PJ Dick Innovation Fund Teaching Grant: Unreasonable Architecture

Unreasonable Architecture
Tuliza Sindi, Ann Kalla Visiting Professor in Architecture, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

In collaboration with: Dr. Lwazi Lushaba, Politics Department Postgraduate Committee, political studies, University of Cape Town (co-instructor); Dr. Brenna Bhandar, Director of Research, law professor, SOAS University of London (co-instructor); Dr. Lyla June, human ecology and indigenous pedagogy, Dream Warriors (co-instructor); Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui, Filmmaker, geopolitics and chronopolitics (co-instructor). Where coordination of schedules will be challenging, practitioners and thinkers of equal stature will substitute the proposed.

Beginning Fall 2024 (recurring annually) | 10 students (onsite) with global audience through online access

U.S. architect and critic Justin Shubow’s 2015 article, “Architecture Continues to Implode: More Insiders Admit the Profession is Failing,” makes a strong case for why the architecture profession could be heading toward an impending doom. Shubow highlights the hubris of architects, and their detachment from and disdain for society as some of the profession’s threats and suggests that the most concerning threat to the profession is not what can replace us, but rather, the profession’s inability to entertain predictions of its demise as a plausible outcome.

Modern architectural practice is continually losing agency in the trajectory, definition and application of spatial meaning and practice because its ideological framework has been less about the production of space and more about the production of property (or currency) and unjust power frameworks alongside the economics, law, geopolitics, philosophy and sociology disciplines (in part, due to its messy ongoing enmeshment with colonialism, capitalism and industrialism).

This hybrid model course aims to temporarily retire the knowledge system of modern spatial practice to introduce a more expanded knowledge framework that includes indigenous systems and technologies through transdisciplinary methods. An array of practitioners across varying disciplines will derive methodologies that can equip future spatial practitioners on how to suspend speculating spatially from captive grounds (or captive meanings, practices and knowledges), to derive futures that can offset current crises-laden spatial inevitabilities that breed and exacerbate social and spatial injustice for all living beings and ecosystems.

The course will be made available online. Annual workshops, seminars, publications and projects will be galvanized around its contents, and those outputs will be situated in a larger body of ongoing research around the course’s themes and ambitions of deriving urgent, new, restorative and just methods and modes of spatial practice. The course will act as a supplementary course that any studio can plug into and use as a resource pool for spatial theorization and practice derivation.

Image Credit: Lukasa memory board. Source: Wikipedia