Unreasonsable Architecture
Through transdisciplinary methods and a framework of thinking and practice that this course terms “Unreasonable Architecture,” the course aims to introduce a more expanded knowledge framework of meaning that includes indigenous systems and spatial technologies that sit outside the constraints of modern reason and economic legibility.
19th-20th century Memory Board (Lukasa). Lukasa boards are hand-held wooden conceptual and cosmological map of fundamental aspects of the Luba culture in Congo. They are at once illustrations of their political system, their historical chronicles, and territorial diagrams of local chiefdoms. Each board's design across regions and generations is unique, and represents the divine revelations of a spirit medium expressed in sculptural form.
Modern architectural practice is continually losing agency in the trajectory, definition and application of spatial meaning and practice because its ideological framework is less about the production of space and more about the production of property and unjust power frameworks alongside the disciplines of economics, law, geopolitics, philosophy and sociology. Its messy ongoing enmeshment with colonialism, capitalism and industrialism (which relies on the cultural practices of “modern reason” as a meaning totality, commodity fetishism, individuation and humans as homo economicus) ensures the inevitability of crisis-laden spatial futures that exacerbate spatial injustice for all living beings and ecosystems.
Through transdisciplinary methods and a framework of thinking and practice that this course terms “Unreasonable Architecture,” the course aims to introduce a more expanded knowledge framework of meaning that includes indigenous systems and spatial technologies that sit outside the constraints of modern reason and economic legibility.