourse (making decolonization a met- The process of making transparent (turning identities into a monolith to be understood), of objectifying
aphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing (turning them into objects to be studied or fetishized as part of a spectacle or a set of requirements), but also
tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances. of overlooking (ignoring and making invisible not only the people but their forms of knowledge), are part of
‘settler moves to innocence” that “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and res-
-Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Colonization is not a metaphor cue settler futurity.” That’s why it is not enough to add portions about class struggle, and include some Black,
indigenous, or Latina references to curriculums without meaningful change. Truly diverse voices and expe-
When Black lives matter everybody lives better. riences (racialized, class, gender, and sexual identities) are fundamental to the possibility of an anti-racist
pedagogy. Books about labor and capitalism that don’t engage with the history of settler-colonialism, slavery,
–Ruth Wilson Gilmore and race shouldn’t exist in an anti-racist academic setting. White designers profiting from Black and indige-
nous labor shouldn’t have a place in anti-racist settings. Black, indigenous, and other voices shouldn’t need
white translators in an anti-racist setting. Just like Tuck and Yang argue that decolonization “is and requires
more than a metaphor”, so does anti-racism.
This document is a work of anti-capitalist realism that acknowledges the unsustainable character of a knowl-
edge and material economy made possible via the inhumane occupation of indigenous land and the brutal Because architecture education is not only confined to the space of the academia even if architecture
materialization of anti-Black racism and its aftermath. schools have been fundamental in the regulation of the practice of architecture with a capital ‘A’ in many
parts of the world, this manual accounts for what happens before, after, and despite formal architectural
Why focus specifically on architecture education, since anti-Black racism and settle-colonialism could (and education.
should) be tackled through the lens of any other major discipline or epistemological system? As stated in
Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto (in the third part of this manual), architecture Structure
has been instrumental in the installation and consolidation of settler-colonialism and the full spectrum of Simultaneously a working tool, a historically situated manifesto, a pedagogical guideline, and a speculative
extractive, abusive, racist, capitalist, postimperial infrastructures of oppression. In the way that buildings are treatise on the future of pedagogy, this Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education exclaims that because
never just buildings, architecture is not a bubble. other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary, other models of architectural education are not only possi-
ble but imperative.
To address architecture is to engage with the multidimensional and material legacy of settler-colonialism,
capitalism, and, as a direct result, racism. To deal with architecture is to confront the processes of planning Divided in three parts, this manual engages with the concept of schooling in relationship to architecture
and constructing the ways in which we live together and the many forms we are compartmentalized, regu- without reducing what architecture is, has been, or could be, and instead, dissects the many fronts architecture
lated, and segregated. To engage with architecture is to face the effects of zoning practices, the fabrication operates, influences, affects, regulates, contains, delimits, excludes, protects, consolidates, and oppresses.
of private property in occupied territories, of the conceptualization, design, and construction of concentra-
tion camps, division walls, buildings and infrastructures for policing, prisons, border checkpoints, but also The first part of the manual, Before School discusses some of the problems regarding the legitimation
of racialized suburban settlements, school buildings and hospitals. Because architecture affects everybody, of particularly problematic and inaccessible forms of architectural education. A series of Anti-Liberation
a radical and abolitionist pedagogy of architecture must embrace all the peoples, not just those officially Paywall Diagrams contrast class and racial segregation with tuition fees, estimated total costs, and endow-
trained as architects. ments of some of the perceived elite architectural institutions in the United States. Through these graphics,
a critical imagination may be able to reflect on the relationship between universities, not only as centers of
Because anti-racism is not taught but practiced, an anti-racist pedagogy is not only about the political and intellectual and cultural capital, but as settler-colonial tools of land occupation, gentrification, and racial
ideological content embedded in the syllabus of the design studio, the critical content of the history of oppression.
theory seminar, and the emancipating potential that technical, and how-to knowledge can bring, but about
interpersonal relations, radically inclusive learning spaces, anti-occupation and de-occupation practices, and During School presents an annotated version of the Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education. The An-
Based on Charles Jencks’ multiple ‘evolutionary
anti-hegemonic institutional approaches. trees’ of architecture, the following spread ques- ti-Racist spiral is a diagram that questions structural forms of knowledge while proposing emancipating
tions the construction of a Eurocentric archi- epistemologies, platforms, methods, strategies, and voices. Through the creation of an open spiral forms of
Anti-racist pedagogies have to engage simultaneously with the continuous omission, invisibility, and violent Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization tectural epistemology devoid of context. An an-
Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, ti-racist model of ‘architectural evolution’ is only
education, histories, theories, and media are intersected through the centers of anti-racism, anti-ableism,
erasure of Black, and indigenous people, and racialization of non-white people, the relationship to class transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and ecological justice in order to imagine
Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. possible by establishing relationships between
and racialized impoverishment and precarity while avoiding and challenging the tokenization, instrumental- hegemonic positions, theories, and institutions other forms of architectural pedagogy.
ization, and objectification of these same people. Because universities, and architecture schools have been and practices of extraction, colonization, white
particularly instrumental in constructing and maintaining the legacy of white supremacist settler-colonial and heteropatriarchal supremacy, anti-Black, and
anti-indigenous racism, war, and technological
In the third part of the manual, After School introduces Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture
states, it is not enough to make symbolic gestures or “settler moves to innocence” as Eve Tuck and K.Wayne Manifesto. The Anti-Racist Manifesto delves into the how architecture has been and continues to be central
development.
Yang describe in ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor.’ to the construction of race and the perpetuation of anti-Black racism.
4
1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Architecture and Urbanism College, US backed Canada stops sponsoring

Fordlandia Indian Residential Schools THOA Silvia
University of São Paulo
B r a s i l i a
coup in Brazil
(1969)
SUBALTERN Rivera
BRAZIL ABOLISHES Puerto Rico tries to ban Brazil (1948) (1964) (1983) Xucuru Cusicanqui
SLAVERY Loudreading in Tobacco Factories (1928) (1956-1963) US supports Bolivia includes
Case Ch’ixinakax
(1888) (1897) Cuban Revolution coup in Bolivia Zapatistas Uprising Wiphala Flag
(2018) utxiwa
(1953-1959) Bay of Pigs (1971) (1994) in constitution (2020)
Cuba reinstates
Panama secession from Colombia
Invasion UPR Student massacre INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE (2009) Colectiva Feminista
CUBA WAR OF backed by US-France
Loudreading in tobacco WEB Du Bois Cuba Architecture Mexico City en construccion
INDEPENDENCE Panama Canal Company Black (1961) (1966) (1968)
factories CUBA ABOLISHES (1903) Reconstruction (2013) Standing Rock
(1895-98) Jacob Lawrence joins Summer Olympics
(1880) SLAVERY Black Wall Street (1935) Jamaica Dakota Access
(1886)
Cuba bans
(1921) HOLC Black Mountain College faculty independence Mexico City TRANSFEMINISM Emi Koyama Pipeline protests
Loudreading in tobacco Home (1946) (1968) US supported Black Black
(1962) The Transfeminist (2016)
factories (continues banning sporadically) The Clansman Ku Klux Klan Parade Owners B l a c k M o u n t a i n C o l e g e coup in Chile Édouard Glissant Lives
Manifesto Lives
Matter ABOLITIONIST Matter
(1896) (1925) Loan C I V I L R I G H T S M O V E M E N T (1973) Rem Poetics of Relation
(1933-1957)
J I M C R O W
Marie C. Turner (1915) NCARB Corporation
enrolls in created
Koolhaas Angela Y Davis
Delirious
(1990) (2001) ANTI-RACIST founded FEMINISM Protests
(1919) (1933) Stonewall
USA MIT Architecture New York Women, Race, Class AFROFUTURISM Afropolitanism (2013) (2020)
Robert Robinson Taylor
claims
H a r l e m R e i n a s s a n c e Irving L. Peddrew III (1969) (1978) (1981) (2005)
(1909) (1918-1937) Taliesin Fellowship Malcolm X Oka Crisis Rebuild
enrolls in MIT Architecture enrolls in Virginia Tech assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.
Puerto Rico USA Jones-Shafroth Act assassinated Foundation
(1888) (1932) (1953) (1965) (1990)
Wounded Knee Guam, Philipines, Cuba makes Puerto Ricans US citizens Philip Johnson attends (1968) Land-Grant Tribal (2009) protests at Yale
Frantz Fanon
Anexes Hawaii drafts 20,000 to war NAAB The Wretched B l a c k P a n t h e r P a r t y and Harvard
Masscre Nazi Youth rally Colleges
(1890) (1898) Walter T. Bailey
(1917) Indian Citizenship Act
(1932) (1940) SEGREGATIONIST of the Earth (1966-1982) (1994)
Lehman Brothers due multibillion dollar
(1924) All US public Combahee River Collective filess for
Sitting Bull graduates University of Illinois Philip Johnson head of Department of Architecture and Design MoMA (1961) colleges admitting Declaration investment in
(1904) Black and White Students (1977) US bankrupcy Puerto Rican Debt
assassinated (1932-1954) (1968) Arcosanti Immigration and (2008)
Dawes Act divides (1890) Mies Van de Rohe heads IIT Architecture department Netherlands (2018)
Second Morrill Land Grant 1890 Indian Civil Righst Act (1989) Customs Enforcement
Native’s lands into
reservations for segregated Universities D e S t i j l (1937-1958)
Constant
(1968)
Black Environmental
ICE is founded Antilles POST-COLONIAL
(1917-1932) Gropius Architecture Chair at GSD (2003) are dissolved
(1887) (1890) New Babylon Studies Team last year
Ebenezer Howard Wits University (1938-1952) (BEST)Yale I R A Q W A R (2010)
(1956) Philip Johnson works at MOMA
Garden Cities of To-morrow
(1900)
THE GREAT WAR Architecture founded
GE Pearce
Cape Town
School of
University president
pressures Gropius to admit women
(1968)
(1988)
ANC wins election
WTC Attack
(2003-2011)
(1914-1918) Architecture in Architecture program GSD First Prizker prize is awarded to (2001)
(1922) Mandela become president
TU Delft Architecture Cape Institute of Architects (1937) (1943) Philip Johnson
ANC Founded
(1904)
(1912)
(1922) WAR MINIMAL Manifesto of the 121 Learning from 26 consecutive awards go to men
(1994) Achille Mbembe
French colonization M a n d a t o r y P a l e s t i n e (1950) Las Vegas Necropolitics Predictive Policing
ALGERIAN WAR (1979) ANC unbanned (2003) Sayak Valencia
West Africa and (1920-1948) (1968) (2008) Gore Capitalism
Aimé Césaire (1954-1962) Nelson Madela

A P A R T H E I D
COLONIAL League of Nations Le Corbusier
Anglo-Boer War I Timboktu Anglo-Boer War II Cahier d'un (1990) Peter Sloterdijk (2016)
(1920) Plan Obus Algiers
(1893) South Africa Otoman Empire end (1931) “Rules of the Patrick Schumacher
South Africa Land Act retour au pays natal
French Guinea (1899-1902) (1922) Partido Nazionale Human Zoo” “In Defense of Capitalism”
(1880-1881) South Africa (1939)
(1891) (King Leopold II) Fascista The Truth about the Colonies EAST Policy of apartheid Congo Durban Strikes CFSA students Namibia Independence (2000) IBM (2015)
(1913) Egypt
(1931) AFRICAN Independence (1973) force Columbia (1990) Smarter
independence (1927) adopted by National Party (NP)
C O N G O F R E E S T A T E Rape of Belgium
(1922) Paris Colonial
CAMPAIGN
(1940-1941) of South Africa
Patrice Lumumba
Prime Minister Angola independence South Africa d Cities TECHNO-FASCIST
Leopoldville (1914)
(1881)
(1885-1908) Libya Civil War Benito Mussolini Exposition I t a l i a n L i b y a (1948) (1960) (1974) divesment (2008)
forms government (1931) (1934-1943) T e a m 1 0 (1985) Facebook
(1911)
(1922) Congrès Interna tiona ux d'Architecture Moderne Mozambique independence (2006)
King Leopold II Jewish settlers USA and Belgium backed
G e r m a n R e p u b l i c (1928-1959) (1974) Big Data
dies proclaim the Patrice Lumumba MAGA
(1918-1933) (2005) MAGA
(1909) Mass Murder foundation of Israel assasination Adobe Photoshop Federal
B a u h a u s (1961) Twitter CCP Weird
(1919-1933) at Auschwitz (1949) (1990) Google Buildings
Mies Van de Rohe (1942) www (2004) Architecture (2020)
Walter GropIus US drops two atomic bombs in Japan The Republic internet goes public (1999) REACTIONARY
Germany and Britain sign Filippo Marinetti negotiates with Gestapo (1945) of the Congo (2014) Stephan Trüby
founds Bauhaus Japan regains (1990)
Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty Italian Futurism closes Bauhaus independence Saskia Sassen Metacity /Datatown Right-Wing Spaces
Weimar India wins independence from US from France European Customs Community
(1890) (1909)
(1919)
FASCIST (1933) independence (1952) Tunisia (1960) The Global City (1999) (2016) Non-Referential
Created 3D printer
The Sydney School of Architecture from United Kingdom independence Nigeria Independence (1968) (1991) SMLXL NEOLIBERAL Architecture
(1983)
G E R M A N C O L O N I A L E M P I R E (1920) (1945) Mao Zedong (1956) (1960)
Shenzhen and (1995) (2018)
March Chagall proclaims the founding CULTURAL REVOLUTION Shanghai Stock Handover of Beijing WeChat
(1880-1920) SETTLER founds People’s
Art School Vitebsk
WORLD WAR II
(1939-1945)
of People’s Republic of China
(1949)
(1966-1976) Market
(1989)
Hong Kong Olympics
(2008)
(2011)
(1997)
W H I T E (1918)
A U S T R A L I A
Vera Ermolaeva Adolf Hitler and Nazi party Tsinghua SA “the pill”
P O L I C Y East and West Germany
reunited
BRICS
(2009)
Social Credit
System National
rector People’s claims power (1946) (1990) Dolly
Art School Vitebsk (1954) Social Credit (2014)
(1919) (1933) Indonesian (1996) System Pilot
Spanish Civil War CAD
People’s Art School revolution VIETNAM WAR Montenegro and Serbia (2009)
(1936-1939) (1957)
Vitebsk (1945-1949) (1965-1973) form Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Union treaty creates USSR
(1918-1922) NAZI C O L D W A R (1992)
(1922) TV
Talking Motion Picture UNOVIS K OREAN WAR
Piotr Kropotkin (1919-1922) (1925) Malaya PEASANTS REVOLT Slovenia, Croatia,
(1910) (1945-1953)
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution OCTOBER REVOLUTION independence J a p a n e s e M e t a b o l i s m THAILAND Macedonoa, Bosnia
Piotr Kropotkin (1960-1970)
The Conquer of (1902) (1917) UTOPIAN Socialist Yugoslavia (1957) (1970s) break from Yugoslavia
Curstis Act BALKAN WAR RUSSIAN V h k u t e m a s declared by Marshall Tito Kiyonori Kikutake (1991)
Bread Exhibition “The
(1898) (1912-1913) CIVIL WAR (1920-1930) (1945) “Metabolism1960-
(1892) International Style” Proposal for a New Urbanism” Russia independence PPE
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1918-1920) MOMA, NY Russian Red Army USSR collapse Kosovo
(1898) R I F W A R captures East Berlin Independence
(1911-1927) Penicillin (1937) (1991) COVID-19
(1928) Germany Surrenders (2008) (2020)
(1945)
PART 1

Before School
Before School Anti-Liberation Paywall no. 1 shows University
$ 10bn 20bn 30bn 40bn 50bn
On Who gets to be an Architect and
Endowments versus National Gross Domestic
Product of countries affected by the United
States military, colonial, and imperial complex.

Anti-Liberation paywalls
lybia gdp $48.36 bn

democratic republic of congo gdp $47.23 bn

In the resurging (for some) struggle against anti-Black racism and its spreading tentacles within academic
environment, great emphasis has been put into curriculum content, pedagogical methods, and deservingly, harvard $41.9 bn endowment
lack of Black faculty and students. However, within the framework of these discussions, oftentimes organized
within the powerful infrastructures of “elite” universities, a larger systemic problem may escape scrutiny.
The first series of questions engages with a more general approach to accessibility and architecture. syria gdp $40.41 bn

Where are the discourses that engage with the future of architecture and the city being generated? Who has
access to the programs that carry the weight in the collective imagination? What are the recruiting strategies bolivia gdp $40.29 bn
carried out by wealthy private and public architecture schools? If architecture schools have been center to
some of the ideal projections of the built environment, who is allowed to dream these scenarios?
yale $30.31 bn endowment
However, a second round of questions may reveal even more about the insidiously racist panorama and the
difficulty and urgency of anti-racist educational models.
princeton $25.9 bn endowment
What is the role of historically white colleges and universities–universities with a clear history of racist ex-
clusion—in the control and processes of legitimation of architectural discourses and positions? Is it possible
to engage on an intellectual journey of decolonization with institutions that operate in the form of empires bosnia herzegovina gdp $20.16 bn
of cultural and material capital? Is a decolonial pedagogy possible on some of the most expensive and
exclusive academic institutions in the world? Could forms of reconstruction be performed by the very same
institutions that have benefited from slave labor, segregation, gentrification, and colonialism? Is an anti-racist afghanistan gdp $19.36 bn
pedagogy possible within the reach of historically racist and anti-Black and anti-indigenous institutions?

Who gets to design the future? Black reproduction of Carnegie Mellon Univer- mit $18.38 bn endowment Land
Until recently, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University distributed a map on its admissions page that omitted sity’s map erasing several of Pittsburgh Black Grant
Homewood, Larimer, the Hill District, Uptown, East Hills, Hazelwood, and Garfield, erasing with it the repre- neighborhoods.
sentation of some of Pittsburgh’s historically Black neighborhoods. What if this map is more than an involun- univeristy of pennsylvania $14.65 bn endowment
tary impasse and instead the revelation of something far more sinister but not as caricaturesque? What if the Howell, Junia, Sara Goodkind, Leah Jacobs,
map projected a real tabula rasa decade (or centuries) in the making? After all, is the now infamous map the Dominique Branson and Elizabeth Miller. 2019.
“Pittsburgh’s Inequality across Gender and
only materialization of racist erasure? nicaragua gdp $13.12 bn
Race.” Gender Analysis White Papers. City of
Pittsburgh’s Gender Equity Commission.
The paper ‘Pittsburgh Inequality across Gender and Race’ published in 2019 states that “Black women and <https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/imag-
men in other cities have better health, income, employment, and educational outcomes than Pittsburgh’s es/7109_Pittsburgh’s_Inequality_Across_Gen- university of michigan $18.38 bn endowment
Black Residents”. How does the dire statistic regarding quality of life for Black residents of Pittsburgh relate der_and_Race_09_18_19.pdf>
to the evident lack of Black students (and the absence of local Black students) in the city’s only professional
architecture program? How can legitimate anti-racist efforts coexist with Columbia University history of ex- In 2007, African-American women made up
a scant two-tenths of a percent of licensed columbia $14.65 bn endowment
pansion projects that push a gentrifying Morningside Heights are into a threatened Harlem? Can anti-racist,
architects in the U.S., for a total of just 196
anti-capitalist or abolitionist programs be really formulated in Gentrifying institutions, in Universities devel- practitioners. (The University of Cincinna-
oping technologies for prescriptive policing, directly gentrifying Black neighborhoods? ti’s database of African-American architects barbados gdp $5.145 bn
reports an increase in that number, to 385, of
Reports state that while Black Americans make up 13 percent of the US population, only 2 percent of a total 107,581 licensed practitioners in the
licensed architects are Black, with, a whooping two-tenths of a percent being Black women. This begs the U.S.) From Curbed, On Race and Architecture,
question; can a more inclusive architecture and city be designed excluding the experiences of Black res- 22 February 2017. < https://www.curbed. liberia gdp $3.264 bn
com/2017/2/22/14677844/architecture-diver-
idents—and other racialized populations? What potential imaginaries be formulated if the profession in
sity-inclusion-race >
charge of designing the cities and buildings where we live and work is unable to welcome in its spaces the
same populations it should be designing for?
10
Can schools of urbanism and architecture envision more inclusive and anti-racist cities while keeping their $ 10k 20k 30k 40k 50k 60k 70k 80k 90k 100k
exclusive faculty and student bodies? Can the most vulnerable parts of the population, the historically dis-
enfranchised dream of better cities, or is the design of collective living the privilege task only for the cast of Anti-Liberation Paywall displays the Tution fee
of professional architecture programs, an esti-
economically and racially privileged? How can architecture deal with the violent effects of segregation of mate of the total cost, including living expenses
the urban fabric, of race, of gender and sexuality, of class, while maintaining a clearly segregated profession and additional fees in contrast to the white and
hidden behind the impossible paywalls of powerfully elite universities? black median household income in the same
cities or states as the programs. The first part of manhattan columbia m.arch tuition $61,080 full cost $96,245
Just like Paulo Freire proposed a Pedagogy of the Oppressed that questions the hierarchical model of tradi- the diagram includes Columbia University M.
tional education, we need to develop an Architecture of the oppressed that not only takes into consider- Arch, Cornell University B.Arch, Carnegie Mellon
University B. Arch, and University of Pennsylva- white $86,494
ation disadvantaged populations in the ratification process of the public forum or to show faces of diversity
nia M.Arch programs. Data taken from each of
(tokenism), but that pursues a radical opening up of the educational institutions that have been central to the Universities’s websites. median household income
the legitimation of the design professions. Forms of Black, transfeminist, intersectional, indigenous, Latina
critiques of architectural pedagogy are only possible after a radical transformation of academic institutions. black $28,116
Radically inclusive and anti-racist architectures and cities won’t be possible until the process of thinking,
dreaming, and designing the future is not just a gentlemanly sport for a privileged few in ivory towers funded
with the profit from genocide, occupation, and settler-colonialism. Land
new york cornell b.arch tuition tuition $56,550 full cost $74,974 Grant
Are institutions ready to be radically democratized through anti-racist pedagogies and the fundamental trans-
formations that these processes entail? white $73,584
Anti-Anti-Racist Institutions median household income
With the increased presentation of “decolonial” and anti-racist agendas inside some of the historically white black $46,178
and elite universities in the United States, an anti-racist approach to architecture education must take into
consideration how power is installed, consolidated, and maintained by these institutions.

Harvard’s 41.9 billion-dollar endowment –larger than the combined GDP of Jamaica, Honduras, and Haiti, carnegie mellon b.arch
pittsburgh tuition $57,560 full cost $76,874
and parallel to Bolivia’s—is just one of the many colossal funds of these universities. Through these en-
dowments and ballooning tuition fees that promise to forcefully maintain the status quo through the lack of
accessibility and piling student debt, these universities not only have benefited from a violent relationship white $57,187
with settler-colonialism, slavery, theft, but with current models of local and global extraction, exploitation,
gentrification, and colonialism. median household income
black $26,330
In the American continent, the university is at the heart of the settler-colonial structure that as Eve Tuck and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization
K. Wayne Yang explain in ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ recast through “law and policy” (and architec- Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity,
ture) the indigenous relationships to land that comprises our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmol- Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
ogies as “property and as a resource.” In this process of settler-colonial subjugation chattel slaves whose philadelphia upenn m.arch tuition $55,566 full cost $77,000
“bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless are also created.”

Is it possible to disentangle Princeton University’s 25.9 billion (25,900,000,000 to really grasp the magnitude white $75,000
of this venture bounty) Columbia University’s 10.9 billion from its connections to settler-colonialism and
median household income
slavery as many of the first university presidents and professors owned slaves? Is it possible to account for
the profit made with regimes of terror around the world, from the many millions produced in their associa- black $38,200
For news on the relationship between Harvard’s
tion with the Apartheid regime in South Africa, with the many colonial and extractive that link their portfolio endowment and COFINA bonds read David
of land resources with conquests within the United States, Latin America and Africa? Dayen, Harvard’s endowment is profiting from
Puerto Rico’s debt as the island’s schools face
Where would these endowments go after decolonizing them, since decolonization as Tucker and Yang affirm crippling cuts, The Intercept, January 25 2018.
“eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty”, a process that “requires the abolition of land as (retrieved 1 March 2020). <https://theintercept.
property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people”? com/2018/01/25/harvards-endowment-is-
profiting-from-puerto-rican-debt-as-the-islands-
schools-face-crippling-cuts/?comments=1>
Can Harvard University—among many Ivy League Universities—offer decolonizing programs at the same
time that it is accused by activists and students of holding around $60 million in Puerto Rican debt through Deirdre Fernandes, ‘Activists urge Harvard to
a multibillion-dollar commitment from a hedge fund, hiding hundreds of millions in bonds from the Puerto stop investing in Boston hedge fund that holds
Rican government? Can a university with a 41.9 billion-dollar-endowment argue for decoloniality and an- Puerto Rico debt’, Boston Globe, 24 January
ti-racism at the same time it benefits from the money extracted by an anti-democratic “fiscal control board” 2018. (retrieved 2 March 2020).
that threatens to cut nearly half the total budget ($450 million) of Universidad de Puerto Rico, the colonial <https://www.bostonglobe.com/met-
archipelago’s public university system? Is a radical pedagogy possible through the channels of ‘elite’ institu- ro/2018/01/24/activists-urge-harvard-stop-in-
vesting-boston-hedge-fund-that-holds-puerto-ri-
tions when they profit from a complex and multi-centenary colonial apparatus of laws, tariffs, and neoliberal co-debt/EjjZiOzVYrrJ2MxNadTy5J/story.html>
speculation?
12
Anti-Liberation Paywall
As the discussion surrounding the possibility of an anti-racist architectural pedagogy unfolds, the role of
academic institutions as instruments of settler-colonial legacies, displacing infrastructures, and hegemonic Anti-Liberation Paywall displays the Tution fee of
ideologies must not be overlooked. Some of the ways that structural racism is maintained are discussed professional architecture programs, an estimate
of the total cost, including living expenses and
thoroughly by Tucker and Yang as they reference Janet Mawhinney in the explanation of the “ways in which additional fees in contrast to the white and black
white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organi- median household income in the same cities or
zations” through “settler moves to innocence”, that “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and states as the programs. The Second part of the
complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” diagram includes Havard University M.Arch,
Washington University St. Louis M.Arch, Yale
The Anti-Liberation Paywall diagram displays through hard numbers factual evidence that oftentimes re- University M.Arch, and University of Southern
mains outside of the radar of the “settler moves to innocence” during anti-racist discussions regarding higher California B,.Arch programs.
education. These diagrams display the tuition fees and approximately total cost (including additional fees, massachusetts harvard m.arch tuition $53,420 full cost $82,183
materials, and living expenses) of some of the major private and more expensive architectural programs Mark Kantrowitz, ‘The Distribution of Grants
in the United States. Below the tuition fee and total cost data of each professionally accredited program (B. and Scholarships by Race’, Student Aid Policy
Arch and M.Arch), two bars show the median income of white and Black households. Although the graph Analysis, September 2, 2011. < https://www. white $84,988
highlights just white and Black households, in many cases Latina and indigenous households would overtake racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Distribution-
median household income
Black households at the bottom of the income charts. What was consistent among all the graphs is that white racescholarships.pdf>
households were at the top and Black households were at the bottom tiers, regardless of city or state. Janet Lee Mawhinney, ‘Giving up the ghost’: Dis- black $46,925
rupting the (re)production of white privilege in
Although the information about scholarships or racial data is not readily available on the websites of the anti-racist pedagogy and organizational change.
universities or architecture schools, this should not deter a more critical take on the role that financial aid Masters Thesis, Ontario Institutue for
plays in the power relations of the universities and the recruitment of students from disenfranchised commu- Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
nities. While international students don’t qualify for financial aid in universities in the United States (implying (1998). Available at: st. louis wash u m.arch tuition $54,176 full cost $81,486
that they pay full tuition in most cases), local Black, Hispanic, and indigenous students are less likely to win http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/
private scholarships or receive merit-based institutional grants than white students according to a study by dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0008/MQ33991.pdf
student financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Not only are powerful universities consolidating their power white $55,000
when they decide to whom they grant scholarships (in a way very similar to charity), white students receive la paperson, ‘Land. And the University Is Settler
Colonial’, A Third University Is Possible, (Minne- median household income
more than three times as much in merit-based grant and private scholarship funding as minority students. apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). <
black $28,000
Additionally, in some examples of what can be considered double (triple or quadruple depending on the https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-univer-
point of reference) settler-colonial theft, Cornell and MIT (not in the chart) are not only private universities sity-is-possible/section/561c45d2-9442-42d5-
with exorbitant tuition fees, but they are also Land-Grant institutions that—as la paperson argues in ‘Land. 9938-f8c9e2aafcfc#ch02>
And the University is Settler Colonial’—are explicitly settler-colonial. Passed as part of Morrill Act of 1962,
Land-Grant Universities are the product of stolen land that “was (and is) the literal capital used to buy and For more information on the history of Land connecticut yale m.arch tuition $54,094 full cost $77,050
Grant Universities see:
build,” turning the traditional model of Land as campuses to Land as Capital. <https://www.landgrabu.org/>
The resulting data evidences how, regardless of symbolic decolonial and anti-racist gestures and other “set- white $89,030
tler moves to innocence”, these elite universities not only continue to make profit out of occupied land, but median household income
remain behind Anti-Liberation Paywalls that oftentimes extend their voracious tentacles to local gentrifica-
tion conquests and in global settler-colonial expeditions. By relying on the legitimation of these institutions, black $43,236
focusing on diplomas and careers connected to these behemoths of cultural, financial, and settler-colonial
capital, the world of architecture reinforces their absolute power.
The Illusion of Global Liberation
These universities often claim (with a pinch of truth in it) that their provide in their expensive halls space for los angeles usc b.arch tuition $59,260 full cost $79,063
the most diverse student bodies. However, an additional chart displays for many nations around the world in-
cluding Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, and China (just to name a few) the median house-
hold income is exponentially inferior to the tuition fees of many of these universities. As in the case with white $95,000
the median Black, indigenous, and Latina household within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States, it median household income
would be highly improbable for a median household, let alone for the subaltern, racialized, and economically
disadvantaged communities in many of these countries to be able to pay full tuition at any of these universities. black $53,500

While the problem in the US (and the rest of the Americas) may be targeted to address specific forms of
Anti-Black racism, racism against indigenous communities and other racialized populations, a true, radical
change must be intersectional as it includes at its core the overlooked experiences and narratives of the mul-
tiple manifestations of disabilities, transfeminism, and class struggle.
Colonial Footprint of Schools Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, (New York: Har-
An Anti-Racist pedagogy across the world is only possible through decolonization processes and reparations row Books, 1972).
that address the colonial footprint of Architecture schools. By eliminating the Anti-liberation paywall, steps Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: $ 10k 20k 30k 40k 50k 60k 70k 80k 90k 100k
can begin to take place towards bringing down class barriers and hegemonic structures that perpetuate archi- Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Kristin
tecture education’s racist structures. In order to create truly accessible and radically inclusive learning envi- Ross, trans. (California: Stanford University Press,
ronments we need to reform institutions that allow for change and be ready to abolish intransigent institutions. 1991).
Other worlds are possible, other universities are possible, other architecture schools are possible. 14
Five Points to Engage with anti-racist architectural education before architecture school
Anti-Liberation Paywall no.2 displays the annual
1 The history of race must address the relationship between architecture and racism.
tuition fee and total cost estimate of the M.Arch
The history of architecture must address its role in the construction of race. program at Columbia University in contrast to
As the history of Blackness and race is (ideally) taught in schools, the role that architecture has and contin- the median household incomes of Puerto Rico,
ues to play in systems of racial, economic, and ecological oppression must be present in the discussions. Mexico, Nigeria, China, Brazil, and South Africa.
New forms of intellectual engagement must be able to present to children and young adults how architecture
is imbricated in the fabrication of racial and gender identities, private property, zoning, policing, prisons, and
capitalism. This can be done through children’s books, presentations, workshops, and public programs ca-
tered to schools across the country (and the world) with special emphasis on the vast array of impoverished, $ 10k 20k 30k 40k 50k 60k 70k 80k 90k 100k
racialized, and oppressed communities.

2 Architecture (and all) education must be free and accessible

In order to actively engage with the pressing challenges of our times, architecture must be truly diversi-
fied. The change of faces of only a handful of privileged students of different ethnicities and other “settler
moves to innocence” won’t be enough to overcome centuries of colonization and oppression. If architecture
schools want to be able to imagine new worlds and develop the tools to do so, a radical transformation of columbia m.arch tuition $61,080 full cost $96,245
the composition of student bodies must take place. In order to ensure that marginalized communities across
endless spectrums are participating in the design of the future, and considering the settler-colonial legacy
of universities and, in this case, architecture schools, education must be free and accessible by any means
necessary. As Angela Y. Davis affirms, free education can be a model of reparations that benefit everybody puerto rico $19,775
and “capacity to pay should not act as an impediment for someone who wants to study and learn.” If legisla-
tion doesn’t exist to make this happen, new laws must be created. If outdated models of elitist education are
in place, new models of emancipatory and inclusive education must replace them. The time of architecture
schools as elite boys’ clubs is over. We must be ready to reform architecture schools around the world. mexico $10,116

median household income

3 Architecture schools should actively recruit, and recruiting should be intersectional
In the process of enrolling potential worldmakers, recruiting efforts by architecture schools should encom-
pass an intersectional approach that engages as much with gender and race, as it does with issues of ter- nigeria $7,740
ritoriality, settler colonialism, disability, and class. To account for the pluriverse of experiences and voices
of those historically unheard and oppressed, architecture schools must be welcoming spaces with diverse
physical, emotional, and material realities. From the anti-racist, transfeminist, and anti-ableist standpoint,
only through the aggressive dismantling to the status quo, and the intense recruitment of other (subaltern, china $5,778
oppressed) forms of existence, new models of architectural pedagogy (and as a result, of practice) may
begin to take place. Because architecture has contributed so long and strongly to a material culture of op-
pression, it is not enough to recruit numbers proportional to the census and other demographic accounts, but
rather radically democratize—or truly begin to decolonize—architectural education by thriving in diverse, brazil $4,801
anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, transfeminist approaches rather than monolithic ones. A true emanci-
patory architectural education will be possible only through radical inclusion of those historically neglected
from architectural education and violently oppressed by architecture.
south africa $2,410
4 Workshops for New Worlds
Because architecture is everywhere and it virtually (and literary) regulates people’s lives, waiting to have
access to universities studies to learn about it may be too late. In order to be able to engage with the complex
realities, challenges, and possibilities of architecture, new models of education would have to bring archi-
tectural concepts to general education across different age groups. Through the incursion of architectural
concepts and workshops in elementary, middle, and high school programs, students would learn about their
role in understanding the world as it has been violently shaped, the existence of multiple imaginaries, and the
possibility of other worlds.

5 Data is not enough

Transforming the world into a more just, anti-racist place is not solely a question of numbers. Although sta- The problem of data, how it’s gathered and an-
tistics, like the ones made to construct the Anti-Liberation Paywall diagrams may reveal part of the story, the alyzed, is not exclusive to admissions and recruit-
five hundred-plus years of colonial re-education in the Americas will not be overcome with numerical ges- ment, but it’s a recurrent problem in academic
tures. To look at data as facts without addressing the systemic and structural issues around it, is to overlook settings, and in the practice of urbanism, urban
the problems. Data driven approaches emphasizing on numeric and quantitative concepts tend to assume planning, and architecture.
solutions come in numbers and quantitative measurements. Rather than relying solely on data, through the
radical inclusion of previously excluded voices and ways of worldmaking that take into consideration real
experiences and ways of living in the world, new emancipatory imaginaries that can be created. 16
PART 2

During School
During School

An Anti-Racist
ICE
JUST
Architecture Education Spiral O GIC
AL
OL
Against the settler-colonial legacy of architecture schools around the world, the Anti-Racist Architectural EC
M
Education Spiral offers a model to radically transform architectural pedagogy. This model questions the ON IALIS
OL
hierarchies between teacher and student, but also between those officially trained in the institutional field of
I -C
architecture, and those who haven’t have the privilege but whose lives are still affected by its repercussions.
A NT
IA LISM
MODERNISM FOR SOME
M PER
I-I
Carmen Espegel, Women Architects in the Modern
In 1919 Walter Gropius founds the staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar with a call for the formation of Architects,
Movement, (New York: Routledge, 2018); Doris T
sculptors, and painters in a program where men could become competent craftsmen or independent creative AN LISM
PITA
Cole, From Tipi to Skyscraper a History of Women
artists, and form a working community of leading and future artist-craftsmen. The founding manifesto states A
in Architecture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973). C
that any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate
NTI- SM
by the Council of Masters, will be admitted, as far as space permits. However, under the presumption that A
F EMINI
only men could think in three dimensions, women are kept away from the main disciplines of architecture, S
AN ISM
sculpture and painting, and relegated to weaving, textiles, and photography. TR
-A BLE
TI ISM
The emblematic diagram of the Bauhaus, produced by Gropius in the form of lithography in 1922—and AN I-RAC
source of uncritical inspiration to many institutions around the world—outlines early on some of the prob- NT
lematic aspects of the school’s approach. Through the finite confinement of its circular form, the diagram

A
partitions, but it also over emphasizes the subdivision of materials that allows the school to perpetuate a
clearly demarcated gender segregation. Just like Metal and Textiles are divided by a clear line in the dia-
gram, women are kept away from many “disciplines” including the metallurgy workshop, where as Marianne
Brandt explains women are “not exactly made welcome: the general opinion was that the metal workshop
was no place for a woman.” To this we can add how women were relegated to the textile workshops (held in
low esteem by male faculty) and to other parts of the programs with less recognition and support. Against
the initial appearance of the Bauhaus as a radically inclusive pedagogical manifesto, reality presents a sexist
program of exclusion and invisibility far behind other contemporary programs like the People’s Art School in
Vitebsk founded a year before the Bauhaus, and directed in 1920 by Vera Ermolaeva, or Vhkutemas in Mos-
cow where men and women were really working across disciplines together.
Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum (adapted,
Although the Bauhaus closed its doors in 1933 after Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe negotiated with the Gestapo right), Walter Gropius, 1922. Lithograph.
to allow him to keep to the school open, Gropius brought his sexism with him to the epicenter of American
architectural academia. After being appointed the Chair of the Architecture Department of Harvard Uni- A fragmentary and closed system that enhanced
versity, Gropius declares his intention to create an “attitude towards the problems of our generation which gender segregation?
is unbiased, original and elastic.” However, when he states that “it should be our highest aim to produce
the type of men who are able to visualize an entity rather than let themselves get absorbed too early in the Gropius, eminent architect, takes over new du-
narrow channels of specialization,” his words should not be taken lightly. When he states “let us make way ties, The Harvard Crimson, 1 April 1937. https://
now for the men of vision”, he means men not as umbrella term used to imply a more generous “people”, but www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/4/1/gropi-
us-eminent-architect-takes-over-new/ (Retrieved
specifically men as a gendered term that excludes women.
10 February 2020); and Gropius Seeks “Unbi-
ased, Original, Elastic” Approach to Architecture,
It should come as no surprise after studying his track record at the Bauhaus that when the president of Har- The Harvard Crimson, 30 May 1937. https://
vard University forced Walter Gropius to admit women in 1941 as two-thirds of the school’s men were called www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/5/20/gro-
for national service, he did so “only for the duration of the war.” Gropius supported this request with the pius-seeks-unbiased-original-elastic-approach/
condition that women were admitted “as special students and not as candidates for the Harvard Degree.” (Retrieved 10 February 2020)

At the same time that white women are being barely admitted to Architecture schools, in many institutions of Special thanks to design librarians Sarah Dickin-
higher learning across the United States, Black students are barred from even applying. In Virginia Polytech- son and Ines Zalduendo for providing archival in-
nic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) the first University in the former confederate states to allow formation on Gropius and the history of women’s
the enrollment of a Black student in 1953, more than two decades passed until Architecture had its first Black enrollment at Harvard GSD.
student in its design labs. Across the country Black students that were permitted to enroll, were sometimes
not even allowed to live or eat together with the rest of the students. Today, in many states the NCARB hasn’t
accredited a single Black woman in its history. 20
As many webpages of Architecture Schools boast about how old their programs are, information about racial

ideology and buildings

scapes

ration

ic
means of production

etor
artifacts

es
desegregation and inclusion are nowhere to be found. In the places where possible new worlds were ren-

nism

imag
es

ism
e rh
Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education

ollabo
nial land
dered, a white, heteropatriarcal institution was left undisturbed. Architectural education has been the training

FORM

imag

ng

ial

er
e urba

usiv
grounds for the materialization of infrastructures that oppress Black, indigenous, brown, and disable bodies,

oving

aki

ow
lon
g
contextual

win
ls of c

s
still

lp
t
ldm
incl

-co

en
but somehow for architecture schools is more important to highlight the time when they were created than

post-colo

p
s
ca
rid

hi
dr a
inclusiv

al m

crti al text

em
ler

gi
sive

rs
r
and

lg
wo
to address at what point do the ‘other’ was allowed in the studio. Rather than overemphasizing in old, white,

mode

lo

ho
ov
ett
dox

ca
ry of a t, id ideo
critic

ut
fm
inclu

e
y

ive
H I S ns

fs
Y

gi
ca l
c

ur
heteropatriarchal legacies, an anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy would highlight the moment og

la
er o
criti

lo
OR
ed cal c ory o

ct
tio

to
ns

nd
ag

ra
eo
lec

ite
d tio s

r i ctu
na litic arch tex
when all that started to change, while self-assessing and reflecting on what is left to be done. A very basic

a
ara
die

het

gy
pe n

ch
T

ic,
u io

co l
tit

ist
bo

ol o

e
at

on

ar
re

rep

la chit
om
l

ke
question may reveal more about what needs to be done: founded as racist and sexist spaces, when did ar- s ic

po bal h
u in ea

n
e
ct br

ar
cr itic sta con
id

r
te e fa
ur s,

bo
,m
chitecture schools became anti-racist? And, if they (as we can assume) have never been anti-racist, how can hi ct er ing

glo

e
lit
c d

te
ite

ia
ar

y
tio al,
en d
uil

r
of
they become anti-racist?

o
of ch g t b

l h ist
ar d in al

m
ry an pr

to
n
ca h
f ide

po
o l, ot

is
yo

iti al
st ,
hi or cia lf
o
ies
In a discipline that preaches the possibility of making new worlds together, what worlds have been created l t
,r
a ia l cit

cr
ICE ca is er
JUST iti al h ture mp idea
CAL
r
under the framework of these exclusionary pedagogical models? How can buildings and cities account for c tic ec i f
GI i
cr chi
t nd y o
l a or
the experiences and lives of Black women, Black trans women, indigenous women if architecture schools O LO ar onia hist
have been some of the least welcoming spaces for them? What happens when the Bauhaus and other models EC l
co itica
l
ALISM cr Y R
of the period are accepted and adopted as the standard modernizing pedagogies of architecture while over- he L ONI EO
me gemo - CO TH ism
looking the people that were excluded from these learning experiences? Who are the anti-racist reformists I ern
dia nic A NT od lism
and abolitionists of architectural pedagogy? ma
in IALISM ns
m
ita sse
d
str
PER tra e cap cs
ma eam i pre
ins IM gor opolit the op
orth tream publi TI- r
nec gogy o
f
What is left after Gropius’ model of fragmentary division is adopted unquestioned by the world of design and odo onl shin AN LISM
turned into a paradigm of avant-garde design education? What are we left with when, if it’s not the Gropius
inst x
itut repres e ma
in g
A PITA a
ped r theor
ies
ry
C heo
TI-
iona ent gaz e
bien l a tion ines que a l t
cur
AN SM loni y
model of Bauhaus and Harvard, the other options are the Frank Lloyd Wright model of Taliesin, or the Hej- MINI heor
nal at
priva es, trien orial deco l t
duk, Eisenman, and Abraham model of Cooper Union, or the Mies van der Rohe model of IIT? Where are the te un n
ivers ales, fes NSFE s t - colo
nia
la c k r easo
n
A ISM po
neoli e of b
anti-racist models of architectural pedagogy? If an anti-racist architectural education is approached through
beral ity p
ro
tival
s TR BLE it iq u
a.i. u n iv ersity grams TI-A cr
ern th
eory
ISM subalt
AN I-RAC
progr
the intersectional lens of Black transfeminism, what can be made of a pedagogical legacy anchored on the robotics ams r it q u e
NT trans c inism
exclusion of both, racialized women and Black people? How would a diagram that calls for the inclusion and social med b o li ti o nist fem
a

A
ia
prioritization of all the other voices affected by architecture, but kept away from its imaginaries look like? v.r.

FORM hegemonic MEDIA

Against the finite, closed, and fixed nature of the circular diagrams of avant-garde institutions like the Bau-
theory narrative architecture
haus, and the corporate checklist of neoliberal universities and so-called elite private institutions, Anti-Racist loudreaders
modernism
Models of Pedagogy operate in the form of a growing, evolving, and inclusive spiral. nism trade school
post-moder
sm how-to w
orientali orkshops
An open-ended shape, always intellectually and critically growing, the spiral foments the exponential inclu- nalism commu
l regio nity des
critica vism altern ign-buil
sion of pressing and imminent struggles without losing grasp of the interrelated central forms of oppression decon
str u c ti
ectur
e alter
ative p
ublish
d
affecting and endangering the human and the nonhuman around the world. r hit
c nativ ing
lute a m e curat
abso ricis ) hete
rodo orial
met (ooo x rep
para a l t o logy ure criti
cal s rese
ntatio
In the way that Architecture can only be critical inasmuch as it searches for ways to emancipate humanity git on
itec
t kyn t
t-di iented ic o r yboa n
pos rch inte al colla rds
c t or al a sign
from forces, systems, and institutions that oppress them, a critical Architectural pedagogy is only possible ob j e n t i
fere ed de inte
rac
tive
ge
-re as com ractiv
tec
through the inclusion of a diverse plethora of abolitionist and decolonial discourses and actions. As the spiral non e-b e
hno
log
d enc acc muni instal y
implies, a truly anti-racist architectural pedagogy is only possible by practices that seek anti-ableism, trans- ev i
it y e t y eng lation
nic y al fre sibl s
or y in eu eo age
feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and ecological justice. o t i g on niv nl me
m s
hi tor or si ers ine p
ge ry
nt p
e rld his and ivi on ity lat
for lat
h to o
w rld ss d
nt ivis
i ms for
ms

-g ism
ic
STRUCTURE his entr d w wn rsh orie h d
o e ip

de
nt rn
t

ar
ne tho t / ut

y o of y f m en
c e
Spiral: Coiling out of a center that holds the ideal of human emancipation, the central spiraling structure er

ov yle ava ode

ro
eu cent is on au iden l so

tor ory to y o m
his hist his stor lop
contains a series of concepts that are fundamental to the possibility of an anti-racist, anti-ableist, transfemi- - s n c a
us pha is o , oc lob

e
tic tate mal le h ev

f m st of

ts
s t g

d
nist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and ecologically just architectural pedagogy. These con- em pha es h /

en
ap ion- tric /ma ss,

r
w t

e i

em
em st / nor

e
cepts should remain at the center of the model while the form of the spiral remains open-ended as additional

e
na oce ntri ogr

lanc
ea bal

eu oce , pr
struggles could potentially expand the reach of the spiral. The spiral is the philosophical backbone and o

c
gl

veil
sur t
/
eu wt

en

ology
intellectual core of an education system that replaces with models of solidarity the (emotionally, psycholog-

o
gr

innin s / poli lacem

y
n
r

otom
s
ically, environmentally, politically, and economically) traditional architecture education model of exhausting

nic

ion cation

nic ide
n
/ seg cing /
r

al

edu s

o
con

sp

research
t

oning
competition, accelerated expansionism, and settler-colonialism. Surrounding the spiral, a set of fluctuating

r-colo ban dich

t
for gemo
oli

rega
/ di

ring
i

egemo
ss
and experimental values, principles, and challenges contrast emancipating principles and the until-now un-

prize oriented studio

nial z
tle
sed

cial rende
m

dio
movable building blocks of a supremacist status quo.

he

icat
tex

r
itie

u
t ba

trauma oriented
gs of h

centralized stu
b

ic text
g
con

trif

u
rt c
deb

n/s
gen
Values: At one side of the spiral emancipating principles, methods, approaches, and philosophies are divided

sma

commer
academ
settle
buildin
redl
urba
under Form, History, Theory, and Media. Form not only focuses on “products” and “activities” intrinsic to
the production of architecture, but on the processes and labor inherent to it. History, studies the genealogy 22
of social, ecological, political, ecological, and material struggles and narratives around the world. Theory
outlines the ideas, knowledge, positions, and discourses that serve as framework for the critiques addressed
in the Spiral. Media deals with the platforms for intellectual solidarity, free exchange of knowledge, and for
J U STICE
AL
the creation, and diffusion of critical processes, actions, positions and discourses.

I C
OG
In this segment, an ideal pedagogy operates at the intersection between Loudreading platforms of public
education and community engagement, Narrative Architecture strategies that subvert the status quo, how-to
workshops on Post-colonial image-making, critical craftspersonship, the construction of a collective intel-
O L
ligence of anti-racist, transfeminist design strategies, and the growing list of theories ranging from Achille
Mbembe to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sayak Valencia, Amílcar Cabral, Nick Estes, la paperson, Silvia Federici, E C
and many more.
I A L ISM
he O LON
me gemo
Through these values— always fluctuating, contextual, and flexible, networks of solidarity foment the free
circulation of design, building and related forms of knowledge, while acknowledging the decolonial struggles
I -C
embedded in processes of ‘unlearning imperialism’, ‘critiques of Black Reason,’ and constructing new worlds.
T
dia nic A N
m ISM
INTERSECTION
At the opposite side of the spiral hegemonic forms, histories, theories, and media are no longer grantedathe
in I A L
ma
default condition given by dogmatic manifestations of architectural education, but are rather intersected with str
eam P ER
their respective critiques on anti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, an- ins
tre p I - IM
am ublis T
ti-imperialism, and ecological justice. Where before an institution would argue for a depoliticized concept of
orth
sustainability and carbon footprints, now, an argument would have to engage with the colonial and imperial
odo h A N LISM
footprint of architecture. Where before architectural education would have accepted a “western” construc-
inst x re online ing I T A
tion of the “orient”, the “global south”, and the “third world”, now a critique of the systems of supremacy
itut p m A P
operating in imperial and colonial powers will take place. Where architectural history would focus on the
iona resent agaz I-C
bien
development of European architecture, many different histories will deconstruct and reconstruct the plot of
l cu atio ine T
nale
a global history of economic, social, ecological, and human spoliation, dreams, ambitions, failures, and chal-
s, tr r a t oria n s AN M INISM
priva FE
lenges. Where architectural theory would have focused on isolated icons and the myth of the single genius
te un iennale l
author, new forms of collaborative, critical, emancipatory work would resurge while questioning the invisible
S
labor behind architecture. Where smart cities, gentrified with prescriptive policing would take the place of
neoli
ideal cities, new utopias from the oppressed and marginalized communities would imagine better worlds
beral
ivers
ity p
s, fe
stiva R AN L EISM
together without the intrusion of paramilitary forces. Where before an institution would try to fit everybody
unive r o g ls T -AB
a.i. rsity rams TI
ISM
to work under the current system, new forms of imagination would declare that other worlds are possible.
progr
ams A N A C
CENTER
Although the center of the spiral is left blank, the conceptual space from where the form
robcoils
otshould
ics be a re- TI-R
flection of the intentions, desires, struggles, challenges, and potentialities of the people, collectives, schools,
socimanifested N
al me iniathe

A
spiral, the center continuously shifts within the realm of spatial temporalities, as attainable goals like d
institutions, or practices working with it. Through the continuous intersection of concepts
more
inclusive, anti-racist architectural learning spaces could potentially evolve into more v. r.
ideal and utopian
like pluridiverse utopias and the possibility of other worlds of human emancipation in balance with the rest
goals

of nature, ecology, and the environment. The center is not fixed but that doesn’t mean that is empty. On the
contrary, the center is a flexible goal that shifts in scale and moves in time always aiming towards a radically
anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, ecologically just imaginary.

PEDAGOGICAL CONCEPTS hegemonic

The list of hegemonic concepts that must be intersected through the spiral are divided in four sections that,

States and around the world. theory

although speculative, provide with a potential framework to rethink architectural curriculums in the United

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (New

modernism
HEGEMONY York: Melville House, 2011).
The following concepts are part of the hegemonic forms of architectural pedagogy that should be scruti- Jillian Berman, All the ways student debt
d e r n is m
post-mo
nized, questioned, challenged, and whenever possible, abolished. exacerbates racial inequality — ‘it’s like landing
in quick sand’, MarketWatch, July 27, 2019.

m
HEGEMONIC FORM < https://www.marketwatch.com/story/all-
n t a l i s
oriorerequirement
Debt Oriented Education: Any form of debt-inducing education, professional protocol goes the-ways-student-debt-is-exacerbating-racial-
against truly anti-racist and decolonizing pedagogies. An Anti-Racist pedagogy is only possible through nalism inequality-its-like-landing-in-quick-sand-one-

l r e g i o black-student-says-2019-07-18>

crit i a
approaches that challenge the current capitalist system of education and the gulf in wealthcbetween Black,
Latina, and indigenous families and white families.
t r u c t ivism24
decon
s
i t e c ture
h
e arc
 evi it y
n ic ry al
in
Centralized Studio: Coordinated studios that enforce a central viewpoint or topic of interest of senior or
m o i s t o
r y r i g
i o n
e h o do
established faculty figures over other pedagogical questions of other members of the faculty goes against
t is n
the possibility of diversifying standard teaching approaches and questioning the status quo. In a historically
g
e ory wor rld h ss a l d i s n i v
d sio
h
white, heteropatriarchal institution, centralized studios may silence the pluriverse of voices needed to diver-

t t
sify architecture and may reinforce white, male, and ableist supremacist assumptions.
i

-g ism
c
i s entr d w wn rsh orie h d
i o e i p n i v

de
h
Prize Oriented Education: Architectural education centered on goals and individual prizes reinforces the

nt rn
t

ar
role of institutional subjectivity and individuality over collaboration. Other forms of recognition and distri-
e o

y o of ry f m en
c r e n / ut

ov le va e
bution of funds pointed towards solidarity and collaboration may foster collective forms of worldmaking in
r o e t h t

d
n u

tor ory to y o m
tune with the challenges of our times.
u t o n so

o
e n e

his hist his stor lop

e a
-c asis on ccid bal
Trauma Oriented Research: Over-emphasizing on the trauma of oppressed communities through research Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing,

e
trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

a
u
and design projects could potentially inflict more trauma on the students and faculty and help perpetuate
ph sis t, o glo

tic tate mal le h ev

2010).

f m st of
stereotypes. Although these issues are important, forcing oppressed people to engage with their condition

ts
d
em pha es h /
through design exercises takes away the potential freedom an educational experience may provide them. An

en
ap ion- tric /ma ss,
anti-racist educational experience should allow the student freedom to address issues that are important to
w rt

y
e i

em
them without forcing them into a particular difficult topic (tokenization). Educators should be critical about
m /

e
their position within the studio and pay extra attention to potential additional emotional, psychological, and
e t o

ce
na oce ntri ogr
intellectual labor that would be incurred by students because of their precarious or vulnerable conditions.
s n
ea bal

illan
Some examples of trauma-oriented research may include issues of poverty, geopolitical borders, imprison-

eu roce , pr
ment, and institutional violence. Architecture pedagogy must focus on freedom without reduction, following
lo

c
what Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity.”

h
g

nt
/
eu wt

urve

logy
Hegemonic Ideology Projects: Architecture syllabi should be critical about the assignation of programs like

me
o
gr
prisons, detention centers, police stations, and religious buildings that overlook the role of racial, gender, and

zonin tomy
n
sexual repression. Without providing a critical context and the possibility to engage, question, and subvert

lace

c ideo
s
s
the problematic legacy of such institutions, the learning space would potentially help perpetuate hegemonic

nic

ion

n
/
ideologies. If not to be completely avoided, these projects of hegemonic ideology should be accompanied by

al

sed icons

o
robust contextual information, and a series of strategies and methods of ideology critique.

o
cat
disp

i
icin

research
t

g
h
egat
for emo
oli
Contextless Icons: The study of established references and iconic projects within hegemonic canons without

n dic

emoni
edu
context obscures the relationship between architecture, political, and economic power. References from the

ering
l
Eurocentric canon of architecture should always be presented in relationship to their political, economic, and

ss

/ po
/

segr
colonial/imperial history. Whenever established architects are presented, rigorous effort should be made to

prize oriented studio

tle

urba
g
discuss the social, cultural, political, and material contexts around them.

atio
m

onial

tudio
he

cial rend
g
ities
tex
Repetitive Curriculum: Unless a class has been engaging with abolitionist, anti-racist strategies since the

e
/
t ba

trauma oriented
beginning, any form of curriculum that has been repeated for years (sometimes decades) must be put into

gs of h
b

ic text
g
i
question in order to address pressing interpersonal, social, political, and ecological challenges.

con

trif

u
r-col
innin
rt c

centralized s
deb

n/s
Gentrification / Displacement: In order to engage with anti-racist approaches, studios that engage and aid

gen
institutions in the speculation, research, and implementation of gentrification processes should be ques-

sma
tioned. Under no circumstances, students should be used as part of development plans that facilitate gentrifi-

commer
academ
settle
buildin
redl
urba
cation and displacement of oppressed, racialized, impoverished, and dispossessed communities.
Smart Cities / Policing / Surveillance: An anti-racist approach to architectural education will question
any projects that assume as virtue the role of ‘smart cities’ without accounting for the role of policing and
surveillance of racialized subjects under the scope these technologies. Data without critical thinking can be a
weapon against subaltern populations.
Redlining / Segregation: Projects that require the proposal or study of urban planning should engage with a
critical history of redlining, segregation, displacement, and violence in human settlements.
Urban/Suburban Dichotomy: Rather than reaffirming the depoliticized dichotomy of the Urban/Suburban,
City/Countryside condition, an anti-racist model of education should engage with issues regarding white
flight, redlining, settler-colonialism, and the invention of private property and the laws, systems, and institu-
tions created to consolidate these dichotomies. .
Settler-Colonial Zoning: An anti-racist model of education would have to dig deep into the settler-colonial
legacy of zoning and how it perpetuates the formulation of identities by the ideological division of the ground. 26
 a l r e g io
critic t i vism
st r u c re
decon e c t u
Academic Text: An anti-racist approach in architecture would generate alternative forms to write about
architecture that take into account forms of practice, different audiences, and relations of accessibility.
rchi t
Rather than investing on texts that are meant to fulfil academic requirements, text should be used as a tool to
lu t e a
abso sm )
generate critical, emancipatory, and anti-racist content and exchanges of knowledge.

t r i c i o o
Commercial Rendering: With the advent of computer-generated graphics and rendering software, archi-
a m e y( o
p a r l o g
l to re
tectural renderings have helped consolidate the white-washing of the world through the lens of commercial
architecture. Anti-racist architectural pedagogy would engage in the formulation of critical images that are
g i t a o n c t u
either radically inclusive when rendering new worlds or critically subversive when exposing the ideology
o s t-di iented c h ite
behind architecture.
p o r l a r
Humiliation and Punishment: The chauvinistic culture of intellectual humiliation, excessive punishment,
b j e c t
n ti a s i gn
and subjective grading criteria is one of the blatant symptoms of a structurally racist, sexist, and toxic o f e r e de
supremacist culture in architecture education. These tasteless practices have no space in anti-racist pedagog-
-r e se d
ical models and must be abolished from learning environments. In the increasingly neoliberalization of the
n o n b a
university, grades should not be used as capital to maintain the status quo.
n c e-
HEGEMONIC HISTORY
v i de y
e it
Eurocentric World History: Anti-Racist programs must undo the damage done by constructions of history
positioning Europe and its imperial-colonial apparatus at the center. New forms of history must generate a
n i c ry in
a l
universe of multiple, coexisting centers that extend around the world and include the narratives previously
rendered invisible by Eurocentric worldviews. History should not be engaged as a European epistemological
m o i s t o
r y r i g
i o n
core with isolated sidenotes of world events, but rather as an always evolving narrative that establishes rela-
e
g ry l d h
i s to d o v i s
e n i on
tionships of local events with global systems of extraction, communication, and mobility.
r h
US-Centered World History: The problem of architectural academia in the US is two-fold: it must simul- h to w o
r l d s
s ip
a
t
d
i s i

-g ism
s ic n iv
hi ocen red w new ors t /or uth d
o e e

de
r
taneously engage with a critical history of the world (beyond the assumed Eurocentric world view), while
critically addressing its own history within and beyond geopolitical boundaries and its role as a colonial and t n h i

nt rn
t

ar
y o of ry f m en
imperial power around the world.

ov yle va de
r e n th en so

tor ory to y o m
u t o u

o
Emphasis on Newness and originality: The concepts of newness and originality, so prevalent in architec-
e n

his ist his or op

ce sis n a cid al
ture schools around thew world, reinforce the misleading Eurocentric myth of the genius author. Anti-racist
-

al te h ale hist vel

models of pedagogy would acknowledge that architecture is a collective intelligence that is built over time
us pha is o , oc lob

a
and that takes into consideration many intellectual and material cultures across periods and territories.

f m st of
oli -sta ic/m ale , de

s
s t g
em pha es h /

t
en
Emphasis on Authorship: In the same way that newness and originality are problematic concepts, the idea

s
of authorship in architecture should not be taken lightly, as it often erases all the labor that goes into making
w rt

es

em
a project. New forms to understand the role of collective intelligence may create a more flexible, inclusive,
e m t / o

e
na oce ntri ogr
and fair approach to the process of generating projects and designs.
s n

lanc
ea bal

m
eu roce , pr
East /West, Occident / Orient Division: An anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy would have to

c/
engage with the critical history of the East/West, Occident/Orient division and the inherent exotification of
o
gl

veil
otherness. Products of imperial and colonial systems of power, these dichotomies should be addressed via

nt
eu wt
projects and arguments that critically engage with them as ideological constructions.

me
o

r
nt

sur
gr

tomy
Global North / Global South Division: The Global North/South dichotomy must be challenged and re-
placed for models that look at specific cases and critical study the relationship between old and new econom-

lace
nic

n
ic and ideological powers.

ion
/ seg icing /
r
n

atio
ons
tio

dicho
tic
Growth, Progress, Development: Cartesian concepts like growth, progress, and development should be crit-

ities / disp

ing
t
for emo
ically scrutinized in relationship with ecological justice, settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, gentrification,

rega
ifica educ
and displacement.

s ic
ap

n
l

gemo
o
Eurocentric / Male history of Modernism: An anti-racist architectural education must challenge the

ial zo
n
les

p
tion
Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal construction of the concept of Modernism and question its relationship with

urba
g

ed
settler-colonialism, empire, gender and racial identity, and systems of capitalist extraction. This history

/
t
he
would have to critically dissect Philip Johnson’s Nazi affiliations, the collaborations of Ludwig Mies Van Der

tex
bas

s of he
Rohe with the Gestapo, the alliances of Modernist architects and urbanists with fascist regimes, and the role

colon
of collections and pedagogical programs in consolidating Modernist ideology as an hegemonic doctrine. 28

/ sub
ning
con

rt c
ebt
ntr
 sity p s
rogra
robotics ms
Eurocentric / Male History of Avant-Garde: In the same way that Modernism must be questioned,
Avant-Garde groups should be presented in their historical, economic, and political contexts, and effort social me
should be added to not isolate them through a Eurocentric scope. A History of the Avant-Garde must engage dia
with politics of exclusion, the role of colonialism and imperialism, and forms of practices until now outside
of the Europeanized and Americanized canon. v.r.
Nation-State History of Style: Instead of focusing on racist and supremacist nation-state narratives of style
that facilitate the otherness of excluded cultures, an anti-racist approach will restore cultural meaning and
fundamental elements that are central to diverse understandings of style. Anti-racist approaches to architec-
tural history would focus on style as part of struggles, identities, and themes regarding means of production,
ideology, politics, and theories of expansionism, extraction, capitalism, and resistance.

Apolitical History of Movements: To look at the history of artistic and architectural Movements without
hegemonic
theory
understanding their context and why have they been historically accepted as the status quo, is to overlook
the political power of discourses and positions. An anti-racist approach to architectural movements would
have to consider how movements are consolidated, diffused, and presented, and the roles of media, plat-
forms, and institutions in their construction and distribution.

HEGEMONIC THEORY modernism

rnism
Modernism: Modernist theories on the relationship of urbanism and architecture, the subdivision of the city
by class, the stratification of labor, the concentration of wealth in city centers, questions of ecological justice
and collective transportation should be intersected with the history of colonialism and imperialism, the car- p o s t - m o d e
sm
tesian values of development, order, and progress, the construction of gender roles, and the problematization

orientali
of a singular, hegemonic European view of universalism.

g i o n a lism
l re
Post-Modernism: The emphasis of Post-Modernism on style on one hand, and on a vernacular of a white,

critica
masculine, capitalist state on the other, while overlooking the role of race and gender in its argument is symp-
tomatic of the pervasive white supremacist ideology in architectural theory. This is declared first hand by one
r u c t i vism
of its main proponents, as Charles Jencks is willing to overlook racial segregation in order to declare style as
st re
the reason Pruitt-Igoe failed in St. Louis. For a theory that was born at the same time as the civil rights move-
decon t e c t u
ment in the United States it does absolutely nothing to address any of these challenges within its framework.
t e a rchi
lu
Orientalism: Against the exotification of the other through the lens of colonialism and imperialism, new
abso t r i c i sm o o )
theories must provide lenses to study the complex histories of the majority of the world. Emancipating forms
a m e y( o
of knowledge have existed in the form of theories endemic to territories previously considered outside of the
p a r l o g
tal d onto ecture
Eurocentric canon.

i g i
Critical Regionalism: Forms of architectural knowledge generated outside of hegemonic institutions and
o s t-d iente c h it
discourses will have to replace the theories developed as umbrella terms to explain everything that happens
p or l a r
c t i a gn
outside of the Eurocentric lens.
b j e e n t s i
Deconstructivism: A continuation of Post-Modernim’s form for form sake approach, Deconstructivism re- o
e f e r d de
sists engaging with any form of ideology critique, and instead approaches architecture as a methodology that
o n -r b a se
n e-
disengages with political content at precisely the same time that neoliberalism makes a violent incursion on
the global markets.
n c
v i de
e ity
Parametricism: Instead of programming algorithms to emancipate humanity, parametricism both, as a style
and as a methodology, has become an accelerationist approach for capricious forms, and eventually through
his loudest advocate, an architectural defense of monocultural supremacy and unregulated capitalism.
n i c ry in
a l
Post-Digital: In the face of pressing challenges, architecture would reject any form of apolitical approach to
m o i s t o
r y r i g
i o n
the post-digital collage as a purely aesthetical exercise, and would instead engage with the political content
e
g ry l d h
i s to d o v i s
e r n i on
of images to generate collages with subversive potential.
h
h to w o
r l d s
s ip
a
t
d
i s i

ar m
Absolute Architecture: In the tradition of Eurocentric architectural theory, Absolute Architecture focuses

s ic n iv
hi ocen red w new ors t /or uth d
o e e

de
on case studies generated within the European framework of urbanism. Against the pressing challenges of
r n

t-g nis
our times, by claiming ‘absolute’ condition of architecture as something else than the city, this theoretical t h i

m nt
an r
approach avoids any engagement with racial, gender, and even ecological critiques on design.

av ode
of me
th en so
30
u r t e n
e n o u

op
ce is n a id al

el
 C O
E
Object Oriented Ontology (OOO): Any theory based on the objectification of everything stands in opposi-
tion to anti-racist, transfeminist, and decolonial struggles against objectification and commodification. OOO
must be challenged by positions that reveal the problematic approach to looking at the world through the

he
lens of objectification.

Non-Referential Architecture: A theory that claims that there’s a need for an architecture that is able to re-
spond to the contemporary lack of universal meanings or beliefs, overlooks some of the most urgent global
and pressing challenges and manifestations. To claim that there are no great narratives today is to ignore the me emog
dia nic
effects of a global pandemic, and collective calls for reparations that engage with ecological justice, global
protests of Black Lives Matter, and indigenous and feminist struggles around the world.
ma
Evidence-based Design: Rather than rely on analytical information to take predetermined design decisions, in str
an evidence-based approach should be aimed to reveal the racial, ethnic, and gender bias in the organiza-
ma eam
tions and programs that generate policy research and analysis.
ins p
tre
HEGEMONIC MEDIA orth am ublis
odo h
x re online ing
Mainstream Publishing: Historically created as tools for the consolidation of cultural power, mainstream
publishing these days oscillates between the hegemonic discourses of the nation-state, elite institutions, and
corporate marketing (any magazine affiliated to professional or regulatory institutions). Truly emancipatory inst pre
itut sen maga
discourses would have to create alternative channels to engage with the world.
iona tati zin
Mainstream Online Magazines: Although the internet promised to democratize information, mainstream bien l cu o es
online design magazines have become the pixel version of printed press. The lack of diversity already en- nale rato n
demic to mainstream publishing has been echoed in online platforms.
priva s , trie rial
te un n nale
Orthodox Representation: Against drawing for drawing sake, new forms of architectural representation
neoli i v ersit s, fe
should replace the traditional techniques of depoliticized architectural representation. While a drawing in it-
self can’t be critical (in the way that it enhances struggles for human emancipation), the discourses surround-
beral y pro stiva
ing it can aid in the formulation of critical and emancipatory architectures.
u n g r ls
i versi a
Institutional Curatorial: Responding to institutional demands, curatorial programs rely on the same protag-
a.i. ty pro ms
onists hailing from the same countries and the same ‘elite’ institutions. Leading collections like the CCA and gram
MoMA lack representation from outside of recognized domains. robotics s
Biennales, Triennales, Festivals: With the principal architecture Biennale in Venice relying on the outdated
colonial model of national pavilions, other biennales, and festivals keep failing to deliver an expansion of social me
the architectural horizon. The overdependence of head figures linked to the same elite cultural institutions
of powerful nation-states ensures that the discourses presented don’t depart drastically from the hegemonic
dia
ideologies, economic models, and aesthetic proposals of the last hundred years. With a few exceptions of
events that engage with new critical takes on settler-colonialism, labor, and human rights, these events have
v.r.
become an extended global circuit for the elite circles of cultural, financial, and material capital.

Private University Programs: Elite private University architecture programs have been active in the pro-
graming and control of the news regarding the calls for anti-racist practices and approaches. However, as

hegemonic
presented in the Anti-Liberation Paywall Diagram, they operate behind insurmountable paywalls sharply
contrasting with the median Black, Latina, and American Indian and pacific islander household incomes.

theory
Neoliberal University Programs: As Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades state, “Public Colleges and Uni-
versities are exemplars of neoliberalism,” as they emphasize their support for corporate competitiveness
through their major role in the global, knowledge-based economy.” In this process “the fundamental social
roles of public higher education, including providing increased upward mobility for underserved populations,

modernism
have been displaced by the economic role of serving corporations’ global competitiveness”

nism
Social Media: Once the promise of radical democratization of means of communication have faded away,
all is left is the infrastructure laid out by powerful agencies that control the information that is consumed.
s t - m o d e r
Critical models of media would find alternative ways to exchange knowledge freely through the available po
sm
channels of the internet.

32 orientali lism
g i o n a
l re
critica sm
A.I.: From prescriptive policing algorithms to bigoted conversations between chatbots, the racist and mi- Ashley Murray and Katie Giammarise, Pittsburgh
sogynist manifestations of AI simulations are well documented. A technology reliant on human subjectivity, suspends policing program that used algorithms
to predict crime ‘hot spots’, Pittsburgh Post-Ga-
the uncritical use of powerful institutions of Artificial Intelligence could result in architectures of accelerated
zette, JUN 23, 2020. <https://www.post-gazette.
segregation, increased policing, efficient occupation, and dispossession of already vulnerable communities. com/news/crime-courts/2020/06/23/Pitts-
burgh-suspends-policing-police-program-algo-
Robotics: The study of robotics in architecture without an ethical and explicitly anti-racist framework has rithms-predict-predictive-hot-spots-crime-data/
the potential to enhance the development of an infrastructure for the use of fully autonomous weapons, stories/202006230059>

ideology and buildings

dscapes

ration

ic
means of production
automated displacement, and extraction of resources through architectural and urban knowledge that can be Autonomous weapons that kill must be

etor
enforced by corporate, policing, military, and paramilitary forces in the continuous oppression of disenfran-

artifacts

es
banned, insists UN chief, UN News, 25
chised and racialized communities around the world. March 2019. < https://news.un.org/en/sto-

nism
ry/2019/03/1035381>

imag
es

e rh
V.R.: Virtual reality is not a replacement for the real conditions of subaltern worlds. As Mark Zuckerberg

ollabo
FORM
and Facebook Social VR Chief Rachel Franklin awkwardly demonstrated while they strolled in the comfort

mag
onial lan

i
g
of their VR experience in the devastated and flooded streets of Puerto Rico after the Hurricane Maria, these

ial
ve urba

kin
usiv
technologies provide a fake sense of place and experience, and if not engaged with critically, could potential-

oving

lon
ly perpetuate the commodification of oppression.

g
contextual

win
ma
ls of c

still
INTERSECTIONAL

incl

-co
The following concepts are pedagogical approaches that have been intersected through the spiral of an-

rld
post-col

dra
al m

ext
ti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, ecological justice.

em
ler
inclusi

sive
Together they act as a speculative anti-racist architecture planetary curriculum.

and

wo
mode

cal t

ov
ett
Leah Penniman, Farming while Black: Soul Fire

dox
FORM

critic
Farm’s practical guide to liberation on the land,

fm
inclu
Means of Production: An emancipating model of education must account for all the forms of labor, materi-

tive
(Hartford: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).

HIS ns

fs
Y
cal
al, extraction, and exchanges of knowledge that shape and are shaped by architecture. Only through a critical

ero
criti

OR

yo
tio

to
position towards controlling the means of architectural production will a real form of emancipating practice

crti

lec
can begin to take shape. Controlling the means of production is one of the strongest acts of resistance.

ex
Adrienne Brown, Race and Real Estate, (Oxford:

ara

m itica istor
het

gy
Oxford University Press, 2015).

T
Ideology and Buildings: A building is never just a building. It is imperative to understand buildings as

col

nt

o
material manifestations of ideology. Anti-racist pedagogies must be able to address the relationship between

rep

l
Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Ar-

po dia l co
tio al, heo
buildings and the ideological systems and infrastructures that fund, envision, commission, and defund them.

po bal h
chitecture and the Perception of Race, (John

o
Hopkins University Press, 2019).

cr itic sta con

Contextual Artifacts: The history of humans is the history of artifacts that respond to specific material,

rc
political, spiritual, psychological, physical, emotional, and environmental needs, desires, questions, subjectivi-

glo

a
e
ties, and objectives. An anti-racist pedagogy would aim to understand the complex material, cultural, political

te
l
and historical contexts of artifacts and those who until now have had the power to construct their narratives.

na tic
e
Post-Colonial Landscapes: In the process of constructing architectural imaginaries through images, critical

i
forms of pedagogy must engage in revealing, challenging, and subverting the relationship of occupation, set-

n
l
tler-colonialism, displacement, gentrification, and spoliation of ecological systems to the history of landscape.

a
Post-Colonial Landscapes engage with systems of power through the acknowledgment of ideological forces in
the manipulation of territories and their direct effect of indigenous, Black, and other racialized people.

cr
Inclusive Urbanism: Critical models of pedagogy must challenge classist and capitalist forms of urbanism with
S T ICE

it
urbanisms of radical inclusion, care, connectivity, desegregation, radical integration, and anti-capitalist solidarity.

L J U
Models of Collaboration: Against the fallacious understanding of architecture as discipline of single au-
IC A
G
thors, award-seeking entrepreneurs, and solitary geniuses, anti-racist pedagogies must foster networks of
solidarity through collaboration, care, empowerment, and mutual aid.
L O
Critical Moving Images: New models of architectural presentation would expand beyond orthodox mod-
els of presentation and develop moving manifestoes that critically dissect the past, subvert the present, and
C O
speculate emancipatory futures. The critical culture that can be found on documentary journalism, specu-
E
lative filmmaking, and what Hito Steyerl calls ‘Poor Images’ that subversively circulate the internet have the

I A L ISM
ON
potential of challenge the commodification of images and construct new ways of storytelling that allow

he
formerly missing voices to the plethora of discourses and architectural desires.

O L
g
me emo
Inclusive Still Images: Anti-racist, anti-ableist models of architectural pedagogy would have to halt the
formulation and dissemination of white-washed architectural imagery and render visible previously invisi- 34 I - C
T
m di n AN
ble Black, brown, disable, trans, queer, racialized bodies. New forms of anti-capitalist realism must expose
through architectural imagery the cruelty of poverty and the true intentions of gentrification. Inclusive still
images will employ image making technologies and techniques to render new imaginaries while lifting the
mask of cynicism to reveal the face of ideology behind architecture.

Heterodox Drawing: Rather than developing self-referential drawings that lead to the perpetual Eurocentric
canon, new pedagogies will embrace drawing forms that speak to ancestral histories and subaltern futurisms
of the other that could potentially communicate beyond the confines of the status quo.

Critical Text: Against the hermetic closeness of academic texts in architectural pedagogy, texts that aid in
the search of forms of human emancipation would take many forms, from poetry, to political manifestoes, to
short stories, to collective projects that allow generations to declare their intentions.

Collective Worldmaking: Against the idea of architecture as a one men or a one corporation enterprise, we Pëtr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
need collective acts of worldmaking. We need collective utopias. We need collective pedagogies. We need (1902) < https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/

ideology and buildings

dscapes

ration

ic
ancestral utopias, queer utopias, trans utopias, Black utopias, indigenous utopias. Collective worldmaking fos- petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution>

means of production

etor
ters and seeks out care, solidarity, and harmony with the environment.

artifacts

es
nism
Reparations: As Angela Y. Davis affirms, free education would be a form of reparations that would benefit Diversity Forum 2020: A Conversation with

imag
es
Angela Davis, University of Pittsburgh, July

ism
everyone. Emancipating forms of pedagogy need to recognize the damage done by a white supremacist,

e rh
ollabo
28, 2020. < https://www.youtube.com/
heteropatriarcal capitalocene and propose real and tangible forms of reparations. Emancipation can’t happen

FORM

mag
watch?v=ae8DYsoUhVI>

onial lan
in a bubble of privilege.

ial

r
ve urba

kin
usiv

we
oving
HISTORY

lon
g
contextual

i
Global history of settler-colonialism: The history of architecture and its effects on societies, people, eco-

po
win
ma
ls of c

ts
still
systems, and the environment would be incomplete without engaging with the history of settler-colonialism.

incl

-co

en

ica cal
An Anti-Racist, anti-colonialist architecture must engage with the global (and cosmic) history of settler-colo-

p
ds
rld
post-col

hi
dra
al m

ext
nial states and institutions, and the mechanisms of domination, extraction, and exploitation inherent to them.

em
ler

i
inclusi

gi
sive

rs
and

lg
wo
Political Context of Movements: A critical pedagogy can’t engage with architecture in a bubble. Art, philoso-

mode

lo

ho
cal t

ov
ett
dox
phy, and architectural movements, must be studied within their respective political, historical, material, cultur-

id ideo
critic

ut
fm
al, social, and ideological frameworks. A history of movements must depart from the Eurocentric epistemolo-

inclu

e
y

tive

HIS ns

fs
Y
cal

ur
g

g
gies and approach the world as a complex network of positions and discourses of aggression and resistance.

la
ero
criti
o

o
OR

yo

ct
tio

to

nd
g

ra
l
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, ed. Media

eo
Media Archeology: As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka explain “Media archaeology rummages textual,

crti

lec
a

ite
d io
Archeaology: Approaches, Applications, and Im-

tu
ex

,a
visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive and the

ara

m itica istor
het

gy
plications, (Los Angeles: University of California

pe t

ch
T
material manifestations of culture.” A media archeology (that accounts of a geology of media) is interested
u

ec
col

c
nt
it
Press, 2011).

t,
not only in “media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy” but in the geophysical effects of

ar
re t

rep

t
l
om
po dia l co

ke
s

tio al, heo

i
this media culture, “from metals and minerals to its waste load.” A search of ecological justice must take into Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, Electronic

po bal h

h
u in

n
Mediations, Volume 46, (Minneapolis: University
account media archeology and media geology in order to consider not only the dreams of technology but the
t

rc
ar

ri
c

cr itic sta con

of Minnesota Press, 2015).
devastating footprint of capitalist extraction.
e e a

fa
rc
t r f

bo
,m
hi tu
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes
r

glo

a
e

to ry o
e
Political, Economic, and Ideological Power: Any form of critical pedagogy focused on anti-racist struggles or None, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
c

la
c d

te
ti e
Press, 2018). < https://manifold.umn.edu/proj-
must outline the connections between architecture, urbanism, political, and ideological power. This study
r

l
n

of
a
ects/a-billion-black-anthropocenes-or-none>

ge
would consider the multiple and complex forms of political influence in the shaping of the built and imagi-

o
f h

na tic
rc t

l h ist
nary environment.
o

ry
y a nd rin

i
n
ca h
r

l
Nation State, Market, Ideological Grids: In order to understand the role of architecture in systems of op-
to f , a t p

is
o

iti al
al oo
pression and extraction and its potential as a tool of liberation, critical pedagogies must take into account the
effects of the nation state, global and local markets, and ideological grids. The history of modernization, prog-
is ry i f s
h o ra
c l t ie
st
ress, and development accounts for the fabrication of identities through abstract systems of varying scales.
l ia i

cr
S T ICE ca h i e er , al
c
U iti
Critical History of Architectural authorship: In order to challenge the myth of the single author, a critical his-

L J
tory must reveal all the systems, forces, and relationships that create and foment the idea of architectural (and ar-
cr tica ect
l ur p
im f id
e
C A
tistic) authorship. A critical history of architectural authorship should reveal how architecture is shaped through

GI
collective intelligence, collaboration, and many different forms of intellectual and physical labor.
i t d
n ry o
O cr chi l a
L
Critical history of labor in architecture: In the same way that it is imperative to critically engage with
r i a s to
O
the history authorship in architecture, a critical history of labor should study all the forms of labor behind 36 a on
l al h
i
EC o
c tic
 rat
means of producti

dsca
ideology and buildi
artifact

et
nism

imag
es

ism
e rh
ollabo
architecture. This history will account from slavery to indenture servitude, to salaried wage labor, to the work Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

FORM

imag
onial lan
involved in the production of architectural materials, and technologies. A critical history of labor in architec-

g
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, (New

ial

r
ve urba
ture must question and challenge any form of analysis that overlooks the role that race, gender, and coloniza-

kin
usiv
York: Vintage Books, 1983).

we
oving
tion plays in the history of architecture.

lon
g
contextual
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women,

po
win
ma
ls of c

ts
the Body, and primitive accumulation, (New York:

still
Critical History of Architectural Pedagogy: A critical pedagogy of architecture must question and chal-

incl

-co
Autonomedia, 2004).

n
lenge the history of architectural pedagogy as it has been previously acknowledged, accepted, and imple-

ica cal

p
s
e
rld
post-col

rid
mented. This approach will aim to understand what educational formats and strategies exist, the historical

hi
dra
al m

e xt

em
ler
inclusi
role they had in shaping hegemonic and subversive discourses, the institutions that have shaped architectural

gi
sive

rs
and

lg
wo
education, and the people that have been overly included and overtly excluded. A critical history of Architec-

mod e

lo

ho
cal t

ov
ett
tural Pedagogy will have focus on the structures of recognized institutions and on those operating outsides of

dox

ry of a t, id ideo
critic

ut
the margins and canons.

fm
inclu

e
y

tive

fs
Y
cal

ur
g

og

la
n
ero
criti
o

OR
Critical History of Architectural institutions: As professional and disciplinary institutions have historically

yo

ct
tio

to
s

nd
g

ra
l
regulated, endorsed, and legitimized architecture, an anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy should
n

eo
crti

lec
a

ite
d o s

tu
explore their role in challenging or facilitating practices of exclusion, displacement, oppression, and power.

ex

a
i

ara

m itica istor
e

het

gy
pe ut on i

ch
T
d

c,

ec
col
i

nt
it o

o
t
Architecture, racial and gender fabrication: As architecture shapes and regulates the spaces and infra-

ar
e

HIS
t a b

rep

t
l
om
ur al

po dia l co
structures of societies, with a settler-colonial legacy, it has also been central to the violent processes of

ke
s

tio al, heo

hi
c
Mario Gooden, Dark Space: Architecture, Repre-

po bal h
in i

n
r
gender and racial fabrication and imposition. A critical form of architecture pedagogy has the duty to identify
t e
sentation, Black Identity, (New York: Columbia

rc
r

ri
c b

on
id
the connections between the use of architecture and control over the body, identity, and life.
re
University Press, 2016).

a
e a

rc
t f ,

bo
,m
i u s

c
r
Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis,

h ct g

glo

a
Colonial and Imperial Footprint: Instead of deferring to responses that focus on carbon economies and

e
e n

la
ed. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical
c nd i

te
ite
green capitalism, an anti-racist pedagogy focuses on understanding how the colonial and imperial footprint
ar

is ory
d

l
History from the Enlightenment to the Present,

il

of
of architecture relates to a long history of exploitation of large parts of the world. By moving away from
ge

cr itic sta
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

of ch u

na tic
nt
capitalist forms of sustainability, an intersectional approach that engages with ecological justice studies the

e
b

l h ist
r
Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and
struggles of resource colonies around the world, from Africa to the indigenous nations in the Americas. The
y a d i a l

i
n pr

to
n
Lynn M. Stephen, ed., Dissident Women: Gender

ca h
or

l
Colonial and Imperial footprint of architecture considers the networks and conditions that support the capi- and Cultural Politics in Chiapas, (Austin: Universi-
f a t id e
o l,

iti al
talist systems that fuel the continuous development of the built environment. ty of Texas Press, 2006).
t o ,
Critical History of ideal cities, ideal buildings, ideal bodies: An anti-racist pedagogy should be able
his o r y
c i a
l fo i e s
t a t
Achille Mbembé, “Aesthetics of Superfluity.”
l r ia l ci

cr
ICE a s
dissect the challenges and threats of the utopias of the few. Through this critical dissection of visionary Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 373-405. muse.

T c i , r
S ir ti al h ture mp idea
e
jhu.edu/article/173738.

U
plans that go from provocative and subversive utopias to totalitarian and fascist regimes of ableist, classist,

L J
and racist terror, relationships should be established between dreams of ideal cities and buildings and the

A
idealization of bodies and identities. Critical approaches to architectural education will provide platforms for

IC
the construction of anti-ableist, anti-racist, and transfeminist utopias of extended sensibilities and radical c tic ec
i t d i
of
G r
c ch i n
a or y
O
accessibility and inclusivity.

L l
O THEORY
ar onia hist
Transmodernism: Instead of the continuous fixation on Eurocentric forms of Modernism and critiques
l l
co itica
operating within the confines of its conceptual apparatus (Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, etc.) Trans-

ISM RY
modernism operates not as a manifestation of its late stages, but as civilization beyond it. Based on subaltern

I A L
civilizations and imaginaries, Transmodernism (a term coined by Enrique Dussel), is a modernity of the
cr
ON O
“other” that occurs beyond and despite the European narratives of Modernism.

C O L
Gore Capitalism: As architecture delves, shapes, and is shaped by the politics, economies, and narratives
H E
- T sm
Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. Erica

T I
of nation states and powerful corporations, the condition of (geographic) border spaces (between nation
states or between privatized space and the ‘other’), generates a particular type of heteropatriarcal violence.
Mena, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).

er n i
AN
Sayak Valencia grounds in a multiplicity of feminisms, a transfeminism that reinterprets the brutal kinds of
d
ISM
violence as tools of necroempowerment. Gore Capitalism analyses the subversion of the terms of capital
s mo talism
I A L
as “commodity production” is substituted with a “commodity-made-flesh in the body and human life.” This
a n i e d
ER t r ca p s s
theoretical framework provides a lens to read the architectures that frame the border condition of masculine
P
hyperviolence of capitalism as a heteropatriarcal machine of accumulation, precarity, and death.
e i c s p re
- I M r
go opol i t
eo
p
T I
Necropolitics: Necropolitics explores, in the words of Achille Mbembe how “contemporary forms of sub- Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Co-

r f t h
nec gogy o
coran, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

AN
jugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance,

T A L ISM
sacrifice, and terror.” The framework of necropolitics allows to read the legacy of the colony that as Frantz
a i es
PI d r
Fanon argues entails a division of space into compartments, “the setting of boundaries and internal frontiers
pe he o
-C A
epitomized by barracks and police stations.” 38
e r t e o ry
T I qu e
ial t
h
y
 y a r d in al
or f an p r e

po

t
cr io
, t d

is
o i

iti al
t l o ,

t
is y a

lh
i o s

cr itic
na
h r c l f e
to ra ti
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Based on Paulo Freire’s model, an architectural pedagogy of the oppressed Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra

ca
Bergman Ramos, (New York: Continuum, 2005).
l i a i
ICE s
challenges the banking concept of education as the deposit of institutional forms of knowledge into empty

T a i , r c
S c lh e e al
vessels (students), and instead proposes a model of knowledge exchange. A pedagogy of the oppressed
U i
Amílcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization,

J
searches for “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domina-
L
trans. Dan Wood, (London / New York: Rowman
ir t
c tica ectu d im of id
r p e
A
tion—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the & Littlefield, 2018).

GI C
world exists as a reality apart from people.”
i t an ory
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearn-

O
ing Imperialism, (New York: Verso Books, 2019).
cr chi l
L
Decolonial theory: Through fiction, poetry, and formal philosophy, an anti-racist architectural pedagogy

ar onia hist
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon

O
must move away from conventional hegemonic epistemologies and participate in complex processes of
Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

EC
decolonial thinking. The field of decolonial theory is as diverse as the forms that colonization takes, and
l l
co itica
includes discourses from pan-Africanists like Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, to indigenous theory by Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future, (New York:

M
Verso Books, 2019).

RY
Nick Estes, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, to the potential histories of Ariella Azoulay, to the transdecolonial

I A L IS
poetry of Raquel Rivera Salas, passing through every ideological territory around the world spoiled by settler Samia Henni, Architecture of Counterrevolution:
cr
ON O
colonialism. The French Army in Northern Algeria, (Zurich:

L E
GTA Verlag, 2018).

CO H
Post-Colonial Theory: Achille Mbembe argues in his ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ that the post-

- T sm
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have

TI
colony is “made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery which, once they are in Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical
n i
er
place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence” and is “characterized by a distinctive style of political Resistance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

AN
improvisation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which iden- Press, Year: 2017).
o d s m
tities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation.” Both building on and departing from Mbembe’s
i
IALISM
m l
ns
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski,
definition, the term post-colonial is used here to describe the potential fabrication of such fictional narratives “Loudreading in Post-colonial Landscapes (to
a i ta ed
ER r a p s s
and emancipatory imaginaries under the suppressive apparatus of colonized territories. The post-colonial
t
the beat of Reggaeton),” in the Avery Review 48

P
as a speculative act of making takes the place of the historical anticolonial struggle and reimagines global (June 2020), http://averyreview.com/is-
e c i c s p re
IM
processes of solidarity and subsistence under an oppressive system. r
go opol i t
eo
p
sues/48/loudreading.

TI- f t h
Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the
Critique of Black Reason: In his book Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe defines as the “becoming
c r o
AN e y
Postcolony,” Journal of the International African

A L IS M
Black of the world” when “all events and situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value” and Institute, vol. 62, no. 1 (1992): 3–37.
n g og es
PIT a i
thus have turned “the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism,” when
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans.

pe d o r
A he
“men and women from Africa were transformed into human-objects, human-commodities, human-money,”
t ry
Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University

I- C
into the “norm for, or at least the lot of, all subaltern humanity.” By delving into the work of Frantz Fanon and Press, 2017).
e e r
lt h e o
T qu
other critical thinkers, Mbembe renders the intersection where capitalism, exploitation, and race meet. Not
i a
NISM
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Rich-

N n ory
much escapes Mbembe’s grasp, as he traces the creation of the concept of Blackness and the transatlantic

I
ard Philcox (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1963).
o l o e
A c h
slave trade to our current neoliberal moment, one characterized by the climatological crisis, the postimperial
M de ial t
FE son
military complex, contemporary technologies of mass communication, and the commodification of death.
n
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A

S
Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of
c o l o r e a
N -
post ck
Decolonization,’ South Atlantic Quarterly (2012)
a
Subaltern Theory: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui affirms that that “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no
A ISM f b l
111 (1): 95–109.

R E ue o
theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice.” Subaltern theory recognizes that decolonial prac-

T B L
tices resistance and subjugated forms of knowledge have been central to subaltern women (so-called Third
A
Judith Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the sub-
r i t i q
I- c ory
World and Global South) and indigenous people around the world. These forms of scholarship and activism version of identity, (New Yorkk: Routledge, 1990).

t h e
T ISM
are central to establish forms to engage with anti-racist and decolonial models of architectural pedagogy.

N C
Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, (New

subal
ter n
A
York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

A I R
Trans Critique: In the introduction of the book Black on Both Sides: A Radical History of Trans Identity, C.
-
Riley Norton references Claire Colebrook resistance to normalize “trans” as a “category of gender, sex or
Raquel Salas Rivera, lo terciario / the tertiary,
s c r i t que
NT tran
(Blacksburg: Noemi Press, 2019)
species”, claiming that transitivity “is the condition for what becomes known as the human.” For Norton,
t f e m i n ism
nis
“Blackness” is an “apposition to Colebrook’s formulation of ‘trans” in the way that Blackness articulates the Emi Koyama, ‘The Transfeminist Fanifesto’,

abolitio
paradox of nonbeing, in the way that “Black” and “trans” have been “constituted as fungible, thingified, and Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the
A

Twenty-First Century, Rory Dieker, Alison Piepmei-

interchangeable, particularly within the logics of transatlantic exchange.” To aim to understand the role of er, (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 2003).
architecture as tool in the fabrication of identities and regulation and control of bodies, trans critiques must
engage with diverse Black Transness, Queer experiences, and what Raquel Salas Rivera calls the Tertiary Claire Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be a
between “colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.” Human?” Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no.
2 (2015).
Indigenous Genders and Sexualities / Queer theories: A comprehensive approach to gender and sexuality C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Radical
must take into account how architecture enacts gendered and sexualized violence in order to regulate land, History of Trans Identity, (Minneapolis: University
communities, and bodies. In relation to the material and ideological repercussions of settler-colonialism, an of Minnesota Press, 2017).

MEDIA
anti-racist approach to architecture should engage with indigenous Two-spirit, genders and sexualities, as
well as the history of modern sexuality, the role of bio politics in settler colonialism, and theories of queer-
ness and feminism that have been disengaged from what Judith Butler calls their “First World presumption”
in order to “rethink the meaning of the tie, the bond, the alliance, the relation as they are imagined and lived
in the horizon of a counter-imperialist egalitarianism.” In this context the work of theorists like Paul B Precia- 40
narrative architecture
lo
 A IT A LISM n
d a g og
r ies
A P p e the o
ry
I-C e e r
l th e o
T qu
do, Butler, and Snorton is intersected with indigenous, Black, and other anti-racist theories and frameworks. Claudia Irizarry Aponte, “A Conversation with

i a
AN ISM n ory
Queer Boricua Writer Raquel Salas Rivera, Phil-

IN adelphia’s Newest Poet Laureate,” NPR Latino

c o l o t h e
M
Abolitionist Feminism: Angela Y. Davis writes that “Abolitionist strategies are especially critical because

E de ial
USA, April 16, 2018. < https://www.latinousa.

F n son
they teach us that our visions of the future can radically depart from what exists in the present.” Abolitionist

S
feminism, that is, trans, queer, intersectional, anti-capitalist, solidary feminism aims to abolish the endemic
org/2018/04/16/raquelsalasrivera/>

c o l o r e a
N -
A ISM post l a ck
and materialized forms of state and interpersonal racial, gender, and sexual violence. Abolitionist feminism
b
Caroline Cottet, Manuela Lavinas Picq, Sexuality

R E
calls for the abolition of prisons and policing, recognizes the relationship of these institutions to settler-colo-
eo f
L
and Translation in World Politics, (Bristol: E-In-

T B
nial systems of oppression, and speculates on the possibility of radically different futures. ternational Relations, 2019).
i t i q u
I-A Angela Y. Davis, ‘Why Arguments Against Aboli- cr t h e o ry
MEDIA

N T C ISM tion Inevitably Fail’, Abolition for the People: The

u b a l tern
RA
Narrative Architecture: Employing irony and humor as philosophical instruments, Narrative Architecture
s
Movement for a Future Without Policing & Pris-

A I-
uses tools of presentation and representation within and beyond the confines of architecture (narrative texts ons, Level. Medium, October 6, 2020. < https://

c r i t q ue
NT trans
and a vast repertoire of images, collages, photomontages, drawings, storyboards, comic strips, animations) in level.medium.com/why-arguments-against-abo-

ism
lition-inevitably-fail-991342b8d042>
order to create allegorical stories that aim to expose the impasse and misfires of architecture in theory and
t f e m i n
nis
practice. This form of architecture aims to reveal critique of ideology, after recognizing that ideology – in its

abolitio
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, Narrative
A
multiple incarnations – has infiltrated all spheres of architectural production, including the sphere of criti-
Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, (Rotterdam:
cism itself. NAI010 Publishers, 2020).

Loudreaders: Learning from Puerto Rican feminist, activist, and suffragist Luisa Capetillo, the model of
Araceli Tinajero, El Lector: A History of the Cigar
Loudreaders continues the centenary practice of the lectores in tobacco factories where workers organized Factory Reader, trans. Judith E. Grasberg, (Austin:
in anarchist syndicates, creating a simple and fascinating alternative practice of education across the Carib- University of Texas Press, 2010).
bean. Denied any form of formal education Tobacco workers engaged in the alienating labor of rolling cigars
would hire one of their own to read aloud for them during the entire work-day. While the readings consisted Taru Spiegel, ‘Luisa Capetillo: Puerto Ri-
can Changemaker’, Library of Congress, 18
mostly of newspapers, magazines, and literature, the Loudreaders focused on Darwin, Bakunin, Kropotkin,

MEDIA
November 2019. (retrieved 20 February 2020)
Marx, and Engels fomenting an anti-capitalist, and decolonial imagination. New Loudreading platforms could <https://blogs.loc.gov/international-col-
offer accessible decolonial and anti-racist imaginaries using contemporary platforms of mass communication. lections/2019/11/luisa-capetillo-puerto-ri-
can-changemaker/>
Trade School: Against the commodification of critical thinking and potentially emancipatory tools for Luisa Capetillo, Absolute Equality: An Early
worldmaking, the model of the trade school can act as a vocational platform for the exchange of skills,
crafts, methods and processes. In the same way that technical and technological knowledge must be diffused
Feminist Perspective, Influencias de la sideas
modernas, Lara Walker, trans. (Houston: Arte
narrative architecture
through free and accessible channels, tools of critical discourse must be freed from the paywalls of hege- Publico Press, 2009).
monic institutions. New models of trade schools should be able to engage with digital craftspersonship in the
same way that they dissect critiques of trans and Black reason.
Luis Othoniel Rosa, The Tobacco Intergalactic loudreaders
School (Postnovis Branch in the Americas)’ Feb.

How-to-workshops: In combination with Loudreaders, trade schools, and other public education forums,
1st, 2019 – Feb. 1st, 2031
www.loudreaders.com
trade school
how-to-workshops can challenge the model of pay-per-skill that the elite and neoliberal universities have
commodified. The experience of apprenticeships and internships that historically privileged students can how-to w
afford to have, should be challenged by accessible how-to-workshops that provide insights into the evolving orkshops
commu
array of architectural skills needed to respond to a constantly evolving world. These workshops should Jennifer Ceema Samimi, Funding America’s Non-

nity des
respond to contextual, material, and historical conditions, and should challenge institutional and professional profits: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex’s Hold
on Social Justice, Columbia Social Work Review,
forms of knowledge deposit and knowledge exchange. 8(1), 17-25 (2019). <https://doi.org/10.7916/
altern ign-bui
Community design-build: While design-build platforms have the potential to establish networks of solidar-
cswr.v8i1.1967>
ative p ld
ity that could aid communities without access to professional architectural services, special emphasis has to
alter ublish
be put in the community and anti-imperialist aspect of this approach. Design-build has the potential of being
nativ ing
an emancipating architectural approach as long as it is not instrumentalized by institutions and professors
hete e cur
seeking to gain access to communities threaten by the same institutions. The charity/colonial approach of
rodo atori
wealthy institutions doing international studio trips to impoverished parts of the world to implement proj-
x rep al
ects and ideas, or for ‘cultural tourism’ without genuine local engagement must be avoided. In order to avoid
criti rese
further exploitation of economically disadvantaged people, design-build projects must always account for the
cal s ntati
unpaid labor executed by students and members of the local communities.
kyn t o r y on
ical boar
Alternative Publishing: In the spirit of mutual-aid and anti-racist practice, new models of publishing should
inte coll ds
take advantage of unexplored digital and physical platforms. Rather than responding to the commercial de-
mands, the academic criteria, and the endemic traditions of architecture publishing, new forms of alternative rac age
publishing must propose alternative format of editorial, design, and diffusion practice of published content. inte tive
tec
com ractiv
Alternative architectural publishing should engage with queer, trans, Black, indigenous, and other subaltern
models of publishing already materializing across the world. hno
e log
acc muni instal
42
y
es t y l at
 narrative architecture
Alternative Curatorial: While the practice of curating is clearly associated with imperialism, colonialism,
loudreaders
trade school
and racism, new formats of critical and anti-racist curatorial practice must depart from the problematic in-
frastructures of so-called cultural institutions and engage with discourses challenging the very same institu-
tions that generate content. Critical and emancipating curatorial practices should find platforms outside the
institutions responsible to construct hegemonic architectural narratives. how-to w
Heterodox Representation: While the practice of drawing and imaging in architecture remains anchored orkshops
on orthodox traditions, hetedorox strategies of presentation and representation that borrow from what is commu
perceived as other disciplines is fundamental to the possibility of generating alternative models of architec- nity des
tural pedagogy. Heterodox forms of representation should engage with discourses and media outside of the
altern ign-bui
institutionally perceived boundaries of architecture.
ative p ld
Critical Storyboards: Critical storyboards that feature diverse voices, perspectives, experiences, struggles, alter ublish
desires, and imaginaries are central to the possibility of critical forms of inclusive and anti-racist architec- nativ ing
tural presentation and representation. In the same way that cinema, documentary journalism, and post-in-
hete e curat
ternet engagements with critical media could articulate voices previously left out of mainstream positions
and discourses, through the engagement of media architecture can benefit from and generate critical story- rodo orial
boards. Against the standardization of the heteropatriarchal, ableist, and Eurocentric narrative voice, new
criti x rep
possibilities of Black, trans, queer, Two-spirit, subaltern, subversive, alternative, invisible, anti-hegemonic,
cal s rese
disabled, anti-capitalist, indigenous voices, positions, sensibilities, and experiences can be rendered impera-
kyn t o ntati
tive, present, active, and solidary.
ical r yboa on
Kynical Collage: Understanding that architectural images are political as much for what they show than for inte coll rds
r a ge
inte active
what they leave out of the frame, kynical collages openly explore and critique images as ideological media.
The Kynic (spelled with a “k” in order to reference the origins of the word in Greek) alludes to the Cynic
tec
com ractiv
philosopher Diogenes, who wandered the streets of Athens in search of an “honest man.” Against naïve and
apolitical collages, kynical collages search for an “honest” architecture that engages with the ideological con-
hno
tent of references, spaces, frame-works, and positions in the construction of architectural images.
e log
Interactive Technology: Rather than accept the passive relationship with technology (from AI to robots), an acc muni instal y
t l
fre esibl y eng atio
anti-racist and anti-ableist approach to architectural pedagogy would demand an approach that considers the

ns
power of interactive technology as strategies for the inclusion of previously marginalized communities and
disable people.
eu eo age
Interactive Installations: Emancipating models of architectural pedagogy must find ways to take the edu- niv nli me
cation of architecture outside of the university studio into spaces where children, elderly communities, and
ers n ep nt p
people with diverse forms of physical and intellectual disabilities can participate in the processes of imagin-
ity lat lat
ing new worlds. Through interactive installations architectural pedagogy can engage with models of knowl-
for for
edge exchange that inform the ways architecture is conceived, maintained, and manipulated.
Community Engagement Platforms: Anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-ableist architectural approaches
ms ms
must develop platforms for the real engagement with communities that have been left out, but are affected
by architectural processes. These platforms of community engagement should not be limited to addressing
communities to convince them about potential projects, but rather can be opportunities to extend the peda-
gogical environment outside of the architecture school into the world that is affected by architecture. These
platforms are as much about establishing connections with communities that otherwise wouldn’t have access
to academic institutions, as they are about providing space for the free exchange of knowledge and for the
egalitarian redistribution of cultural wealth, power, and capital. The settler-colonial idea of the architect
(savior) that goes to a community should be replaced with the architect that is formed by and comes from the
community.
Accessible Online Platforms: Anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist models of education must constant-
e

ly explore platforms that are accessible across geographic, and class boundaries, and through diverse bodily
anc

and intellectual sensibilities. Online platforms provide with a unique opportunity to make critical forms of
architectural education to many places, sensibilities, and experiences excluded from the generation and
consolidation of positions and discourses. Truly accessible online platforms would depart from the infra-
ation rveill

structure laid out in place by hegemonic and ableist institutions and instead formulate universes that operate
ing ment

logy

beyond the confines of the status quo. New platforms must be created, not for the further commodification
of knowledge, but for technological explorations that, in search of collectivity and solidarity, diversify the col-
my

lective intelligence of critical architecture with new languages, vocabularies, concepts, and forms of expres-
/ su

sion. Critical, radically inclusive, and solidary utopias must develop, master, rekindle, and share accessible
ace

ic ideo
tion

anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist online platforms. 44

hoto
ispl

ch
g
PART 3

After School
Un-Making Architecture ARCHITECTURE
Architecture is too obsessed with making. Trained as yes men and women, the vocation of the architect
An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto mostly exists and subsists as an appendix of hegemonic power. This power, always overwhelming and undis-
putable, hates to come voluntarily to the table of negotiation. Often, architects speak in platonic terms when
defending architecture and its problematic relationship to economies of exploitation and white supremacy.
In their naïve idealism, architects often fantasize about the possibility of exorcising the evil out of buildings,
and working within the parameters of the lesser evil. They dream about manufacturing consent, simulating
empathy. They talk about reforming prisons, creating sustainable concentration camps, laying out pristine
border walls, and outlining “community oriented” buildings for policing. In their obstinate naiveté they refuse
to acknowledge the racist, colonial, and oppressive legacies of these archetypes. The prisons that profit from
black and brown men and women, the detention centers that serve to separate and destroy families, the
infrastructures of the postimperial military apparatus that continuously terrorizes communities around the
world cannot be fixed by better, more efficient, and sustainable architectures. After all, what is the colonial
footprint of your architecture? Racism is a device whose aim is to create walls between people. These walls
should not be made. We need to learn to un-make these walls.

CAPITALISM
Capitalism is often sold as a utopian dream of free markets and unobstructed, post-ideological competition.
However, as corporations, powerful lobbyists, and dominant classes build their power on the legacy of ex-
ploitation of black, brown and indigenous bodies, all that’s left is a trail of environmental destruction, social
violence and neglect. The relationship between Capitalism and Architecture as private property, gives way to
the rise of policing dating back to the plantations across the Americas and the Caribbean. On the footsteps
of this legacy, the need to subdivide, the “zoning practices” linked to networks of repression whose tools and
methods include the “imposition of ideological grids on populations”, is responsible for the surveillance and
policing state of many black and brown neighborhoods and communities. These subdivisions of the soil fo-
ment and maintain the status quo via the accumulation of wealth having enormous repercussions in the op-
portunities (education, health, safety) of disenfranchised communities. Archaic property tax laws that bond
education to the possession of land and architectural commodities are just an example of these racist zoning
laws. The policing and zoning practices that go together with the invention of private property are settler-co-
lonial strategies that must be abolished. We must dismantle the concept of capitalism as a free market built
on the accumulation of wealth, dehumanization, policing, zoning, and mass incarceration. New anti-capitalist
and anti-racist zoning strategies must be created, not to subdivide groups by class or ethnic affiliation, but
BUILDINGS in order to demolish the mechanisms of exploitation, accumulation of wealth, and allow truly equitable, fair,
Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foundations of the institutions that fund, and dignifying spaces to flourish.
envision, and desire them. Buildings are physical manifestations of the ideologies they serve. Although a na-
ively detached or romantic position may be able to render buildings as semi-autonomous artifacts capable of KINSHIP
sheltering or enveloping space, this depoliticized attitude overlooks their historical and material relationship Kinship may be a poetic aim to find alliances, but the empty hope rendered by milquetoast liberalism won’t
to regimes of violence and terror. Buildings can protect but they can also confine, instill fear, crush, oppress. be enough to eliminate anti-black racism. The role of complicity played by institutions in the construction
Buildings can school, and foment hospitality but can imprison and torture. Buildings can be tools for ethnic and perpetuation of the status quo is a real problem with material ramifications. It is not enough for academ-
segregation, cultural destruction and historical erasure. Buildings can reinforce the status quo and aide in ic and professional organizations to conveniently pen announcements that support black and decolonizing
the implementation of settler-colonial desires of expansionism. An anti-racist democratization of access is struggles if they do nothing to stop the design and construction of machines of oppression. Just like de-
only possible through the decolonization of buildings and public spaces. Architects should be aware of the colonization is not a metaphor, nor is anti-racism. The abstract call for making kin with one another is not a
programs of the buildings they design and be held accountable for doing so. substitute for real actions in their psychological and spatial manifestations. It is not enough to fill the ranks of
a managerial class with exceptional representational cases of marginalized groups if the institutions will keep
LINKS sponsoring the architectures of anti-blackness and racial oppression.
Like the Vertiginous Assembly that is Blackness and Race (and therefore the construction of a concept of
whiteness) the history of the architecture we are forced to learn and practice is brought to us at the same
moment and via the same ideological superstructure as the “despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade” and
continues today with the “globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliber-
alism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and digital
technologies.” The forced import of an idea of modernization and progress that could have been executed
only through the enslaving of black and indigenous bodies is as intrinsic to the practice of architecture as
the exploitation of a subaltern humanity linked to contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its practice of
capture, predation, extraction and asymmetrical warfare. Just as architecture becomes ever more imbricated
with neoliberalism, so does a system of risk. What was initially experienced by Blacks during the transatlan-
tic slave trade has now become the “norm for, or at least the lot of, all subaltern humanity.” We cannot deal
with a contemporary state of risk, exploitation, policing, militarization, and warfare without challenging first
the physical manifestations of the status quo. 48
LAW
Legal systems and the institutions that enforce them, have historically obstructed true fairness, justice, and MONUMENTS
equality. The bloody and racist history of the judicial mechanisms and codes that brought the world that Military, confederate, philanthro-capitalist, and colonizer monuments are part of an apparatus that rewrites,
existed in the West Indies to the United States with the plantation as its core structure, plants its rotten roots white-washes, legitimizes, standardizes, and erases a history of genocide, destruction, and racism while
in a legacy of racist architecture and planning. In the same way that Jim Crow laws in the United States and maintaining the status quo. Monuments refer us back in time, as they concretize in marble, granite, bronze,
Apartheid in South Africa were legally sanctioned systems of anti-black oppression today we are still battling glass, steel, objects that carry a dead weight of a murderous history. Together with these avatars shaped
with a legacy of legal and institutional racism. As settler-colonial revolutions transform, destroy, and alter
environments, regimes of racism and oppression are extremely efficient as they write laws, orders, and direc- after leaders of regimes of death, racism, and colonial exploitation, other architectures recreate the effect of
tives that allow for the control and oppression of black, brown, and indigenous populations. We must chal- the monument, albeit at a different scale: train stations, palaces of colonial administrators, bridges, camps,
lenge the perverse use of public space as a militarized territory for surveillance and violence against black, fortresses, stadiums, and also buildings for schooling, endowments, and museums. An anti-racist architecture
brown, indigenous, queer, and trans people. We must demolish both, the material and immaterial legacies must dismantle the construction of these monuments and question their role in the construction of a “style
of colonization, the plantation, Jim Crow, and Apartheid. It is not enough to abide by the law when the law of power and domination. The remains of the potentate are the signs of the physical and symbolic struggle
is part of a racist apparatus. We must challenge the architectures of racist occupation, of gentrification, of directed against the colonized.”
environmental destruction.
AGNOSIA
INSTITUTIONS For the English and Spanish versions of the Architecture suffers from an agnosia similar to what Jose Saramago described in his essay about Blindness.
Institutional racism is the wizard behind the curtain of Oz. Institutional racism operates in the governing manifesto as well as the animated manifesto In Saramago’s text a pandemic makes all the characters lose their sight, awash in a blinding whiteness. Thick
boards, hiring committees, and admissions evaluations. Institutional racism is responsible for fabricating and readings go to:
like milk, this white blindness expands creating havoc and a system of exploitation and cruelty. Architecture
maintaining hegemonic discourses while punishing and obstructing the construction and free flow of alter- <https://www.waithinktank.com/Anti-Rac-
native, ancestral, and anti-racist forms of knowledge. It is not enough for Universities, schools, studios, and ist-Manifesto>
suffers from a similar white agnosia. Unable to see its complicity with a legacy of oppression, Architecture
professional organizations to post solidary messages on their Instagram platforms when they create invisible relies on guiding itself through the sensations of its white, masculine, geriatric hands. We must find ways to
walls around their ivory towers. It is not enough to hashtag BLM when they are designing buildings for polic- recover sight, to perceive the diversity in front of us.
See also:
ing, detaining, and incarcerating, when they maintain the status quo through biased processes of evaluation Reading Design:
and biased demands. It is not enough for institutions to pen beautiful #heartfelt letters in solidarity with <https://www.readingdesign.org/antirac- THEORY
activists struggling against police and paramilitary forces while they continue building their endowments ist-manifesto> The potential fusion of capitalism and racism carries with it a number of architectural and urban implica-
with the money of their settler-colonial legacies. If they are serious about demolishing their legacies of insti- tions. Systematic risk, impoverishment, and debt, the emergence of new imperial practices that borrow from
tutional racism, Academic institutions must rethink their recruiting strategies to attract, stimulate, and create The Architect’s Newspaper:
<https://www.archpaper.com/2020/06/
both, the enslaving logic of capture and predation, and from the colonial logic of occupation and extraction.
safe environments for both, educators and students. Simultaneously, Architecture schools must embrace the Under the rubric of capitalism and racism, architecture remains on the one hand a discipline that filters and
un-making-architecture-an-anti-racist-architec-
deconstruction of their curriculums to question not only the future of architecture, but to expose the racist ture-manifesto/> distills the possibility of other worlds into a canonical European, white ideological construction. On the other
past they helped construct. hand, it continuously reproduces itself by means of more settler-colonial strategies that tirelessly destroy the
Arquine:
environment for the creation of new settlements while endlessly gentrifying the already existing ones. New
VALUE < https://www.arquine.com/manifiesto-de-la-ar-
Value in contemporary societies is often confused with the illusion of a wealth that can be measured either quitectura-antirracista/> theories and practices must be developed and implemented in order to question, subvert, and oppose archi-
through the accumulation of commodities or through the speculative ether of financial capital. In these tecture as a tool for control, domination, and oppression. New forms of knowledge must abolish Architecture
Revista: as an extension of capitalism and racism.
scenarios, commodities, including architecture or architectural elements, could acquire a mystical status. The < https://www.claridadpuertorico.com/deshaci-
question that remains is, what is the value of architecture as a commodity in comparison to the value of a endo-la-arquitectura-manifiesto-de-la-arquitectu-
black life? Can a broken window, a graffitied wall, or a burned police precinct be the equivalent or more valu- ra-antirracista/> TRICKLE-DOWN
able than black life? In this white-supremacist system of values are black, brown, and indigenous lives mere Trickle-down justice doesn’t work, just like tickle-down economics proved to be a hoax, magic that didn’t
commodities that can be compared to disposable and replaceable objects and artifacts? After all, what is the work. Trickle-down architecture suffers from the same problem. If utopias can only be conceived by those
value of your architecture? And, what is the value of black life? privilege enough to make it to the schools of a white, elitist discipline, these ideal conditions will only reflect
those who envision them. Instead of a trickle-down culture of architecture, the one that serves and maintains
ENVIRONMENT the status quo, we must find ways to build networks of solidarity. Black, indigenous, brown utopias must
European colonization and the extension of its spatial horizon was fueled by genocide and environmental The manifesto includes parts from: occupy the space previously reserved by white imaginaries. We need new Utopias. Utopias from below. We
destruction. It is not a coincidence that the environmental effects of this expansion resurface in the form
of an ecological threat that is imminent for impoverished communities and has clear racist overtones. The need trickle-up utopias by means of anti-racist architectures.
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans.
postimperial military complex that maintains the chain of material, environmental, and human exploitation Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University
is directly linked to the destruction of ecosystems. “Militarism is the largest single cause of environmental Press, 2017).
ENCOUNTER
destruction in the world. The US Military is the largest single pollutant in the planet and the largest single Encountering these dreary scenarios, it is not enough to be apolitical or to ‘not be a racist’. Due to the rise
consumer of oil in the world. The Pentagon is BP’s largest client.” There’s no racial justice without the pro- Mbembé, “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public of populism and increasing levels of risk, the fabrication of racial subjects has been reinvigorated nearly
tection of the environment. It is not enough to use LEED certified materials or photovoltaic panels in build- Culture, vol. 16 no. 3, 2004, p. 373-405. Project everywhere. We need to acknowledge our role in this reinvigoration and oppose vehemently its destructive
ings if they contribute to the postimperial military complex. We cannot argue for environmental justice while MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/173738. intentions. We must employ our ways of reimagining the world to question the one we have created. It is
condoning and participating in processes of militarization, deforestation, and the desecration, occupation, imperative that we use our critical faculties to deconstruct our ways of imagining the world. Other worlds are
and destruction of indigenous territories. There’s no sustainable architecture to the service of the military. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. possible, urgent, and necessary.
There’s no ecological justice if architecture contributes to environmental racism. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press Inc.,
1963).
RADICAL
STATISTICS
Success cannot be measured in empty data charts and dubious demographic indicators. Stop-and-frisk. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Radical means to go into the roots. For architecture to be radical it has to dig deep into its past, present, and
Heavy Policing. Random checks. The war on drugs. The war on crime. The war on terror. These miscalculat- Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, potential future role into perpetuating the origins of social fragmentation, oppression, colonization, and rac-
ed policy moves have been justified by the misinterpretation of contextless numbers. Numbers that quantify Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. ism. We must undo the damage created by the complicity of architecture with these systems of oppression.
the specificities of effects without looking at the causes. Numbers that without context are manipulated to We must un-make detention centers. We must un-make prisons. We must un-make the military. We need to
The relationship between militarism and envi- un-narrate the history of architecture, and construct new narratives that expose the racist, settler-colonial
justify the mass incarceration and mass homicide of black and brown people. The same can be said about ronmental destruction was borrowed from Anne
the cartesian ideal of progress and its settler-colonial legacy and the unquenchable thirst for growth. We McClintock reading for TBA21.
roots of its capitalist development, of its modernism and desperate afterbirths. In order to make new forms
must learn to create new parameters for architecture to operate without responding to empty statistics and of radical architecture, we must learn to un-make Architecture.
without serving to its racist and ideological technologies and agendas. 50
The references in this manual include contributions by many of our friends,
comrades, collaborators, colleagues, members of the Post-Novis Collective,
and Loudreaders. Special thanks to Ilze Wolff, Léopold Lambert, Luis Otho-
niel Rosa, Hilary Wiese, Johnny Leya, Léone Drapeaud, Insaf Ben Othmane,
Alice Grandoit, Nu Goteh, Deem Journal, Ingrid Robyn, Desirée Valadares,
Christopher Rey Perez, Wilhelm Scherübl, Stefan Gruber, Rose Mary Florian,
Nestor Lebron, Chen Hao, Li Shan, Michelle Garnaut, Desirée Valadares, Ana
María León, Alejandro Hernández Gálvez, Deidre Regan, Joseph Wang, Aaron
Betsky, Francisco Javier Rodriguez, Raquel Salas Rivera, Ophelia Chan, Holly
Craig, Ana Olmedo, Elena Águila, Sadé Hooks and our students at Virginia
Tech, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and The School of Architecture at Taliesin.

What About WAI?

While working on this manual we have had the opportunity to reflect on our
own condition as educators working within and outside academic institu-
tions and as practitioners engaging with the possibility of critical, subversive,
and emancipatory Post-Colonial imaginaries. Through the constant ethos of “The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively.
asking ‘What about it’, WAI Architecture Think Tank has been a workshop This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of
for architecture intelligentsia that allows us to speculate on the possibility of:
dignified and purposeful rebelliousness.
Workshops for Anti-Racist Imaginaries Other worlds are possible.”
Workshops for Anti-Ableist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Capitalist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Alienating Imaginaries - Introduction to the Syllabus ‘The Tobacco Intergalactic School (Postnovis
Workshops for Anti-Imperialist Imaginaries Branch in the Americas)’ Feb. 1st, 2019 – Feb. 1st, 2031
Workshops for Anti-Heteropatriarcal Imaginaries

First Published 2020

Design and Content:

WAI
Architecture
Think Tank

Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski

Editor:
Ronald Frankowski

ISBN
978-2-9544145-0-8

www.waithinktank.com
www.loudreaders.com
 WAI
ARCHITECTURE
THINK TANK
waithinktank.com/Anti-Racist-Education-Manual