A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education 9782954414508

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A MANUAL OF ANTI-RACIST ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION

LOUDREADERS

A MANUAL OF ANTI-RACIST ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION

Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski WAI Architecture Think Tank

Index Foreword

A Re/De/Compositonal Tool Alice Grandoit-Šutka 4 Introduction

An Introduction to this Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education 6

History Doesn’t Exist 10

Before School

Anti-racism is not taught. Anti-racism is practiced.

On Who Gets to be an Architect and Anti-Liberation Paywalls 14

During School

An Anti-Racist Architecture Education Spiral 24

After School

Un-Making Architecture An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto 52

Appendix

Against the Precarization of Anti-Racist Education Labor 60

A Re/De/Compositional Tool Alice Grandoit-Šutka

Liberation cannons at Fort Jacques Port-auPrince, Haiti

This Anti-Racist Manual for Architecture Education is a “re/de/compositonal tool,” or, in the words of scholar and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva, “a simultaneous disunifying, disfiguring and redesigning that which necessity sustains.” The injustices of our time are byproducts of design, and must be addressed as deliberate and instrumental in order to be corrected with the consideration with which they were made. This manual is a liberatory text of both remembrance and of possibility. It is an active, open-ended, and unfinished cartography, and a representation of a deeply engaged labour that is also spiritual, intellectual, and emotional.

4

Foreword

5

An Introduction to this Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing, trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too easy adoption of decolonizing discourse (making decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances.

The process of making transparent (turning identities into a monolith to be understood), of objectifying (turning them into objects to be studied or fetishized as part of a spectacle or a set of requirements), but also 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 rescue settler futurity.” That’s why it is not enough to add portions about class struggle, and include some Black, Indigenous, or Latine references to curriculums without meaningful change. Truly diverse voices and experiences (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, and race shouldn’t exist in an anti-racist academic setting. White designers profiting from Black and Indigenous 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.

–Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” When Black lives matter everybody lives better. –Ruth Wilson Gilmore

This document is a work of anti-capitalist realism that acknowledges the unsustainable character of a knowledge and material economy made possible by the inhumane occupation of Indigenous land and the brutal materialization of anti-Black racism and its aftermath.

Because architecture education is not only confined to the space of the academia even if architecture 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 education.

Why focus specifically on architecture education, since anti-Black racism and settle-colonialism could (and 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 has been instrumental in the installation and consolidation of settler-colonialism and the full spectrum of extractive, abusive, racist, capitalist, post-imperial infrastructures of oppression. In the way that buildings are never just buildings, architecture is not a bubble.

Structure Simultaneously a working tool, a historically situated manifesto, a pedagogical guideline, and a speculative treatise on the future of pedagogy, this Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education exclaims that because other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary, other models of architectural education are not only possible 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 and constructing the ways in which we live together and the many ways in which we are compartmentalized, regulated, and segregated. To engage with architecture is to face the effects of zoning practices, the fabrication of private property in occupied territories, and the conceptualization, design, and construction of concentration camps, division walls, buildings, and infrastructures for policing, prisons, and border checkpoints, as well as racialized suburban settlements, school buildings, and hospitals. Because architecture affects everybody, a radical and abolitionist pedagogy of architecture must embrace all the peoples, not just those officially trained as architects.

Divided in three parts and an appendix about anti-racist educational labor, this manual engages with the concept of schooling in relationship to architecture without reducing what architecture is, has been, or could be, and instead, dissects the many fronts architecture operates, influences, affects, regulates, contains, delimits, excludes, protects, consolidates, and oppresses. The first part of the manual, Before School, discusses some of the problems regarding the legitimation of particularly problematic and inaccessible forms of architectural education. A series of Anti-Liberation Paywall Diagrams contrast class and racial segregation with tuition fees, estimated total costs, and endowments 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 intellectual and cultural capital, but as settler-colonial tools of land occupation, gentrification, and racial oppression.

Because anti-racism is not taught but practiced, an anti-racist pedagogy is not only about the political and ideological content embedded in the syllabus of the design studio, the critical content of the history of 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 anti-hegemonic institutional approaches. Anti-racist pedagogies must engage simultaneously with the continuous omission, invisibility, and violent erasure of Black and Indigenous people, the racialization of non-white people, and the relationship between class, racialized impoverishment, and precarity, while avoiding and challenging the tokenization, instrumental- ization, and objectification of these same people. Because universities and architecture schools have been particularly instrumental in constructing and maintaining the legacy of white supremacist settler-colonial states, it is not enough to make symbolic gestures or “settler moves to innocence” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe in ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor.”

6

Introduction

Education models pursuing anti-racist practices must respect and protect the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant articulates in Poetics of Relation. The right to opacity stands against the “reductive transparency” that commodifies, instrumentalizes and profits from decodifying Blackness or Indigeneity or any other form of racialization. This “settler move to innocence,” as Tuck and Yang describe, is how mainstream educational 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 nations as ‘populations’ to the margins of public discourse.”

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

During School presents an annotated version of the Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education. The Anti-Racist Spiral is a diagram that questions structural forms of knowledge while proposing emancipating epistemologies, platforms, methods, strategies, and voices. Through the creation of an open spiral, forms of education, histories, theories, and media intersect through the centers of anti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and ecological justice in order to imagine other forms of architectural pedagogy. In the third part of the manual, After School introduces Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto. The Anti-Racist Manifesto delves into the how architecture has been and continues to be central to the construction of race and the perpetuation of anti-Black racism.

Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education

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Canada stops sponsoring Silvia Indian Residential Schools THOA SUBALTERN Rivera (1969) (1983) BRAZIL ABOLISHES Puerto Rico tries to ban Xucuru Cusicanqui US supports Bolivia includes SLAVERY Loudreading in Tobacco Factories Case Ch’ixinakax coup in Bolivia Wiphala Flag Zapatistas Uprising (1888) (1897) (2018) utxiwa (1971) in constitution (1994) (2020) Panama secession from Colombia INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE (2009) Colectiva Feminista Student massacre Cuba reinstates backed by US-France CUBA WAR OF Mexico City WEB Du Bois Loudreading in tobacco en construccion INDEPENDENCE Panama Canal Company Black (1968) factories CUBA ABOLISHES Standing Rock (2013) (1903) Reconstruction (1895-98) Summer Olympics Black Wall Street (1880) (1935) SLAVERY Dakota Access Cuba bans Mexico City TRANSFEMINISM (1921) Emi Koyama HOLC (1886) Pipeline protests Loudreading in tobacco Black (1968) US supported Home Black The Transfeminist (2016) Ku Klux Klan Parade Owners B l a c k Édouard Glissant factories (continues banning sporadically) The Clansman coup in Chile Lives Lives M o u n t a i n C o l e g e Manifesto Loan (1973) (1925) Poetics of Relation Rem C I V I L R I G H T S M O V E M E N T (1896) (1933-1957) Matter ABOLITIONIST Matter Marie C. Turner (1915) NCARB Corporation (2001) Koolhaas Angela Y Davis ANTI-RACIST founded FEMINISM Protests (1990) created enrolls in Delirious (1919) (2020) Stonewall (1933) Women, Race, Class USA Afropolitanism New York (2013) MIT Architecture AFROFUTURISM (1969) Robert Robinson Taylor H a r l e m R e i n a s s a n c e Irving L. Peddrew III (1978) (1981) claims (2005) Malcolm X Rebuild (1909) (1918-1937) Taliesin Fellowship Oka Crisis enrolls in MIT Architecture enrolls in Virginia Tech assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. Puerto Rico Foundation USA Jones-Shafroth Act assassinated (1990) (1932) (1965) (1888) (1953) protests at Yale Guam, Philipines, Cuba makes Puerto Ricans US citizens (2009) (1968) Land-Grant Tribal Wounded Knee Philip Johnson attends Frantz Fanon drafts 20,000 to war and Harvard Anexes Hawaii NAAB The Wretched B l a c k P a n t h e r P a r t y Colleges Massacre Nazi Youth rally (1917) Lehman Brothers due multibillion dollar Indian Citizenship Act SEGREGATIONIST (1898) Walter T. Bailey of the Earth (1940) (1966-1982) Combahee River Collective (1994) (1890) (1932) All US public files for (1924) (1961) investment in graduates University of Illinois Sitting Bull colleges admitting Declaration Philip Johnson head of Department of Architecture and Design MoMA US bankrupcy Black and White Students (1977) Puerto Rican Debt (1904) assassinated (1932-1954) Arcosanti Immigration and (1968) (2008) (2018) Dawes Act divides (1890) Mies Van de Rohe heads IIT Architecture department Netherlands Indian Civil Righst Act (1989) Customs Enforcement Second Morrill Land Grant 1890 Native’s lands into (1937-1958) Antilles (1968) D e S t i j l POST-COLONIAL ICE is founded for segregated Universities Constant Black Environmental reservations are dissolved Gropius Architecture Chair at GSD (1917-1932) (2003) Studies Team last year (1890) New Babylon (1887) Wits University I R A Q W A R (2010) (1938-1952) (BEST)Yale Ebenezer Howard Philip Johnson works at MOMA (1956) (1968) Architecture founded (2003-2011) University president Cape Town Garden Cities of To-morrow (1988) WTC Attack pressures Gropius to admit women GE Pearce School of ANC wins election (1900) (1914-1918) (2001) First Prizker prize is awarded to in Architecture program GSD Architecture (1922) Mandela become president (1943) TU Delft Architecture (1937) Cape Institute of Architects Philip Johnson ANC Founded (1994) Achille Mbembe Learning from (1904) WAR MINIMAL Manifesto of the 121 (1922) 26 consecutive awards go to men (1912) Necropolitics M a n d a t o r y P a l e s t i n e (1950) Predictive Policing French colonization Las Vegas ANC unbanned ALGERIAN WAR (1979) Sayak Valencia (2003) (1920-1948) (2008) West Africa and (1968) Gore Capitalism Aimé Césaire Nelson Madela (1954-1962) League of Nations Le Corbusier COLONIAL (2016) Timboktu Peter Sloterdijk Anglo-Boer War II Anglo-Boer War I Cahier d'un (1990) Plan Obus Algiers (1920) Patrik Schumacher (1893) “Rules of the South Africa Otoman Empire end (1931) South Africa retour au pays natal Land Act “In Defense of Capitalism” French Guinea Partido Nazionale Human Zoo” (1899-1902) (1922) (1880-1881) (1939) South Africa IBM (2015) Durban Strikes Congo (1891) (King Leopold II) Fascista The Truth about the Colonies EAST (2000) CFSA students Namibia Independence Policy of apartheid Egypt (1913) Independence Smarter AFRICAN (1973) (1931) force Columbia (1990) adopted by National Party (NP) independence (1927) Patrice Lumumba Rape of Belgium CAMPAIGN C O N G O F R E E S T A T E Cities Angola independence Paris Colonial South Africa d of South Africa TECHNO-FASCIST Prime Minister (1922) (1940-1941) (1914) Leopoldville (2008) (1974) (1960) Exposition I t a l i a n L i b y a Benito Mussolini divesment (1948) (1885-1908) Libya Civil War (1881) Facebook T e a m 1 0 (1931) forms government (1985) (1934-1943) (1911) (2006) C on grès In tern atio n au x d ' A rchitectu re M o d ern e (1922) Mozambique independence King Leopold II USA and Belgium backed Jewish settlers G e r m a n R e p u b l i c (1928-1959) (1974) Big Data dies Patrice Lumumba MAGA proclaim the (1918-1933) MAGA (2005) (1909) assasination Mass Murder Federal Adobe Photoshop foundation of Israel B a u h a u s Twitter CCP Weird (1961) at Auschwitz Buildings (1990) (1949) (1919-1933) Google (2004) www Architecture Mies Van de Rohe (1942) (2020) US drops two atomic bombs in Japan REACTIONARY Walter GropIus The Republic (1999) internet goes public Filippo Marinetti Germany and Britain sign (2014) Stephan Trüby negotiates with Gestapo of the Congo (1945) (1990) founds Bauhaus Japan regains Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty Italian Futurism independence Right-Wing Spaces closes Bauhaus Saskia Sassen Metacity /Datatown India wins Weimar independence from US from France European Customs Community (1909) (1890) (2016) Non-Referential (1933) FASCIST The Global City (1999) independence (1952) Tunisia (1960) (1919) Created 3D printer Architecture SMLXL (1991) from United Kingdom NEOLIBERAL The Sydney School of Architecture independence Nigeria Independence (1968) (1983) Shenzhen and (1995) (2018) (1945) Mao Zedong G E R M A N C O L O N I A L E M P I R E (1920) (1956) (1960) Shanghai Stock Beijing proclaims the founding March Chagall Handover of CULTURAL REVOLUTION WeChat (1880-1920) Market Olympics founds People’s of People’s Republic of China Hong Kong (1966-1976) (2011) SETTLER (1989) Art School Vitebsk (2008) (1949) (1939-1945) (1997) (1918) East and West Germany BRICS Social Credit reunited Vera Ermolaeva Adolf Hitler and Nazi party Tsinghua SA “the pill” (2009) System National rector People’s (1990) (1946) claims power Dolly (1954) Grief and Social Credit (2014) Art School Vitebsk (1933) Indonesian (1996) Grievance: (1919) System Pilot Spanish Civil War CAD Art and revolution VIETNAM WAR People’s Art School Montenegro and Serbia (2009) (1936-1939) (1957) Mourning in (1945-1949) (1965-1973) Vitebsk form Federal Republic of Yugoslavia America Union treaty creates USSR NAZI (1918-1922) (2021) C O L D W A R (1992) (1922) TV UNOVIS Talking Motion Picture KOR E A N WA R Malaya PEASANTS REVOLT Slovenia, Croatia, Piotr Kropotkin (1919-1922) (1925) (1910) (1945-1953) independence J a p a n e s e M e t a b o l i s m THAILAND Macedonia, Bosnia OCTOBER REVOLUTION Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution Piotr Kropotkin (1960-1970) Socialist Yugoslavia (1957) (1970s) break from Yugoslavia UTOPIAN (1917) (1902) The Conquer of declared by Marshall Tito Kiyonori Kikutake BALKAN WAR RUSSIAN V h k u t e m a s (1991) Curstis Act Exhibition “The Bread “Metabolism1960(1945) (1920-1930) (1912-1913) CIVIL WAR (1898) PPE Russia independence International Style” Proposal for a New Urbanism” (1892) Russian Red Army (1918-1920) Kosovo SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR USSR collapse MOMA, NY R I F W A R captures East Berlin Independence (1898) (1991) (1937) COVID-19 Penicillin (1911-1927) Germany Surrenders (2008) (1928) (2020) (1945) Architecture and Urbanism College, US backed University of São Paulo coup in Brazil B r a s i l i a (1948) (1964) (1956-1963) Cuban Revolution Bay of Pigs (1953-1959) Invasion UPR Cuba Architecture (1961) (1966) Jacob Lawrence joins Jamaica Black Mountain College faculty independence (1946) (1962)

Fordlandia Brazil (1928)

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History Doesn’t Exist

Based on Charles Jencks’ multiple “evolutionary trees” of architecture, the following spread questions the construction of a Eurocentric architectural epistemology devoid of context. An anti-racist model of ‘architectural evolution’ is only possible by establishing relationships between hegemonic positions, theories, and institutions and practices of extraction, colonization, white and heteropatriarchal supremacy, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous racism, war, and technological development.

How to Read this Chronocartographic Map By the time Charles Jencks starts publishing his first “evolutionary trees” in the 1970s, diagrams were a common sighting in modernist circles. Many of these diagrams, like Alfred Barr’s diagram Cubism and Abstract Art, Walter Gropius’ lithograph of the Diagram of the Bauhaus Curriculum (1922), and the CIAM Grille, presented in the CIAM 7 in Bergamo (1949), displayed some of modernism’s predilection for clear graphics that avoided questioning the legitimacy of the modernist ways and alliances with white supremacy, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. While Barr’s diagrams obscured the colonial expeditions and occupations of the period, Gropius’ diagram has come to signify the sexist curriculum of an institution that enforced gender separation by discipline. By focusing on work, dwelling, transportation, and circulation, the Grille avoids addressing the politics of modernist urbanism, abstracting discussions about colonialism that would question European planners, including its own proponent in Le Corbusier, who proposed Plan Obus in colonial Algeria just a decade earlier. Jencks’ diagrams (the reference point for this chronocartography of anti-Black systems), like the modernists that preceded them, were unable to address questions of colonialism, imperialism, or the evident apartheid states that were fully on display while he worked on his “evolutionary tree.” Where pseudo-scientific modernist diagrams fail to question European supremacy as many anticolonial struggles unfold in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, so-called post-modernist diagrams, with their focus on styles and aesthetics, do absolutely nothing to critically address the ongoing struggles for human emancipation or to question the forces that shape architecture and urban policy.

HISTORY DOESN’T EXIST. Historical narratives do really exist, like propaganda: though rendered with ideology, they are real productions that satisfy the positions of settler-colonization, ruling classes, capitalism, white-supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Architectural History™, which organizes the reduction of systems of extraction, accumulation, capture, and predation to white-washed accounts of style, aesthetized movements, and depoliticized asymmetrical power relations, is incapable of presenting a critical account of its alliance with systems of human oppression and ecological spoliation. Architectural theory has been its masterpiece. At the root of the canonized architectural history lie a thousand theories that reinforce the status quo. As hegemomic regimes shape and fund architectural histories and theories that multiply like trees in a forest, anti-racist forms of historical narrative must dig down into the soil of ideology and address architecture’s white-supremacist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal roots. Among these, the multiple iterations of Charles Jencks’ “evolutionary tree” highlight the construction of historical narratives that overemphasize Eurocentric worldviews, while overlooking and erasing the systems of extraction that have historically fueled, funded, and shape them.

Part of this text was first published in The Funambulist Magazine Issue 36: They Have Clocks, We Have Time, June 2021. < https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/theyhave-clocks-we-have-time/history-doesnt-exist>

Black Panther Party, The Ten-Point Program, October 15, 1966.

The beginnings of post-modernism and the evolutionary diagrams that have taken centerstage in many discussions about architecture theory and history take place as Jim Crow, Apartheid, and White Australia Policy are consolidated as part of the legal system across three different continents, making white supremacy officially a planetary law. To write about failed buildings (like Pruitt-Igoe) or architectural styles while ignoring segregation laws and the history of white supremacy in USA (and the rest of the world), is as problematic as publishing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas while completely overlooking the Civil Rights Movement and its multiple aesthetic, political, and spatial manifestations. Instead of diagramming the aesthetic games performed in the safe bubbles of architectural academia, this diagram focuses on the systems challenging the marching calls for dignity, life, “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace.” Rather than drawing vector lines to map the allegorical evolution of white buildings, this map focuses on the effects that white-supremacist infrastructures have on Black life.

Through an anti-racist approach, this chronocartography rethinks the concept of the “evolutionary tree” by re-centering three global anti-Black regimes in relationship to events, institutions, inventions, and propositions. By including Jim Crow in the US, Apartheid in South Africa, and White Australia Policy in Australia, the diagram invites a more critical understanding of historical matter and its relationship to architecture during the last 140 years. By decentering uncritical readings of whiteness and highlighting regimes of anti-Black oppression, the diagram connects the history of colonialism and imperialism, the construction of architectural and urban institutions, and the ongoing struggles of those historically left out of mainstream narratives of history. Just as it displays how Philip Johnson attended a Hitler Youth Rally the same year that he founded the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the graphic also creates a continuous current between subversive, anticolonial, and anti-capitalist imaginations that bind the loudreaders in the tobacco factories at the beginning of the 20th Century with forms of Indigenous resistance, police and carceral abolition, and transfeminist rights in 2021.

10

Introduction

History Doesn’t Exist

11

PART 1

Before School

Before School

On Who Gets to be an Architect and Anti-Liberation Paywalls

Anti-Liberation Paywall no. 1 shows University Endowments versus National Gross Domestic Product of countries affected by the United States military, colonial, and imperial complex.

$

10bn

20bn

30bn

lybia

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 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?

While these charts have been developed to discuss US American institutions, similar graphics can be developed in other countries around the world. While tuition fees are not the only symptom of social stratification in society, they can offer a clear insight on economic disparities between groups of people.

The paper “Pittsburgh Inequality across Gender and Race” published in 2019 states that “Black women and men in other cities have better health, income, employment, and educational outcomes than Pittsburgh’s Black Residents.” How does the dire statistic regarding quality of life for Black residents of Pittsburgh relate 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’s history of expansion projects that push a gentrifying Morningside Heights into a threatened Harlem? Can anti-racist, anti-capitalist, or abolitionist programs be really formulated in gentrifying institutions, in Universities developing technologies for prescriptive policing directly gentrifying Black neighborhoods? Reports state that while Black Americans make up 13 percent of the US population, only 2 percent of licensed architects are Black, with a whooping two-tenths of a percent being Black women. This begs the question: can a more inclusive architecture and city be designed excluding the experiences of Black residents and other racialized populations? What potential imaginaries be formulated if the profession in 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?

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Anti-Liberation Paywalls

harvard

$41.9 bn endowment

syria

gdp $40.41 bn gdp $40.29 bn

yale

$30.31 bn endowment

princeton

What is the role of historically white colleges and universities—universities with a clear history of racist exclusion—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 of cultural and material capital? Is a decolonial pedagogy possible in 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 pedagogy possible within the reach of historically racist, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous institutions? Who gets to design the future? Until recently, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University distributed a map on its admissions page that omitted Homewood, Larimer, the Hill District, Uptown, East Hills, Hazelwood, and Garfield, erasing with it the representation of some of Pittsburgh’s historically Black neighborhoods. What if this map is more than an involuntary impasse and instead the revelation of something far more sinister but not as caricaturesque? What if the map projected a real tabula rasa decades (or centuries) in the making? After all, is the now infamous map the only materialization of racist erasure?

gdp $47.23 bn

bolivia

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.

bosnia and herzegovina afghanistan Black reproduction of Carnegie Mellon University’s map erasing several of Pittsburgh Black neighborhoods.

mit

Howell, Junia, Sara Goodkind, Leah Jacobs, Dominique Branson and Elizabeth Miller. 2019. “Pittsburgh’s Inequality across Gender and Race.” Gender Analysis White Papers. City of Pittsburgh’s Gender Equity Commission.

univeristy of pennsylvania

In 2007, African-American women made up a scant two-tenths of a percent of licensed architects in the US, for a total of just 196 practitioners. (The University of Cincinnati’s database of African-American architects reports an increase in that number, to 385, of a total 107,581 licensed practitioners in the U.S.) From Curbed, On Race and Architecture, 22 February 2017. < https://www.curbed. com/2017/2/22/14677844/architecture-diversity-inclusion-race >

nicaragua university of michigan

$25.9 bn endowment gdp $20.16 bn gdp $19.36 bn $18.38 bn endowment Land Grant $14.65 bn endowment gdp $13.12 bn $18.38 bn endowment

columbia

$14.65 bn endowment

barbados

gdp $5.145 bn

liberia

50bn

gdp $48.36 bn

democratic republic of congo In the resurging (for some) struggle against anti-Black racism and its spreading tentacles within academic environments, great emphasis has been put into curriculum content, pedagogical methods and, deservingly, 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.

40bn

gdp $3.264 bn

Can schools of urbanism and architecture envision more inclusive and anti-racist cities while keeping their exclusive faculty and student bodies? Can the most vulnerable parts of the population, the historically disenfranchised, dream of better cities, or is the design of collective living a task only for the cast of economically and racially privileged? How can architecture deal with the violent effects of segregation of the urban fabric, of race, of gender and sexuality, of class, while maintaining a clearly segregated profession hidden behind the impossible paywalls of powerfully elite universities? Just like Paulo Freire proposed a Pedagogy of the Oppressed that questions the hierarchical model of traditional education, we need to develop an architecture of the oppressed that not only takes into consideration disadvantaged populations in the ratification process of the public forum or to show faces of diversity (tokenism), but that pursues a radical opening up of the educational institutions that have been central to the legitimation of the design professions. Forms of Black, transfeminist, intersectional, interlocking, Indigenous, Latine critiques of architectural pedagogy are only possible after a radical transformation of academic institutions. 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.

$ Anti-Liberation Paywall displays the tuition fee of professional architecture programs, an estimate of the total cost, including living expenses and additional fees, in contrast to the white and Black median household income in the same cities or states as the programs. The first part of the diagram includes Columbia University M.Arch, Cornell University B.Arch, Carnegie Mellon University B. Arch, and University of Pennsylvania M.Arch programs. Data taken from each of the Universities’ websites.

manhattan

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 a multibillion-dollar commitment from a hedge fund, hiding hundreds of millions in bonds from the Puerto Rican government? Can a university with a 41.9 billion-dollar endowment argue for decoloniality and anti-racism at the same time it benefits from the money extracted by an anti-democratic “fiscal control board” that threatens to cut nearly half the total budget ($450 million) of Universidad de Puerto Rico, the colonial archipelago’s public university system? Is a radical pedagogy possible through the channels of “elite” institutions when they profit from a complex and multi-centenary colonial apparatus of laws, tariffs, and neoliberal speculation?

16

Anti-Liberation Paywalls

40k

50k

60k

70k

80k

tuition $61,080

$86,494 $28,116

tuition $56,550

cornell b.arch tuition white

Land full cost $74,974 Grant $73,584

median household income $46,178

black

pittsburgh

carnegie mellon b.arch

tuition $57,560

full cost $76,874

$57,187

white median household income black

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

philadelphia

$26,330

upenn m.arch

tuition $55,566

white

For news on the relationship between Harvard’s endowment and COFINA bonds read David Dayen, “Harvard’s endowment is profiting from Puerto Rico’s debt as the island’s schools face crippling cuts,” The Intercept, January 25 2018. (retrieved 1 March 2020). Deirdre Fernandes, “Activists urge Harvard to stop investing in Boston hedge fund that holds Puerto Rico debt,” Boston Globe, 24 January 2018. (retrieved 2 March 2020).

black

full cost $77,000 $75,000

median household income $38,200

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full cost $96,245

median household income

new york

Harvard’s 41.9 billion-dollar endowment—larger than the combined GDP of Jamaica, Honduras, and Haiti, and parallel to Bolivia’s—is just one of the many colossal funds of these universities. Through these endowments 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 with settler-colonialism, slavery, and theft, but with current models of local and global extraction, exploitation, gentrification, and colonialism.

Where would these endowments go after decolonizing them, since decolonization, as Tuck and Yang affirm “eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty,” a process that “requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people”?

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Anti-Anti-Racist Institutions With the increased presentation of “decolonial” and anti-racist agendas inside some of the historically white 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.

Is it possible to disentangle Princeton University’s 25.9 billion (25,900,000,000 to really grasp the magnitude of this venture bounty) and Columbia University’s 10.9 billion from their connections to settler-colonialism and slavery as many of the first university presidents and professors owned slaves? Is it possible to demand accountability from institutions whose portfolios of land resources are tied up to conquests within the United States, Latin America, and Africa, and to the many millions accrued in connection with Apartheid regimes like the one in in South Africa, as well as with many other colonial and extractive regimes of terror around the world?

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white

Are institutions ready to be radically democratized through anti-racist pedagogies and the fundamental transformations that these processes entail?

In the American continent, the university is at the heart of the settler-colonial structure that, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang explain in “Decolonization is not a metaphor” recast through “law and policy” (and architecture) the Indigenous relationships to land that comprises our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies as “property and as a resource.” In this process of settler-colonial subjugation, chattel slaves whose “bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless are also created.”

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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 ideologies must not be overlooked. Some of the ways that structural racism is maintained are discussed thoroughly by Tucker and Yang as they reference Janet Mawhinney in the explanation of the “ways in which white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organizations” through “settler moves to innocence,” that “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” The Anti-Liberation Paywall diagram displays through hard numbers factual evidence that oftentimes remains outside of the radar of the “settler moves to innocence” during anti-racist discussions regarding higher education. These diagrams display the tuition fees and approximately total cost (including additional fees, materials, and living expenses) of some of the major private and more expensive architectural programs in the United States. Below the tuition fee and total cost data of each professionally accredited program (B. Arch and M.Arch), two bars show the median income of white and Black households. Although the graph highlights just white and Black households, in many cases Latine and Indigenous households would overtake Black households at the bottom of the income charts. What was consistent among all the graphs is that white households were at the top and Black households were at the bottom tiers, regardless of city or state. Although the information about scholarships or racial data is not readily available on the websites of the universities or architecture schools, this should not deter a more critical take on the role that financial aid plays in the power relations of the universities and the recruitment of students from disenfranchised communities. While international students don’t qualify for financial aid in universities in the United States (implying that they pay full tuition in most cases), local Black, Latine, and Indigenous students are less likely to win private scholarships or receive merit-based institutional grants than white students according to a study by student financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Not only are universities consolidating their power when they decide to whom they grant scholarships (in a way very similar to charity), white students receive more than three times as much in merit-based grant and private scholarship funding as minority students. Additionally, in some examples of what can be considered double (triple or quadruple depending on the point of reference) settler-colonial theft, Cornell and MIT (not in the chart) are not only private universities with exorbitant tuition fees, but they are also Land-Grant institutions that—as la paperson argues in “Land. 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 build,” turning the traditional model of Land as campuses to Land as Capital.

Anti-Liberation Paywall displays the tution fee of professional architecture programs, an estimate of the total cost, including living expenses and additional fees in contrast to the white and Black median household income in the same cities or states as the programs. The second part of the diagram includes Havard University M.Arch, Washington University St. Louis M.Arch, Yale University M.Arch, and University of Southern California B.Arch programs. Mark Kantrowitz, “The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race,” Student Aid Policy Analysis, September 2, 2011. < https://www. racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Distributionracescholarships.pdf> Janet Lee Mawhinney, “Giving up the ghost, disrupting the (re)production of white privilege in anti-racist pedagogy and organizational change,” Masters Thesis, Ontario Institutue for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1998). Available at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/ dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0008/MQ33991.pdf la paperson, “Land. And the University Is Settler Colonial,” A Third University Is Possible, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). < https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-university-is-possible/section/561c45d2-9442-42d59938-f8c9e2aafcfc#ch02> For more information on the history of Land Grant Universities see:

The resulting data evidences how, regardless of symbolic decolonial and anti-racist gestures and other “settler moves to innocence,” these elite universities not only continue to make profit out of occupied land, but remain behind Anti-Liberation Paywalls that oftentimes extend their voracious tentacles to local gentrification conquests and in global settler-colonial expeditions. By relying on the legitimation of these institutions, focusing on diplomas and careers connected to these behemoths of cultural, financial, and settler-colonial capital, the world of architecture reinforces their absolute power.

massachusetts

harvard m.arch

tuition $53,420

full cost $82,183

white

$84,988

median household income black

$46,925

wash u m.arch

st. louis

tuition $54,176

full cost $81,486

$55,000

white median household income black

connecticut

$28,000

yale m.arch

tuition $54,094

full cost $77,050

white

$89,030

median household income black

The Illusion of Global Liberation These universities often claim (with a pinch of truth in it) that they provide in their expensive halls space for the most diverse student bodies. However, an additional chart displays for many nations around the world including Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, and China (just to name a few) the median household income is exponentially inferior to the tuition fees of many of these universities. As in the case with the median Black, Indigenous, and Latine household within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States, it 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.

los angeles

$43,236

usc b.arch

tuition $59,260

full cost $79,063

white

median household income

$95,000

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 multiple manifestations of disabilities, transfeminism, and class struggle. Colonial Footprint of Schools An Anti-Racist pedagogy across the world is only possible through decolonization processes and reparations that address the colonial footprint of architecture schools. By eliminating the Anti-liberation paywall, steps can begin to take place towards bringing down class barriers and hegemonic structures that perpetuate architecture education’s racist structures. In order to create truly accessible and radically inclusive learning environments, we need to reform institutions that allow for change and be ready to abolish intransigent institutions. Other worlds are possible, other universities are possible, other architecture schools are possible.

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Anti-Liberation Paywalls

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, (New York: Harrow Books, 1972). Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Kristin Ross, trans. (California: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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Five Points to engage with anti-racist architectural education before architecture school 1 The history of race must address the relationship between architecture and racism. The history of architecture must address its role in the construction of race. As the history of Blackness and race is (ideally) taught in schools, the role that architecture has and continues to play in systems of racial, economic, and ecological oppression must be present in the discussions. 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 catered to schools across the country (and the world) with special emphasis on the vast array of impoverished, racialized, and oppressed communities.

Anti-Liberation Paywall no.2 displays the annual tuition fee and total cost estimate of the M.Arch program at Columbia University in contrast to the median household incomes of Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nigeria, China, Brazil, and South Africa.

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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 diversified. 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 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 and “capacity to pay should not act as an impediment for someone who wants to study and learn.” If legislation 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.

columbia m.arch

median household income

puerto rico

3 Architecture schools should actively recruit, and recruiting should be intersectional. In the process of enrolling potential worldmakers, recruiting efforts by architecture schools should encompass an intersectional approach that engages as much with gender and race as it does with issues of territoriality, 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, oppressed) forms of existence, may new models of architectural pedagogy (and as a result, of practice) begin to take place. Because architecture has contributed so long and strongly to a material culture of oppression, 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, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, transfeminist approaches. A true emancipatory architectural education will be possible only through radical inclusion of those historically neglected from architectural education and violently oppressed by architecture.

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Anti-Liberation Paywalls

mexico

nigeria

$19,775

$10,116

$7,740

china $5,778

brazil $4,801

south africa $2,410

4 Workshops for New Worlds. Because architecture is everywhere and it virtually (and literally) 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 architectural 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 statistics, like the ones made to construct the Anti-Liberation Paywall diagrams, may reveal part of the story, the five hundred-plus years of colonial re-education in the Americas will not be overcome with numerical gestures. To look at data as facts, without addressing the systemic and structural issues around it, is to overlook the problems. Data driven approaches emphasizing on numeric and quantitative concepts tend to assume 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 can be created.

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The problem of data, how it’s gathered and analyzed, is not exclusive to admissions and recruitment, but is a recurrent problem in academic settings, and in the practice of urbanism, urban planning, and architecture.

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tuition $61,080

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PART 2

During School

During School

An Anti-Racist Architecture Education Spiral ANTI-RACIST SPIRAL Carmen Espegel, Women Architects in the Modern Movement, (New York: Routledge, 2018); Doris Cole, From Tipi to Skyscraper a History of Women in Architecture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973).

RESOLUTION

POST-COLONIAL METHOD

At the same time that white women are barely being admitted to architecture schools in many institutions of higher learning across the United States, Black students are barred from even applying. In Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), the first university in the former confederate states to allow the enrollment of a Black student in 1953, more than two decades passed until architecture had its first Black student in its design labs. Across the country, Black students who 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.

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Anti-Racist Spiral

MODERNITY

ENLIGHTENMENT Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum (adapted, right), Walter Gropius, 1922. Lithograph. A fragmentary and closed system that enhanced gender segregation? “Gropius, eminent architect, takes over new duties,” The Harvard Crimson, 1 April 1937. https:// www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/4/1/gropius-eminent-architect-takes-over-new/ (Retrieved 10 February 2020); and “Gropius Seeks Unbiased, Original, Elastic Approach to Architecture,” The Harvard Crimson, 30 May 1937. https:// www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/5/20/gropius-seeks-unbiased-original-elastic-approach/ (Retrieved 10 February 2020) Special thanks to design librarians Sarah Dickinson and Ines Zalduendo for providing archival information on Gropius and the history of women’s enrollment at Harvard GSD.

Post-Colonial Diagram of Systems: A diagram of relationships that link EuroAmerican Modernity, its epistemologies, and institutions to systems of anti-Black oppression, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this diagram the Anti-Racist Spiral is a tool part of the post-colonial method that brings to resolution the many ways in which Modernism abstracts the footprint of violence of the project of EuroAmerican modernity.

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It should come as no surprise after studying his track record at the Bauhaus that when the president of Harvard University forced Walter Gropius to admit women in 1941, as two-thirds of the school’s men were called for national service, he did so “only for the duration of the war.” Gropius supported this request with the condition that women were admitted “as special students and not as candidates for the Harvard Degree.”

TY NI R E OD

OCC UP

Although the Bauhaus closed its doors in 1933 after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe negotiated with the Gestapo 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 chair of the Architecture Department of Harvard University, Gropius declared his intention to create an “attitude towards the problems of our generation which 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 narrow channels of specialization,” his words should not be taken lightly. When he states “let us make way now for the men of vision,” he means men not as umbrella term used to imply a more generous “people,” but specifically men as a gendered term that excludes women.

IVERSALISM UN

N TIO AC

The emblematic diagram of the Bauhaus, produced by Gropius in the form of lithography in 1922—and a source of uncritical inspiration to many institutions around the world—outlined some of the problematic aspects of the school’s approach early on. Through the finite confinement of its circular form, the diagram 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 diagram, women are kept away from many “disciplines” including the metallurgy workshop; 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 Moscow where men and women were working across disciplines together.

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MODERNISM FOR SOME In 1919, Walter Gropius founded the staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar with a call for the formation of architects, sculptors, and painters in a program where men could become competent craftsmen or independent creative artists and form a working community of leading and future artist-craftsmen. The founding manifesto states that any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted, as far as space permits. However, under the presumption that only men could think in three dimensions, women are kept away from the main disciplines of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and relegated to weaving, textiles, and photography.

ANTI-BLACKNESS

EXT RA

Against the settler-colonial legacy of architecture schools around the world, the Anti-Racist Architectural Education Spiral offers a model to radically transform architectural pedagogy. This model questions the hierarchies between teacher and student, but also between those officially trained in the institutional field of architecture, and those who haven’t have the privilege but whose lives are still affected by its repercussions.

ION CT

ECOCIDE

CAPITALISM

GENOCIDE PLANTATION

In a discipline that preaches the possibility of making new worlds together, what worlds have been created under the framework of these exclusionary pedagogical models? How can buildings and cities account for the experiences and lives of Black women, Black trans women, and Indigenous women if architecture schools have been some of the least welcoming spaces for them? What happens when the Bauhaus and other models of the period are accepted and adopted as the standard modernizing pedagogies of architecture while overlooking the people who were excluded from these learning experiences? Who are the anti-racist reformists and abolitionists of architectural pedagogy? What is left after Gropius’ model of fragmentary division is adopted unquestioned by the world of design and turned into a paradigm of avant-garde design education? What are we left with when, if it’s not the Gropius model of Bauhaus and Harvard, the other options are the Frank Lloyd Wright model of Taliesin, or the Hejduk, Eisenman, and Abraham model of Cooper Union, or the Mies van der Rohe model of IIT? Where are the anti-racist models of architectural pedagogy? If an anti-racist architectural education is approached through the intersectional lens of Black transfeminism, what can be made of a pedagogical legacy anchored on the exclusion of both racialized women and Black people? What would a diagram that calls for the inclusion and prioritization of all the other voices affected by architecture but kept away from its imaginaries look like? FORM Against the finite, closed, and fixed nature of the circular diagrams of avant-garde institutions like the Bauhaus, and the corporate checklist of neoliberal universities and so-called elite private institutions, Anti-Racist Models of Pedagogy operate in the form of a growing, evolving, and inclusive spiral. An open-ended shape, always intellectually and critically growing, the spiral foments the exponential inclusion of pressing and imminent struggles without losing grasp of the interrelated central forms of oppression affecting and endangering the human and the nonhuman around the world. In the way that architecture can only be critical inasmuch as it searches for ways to emancipate humanity from forces, systems, and institutions that oppress it, a critical architectural pedagogy is only possible through the inclusion of a diverse plethora of abolitionist and decolonial discourses and actions. As the spiral implies, a truly anti-racist architectural pedagogy is only possible by practices that seek anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and ecological justice. STRUCTURE Spiral: Coiling out of a center that holds the ideal of human emancipation, the central spiraling structure contains a series of concepts that are fundamental to the possibility of an anti-racist, anti-ableist, transfeminist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and ecologically just architectural pedagogy. These concepts should remain at the center of the model while the form of the spiral remains open-ended as additional struggles could potentially expand the reach of the spiral. The spiral is the philosophical backbone and intellectual core of an education system that replaces with models of solidarity the (emotionally, psychologically, environmentally, politically, and economically) traditional architecture education model of exhausting competition, accelerated expansionism, and settler-colonialism. Surrounding the spiral, a set of fluctuating and experimental values, principles, and challenges contrast emancipating principles and the until-now unmovable building blocks of a supremacist status quo. Values: At one side of the spiral emancipating principles, methods, approaches, and philosophies are divided 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

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Anti-Racist Spiral

Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education

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As many webpages of architecture schools boast about how old their programs are, information about racial desegregation and inclusion are nowhere to be found. In the places where possible new worlds were rendered, a white, heteropatriarcal institution was left undisturbed. Architectural education has been the training grounds for the materialization of infrastructures that oppress Black, Indigenous, Brown, Latine, and disabled bodies, but somehow for architecture schools is more important to highlight the time when they were created than to address at what point the ‘other’ was allowed in the studio. Rather than overemphasizing old, white, heteropatriarchal legacies, an anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy would highlight the moment when all that started to change, while self-assessing and reflecting on what is left to be done. A very basic question may reveal more about what needs to be done: founded as racist and sexist spaces, when did architecture schools became anti-racist? And, if they (as we can assume) have never been anti-racist, how can they become anti-racist?

O EC

INTERSECTION At the opposite side of the spiral of hegemonic forms, histories, theories, and media are no longer granted the default condition given by dogmatic manifestations of architectural education, but rather are intersected with their respective critiques on anti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and ecological justice. Where before an institution would argue for a depoliticized concept of sustainability and carbon footprints, now, an argument would have to engage with the colonial and imperial footprint of architecture. Where before architectural education would have accepted a “western” construction of the “orient,” the “global south,” and the “third world,” now a critique of the systems of supremacy operating in imperial and colonial powers will take place. Where architectural history would focus on the development of European architecture, many different histories will deconstruct and reconstruct the plot of a global history of economic, social, ecological, and human spoliation, dreams, ambitions, failures, and challenges. Where architectural theory would have focused on isolated icons and the myth of the single genius author, new forms of collaborative, critical, emancipatory work would resurge while questioning the invisible labor behind architecture. Where smart cities, gentrified with prescriptive policing would take the place of ideal cities, new utopias from oppressed and marginalized communities would imagine better worlds together without the intrusion of paramilitary forces. Where before an institution would try to fit everybody under the current system, new forms of imagination would declare that other worlds are possible.

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Jillian Berman, “All the ways student debt exacerbates racial inequality — it’s like landing in quick sand”, MarketWatch, July 27, 2019. < https://www.marketwatch.com/story/allthe-ways-student-debt-is-exacerbating-racialinequality-its-like-landing-in-quick-sand-oneBlack-student-says-2019-07-18>

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David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (New York: Melville House, 2011).

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HEGEMONIC FORM Debt Oriented Education: Any form of debt-inducing education, professional protocol or requirement goes against truly anti-racist and decolonizing pedagogies. An anti-racist pedagogy is only possible through approaches that challenge the current capitalist system of education and the gulf in wealth between Black, Latine, and Indigenous families and white families.

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CENTER Although the center of the spiral is left blank, the conceptual space from where the form coils should be a reflection of the intentions, desires, struggles, challenges, and potentialities of the people, collectives, schools, institutions, or practices working with it. Through the continuous intersection of concepts manifested in the spiral, the center continuously shifts within the realm of spatial temporalities, as attainable goals like more inclusive, anti-racist architectural learning spaces could potentially evolve into more ideal and utopian goals like pluridiverse utopias and the possibility of other worlds of human emancipation in balance with the rest of nature, ecology, and the environment. The center is not fixed but that doesn’t mean that it’s 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.

HEGEMONY The following concepts are part of the hegemonic forms of architectural pedagogy that should be scrutinized, questioned, challenged and, whenever possible, abolished.

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Through these values—always fluctuating, contextual, and flexible—networks of solidarity foment the free circulation of design and related forms of knowledge while acknowledging the decolonial struggles embedded in processes of “unlearning imperialism,” “critiques of Black Reason,” and constructing new worlds.

PEDAGOGICAL CONCEPTS The list of hegemonic concepts that must be intersected through the spiral are divided in four sections that, although speculative, provide with a potential framework to rethink architectural curriculums in the United States and around the world.

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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 intelligence of anti-racist, transfeminist design strategies, and the growing list of theories ranging from Achille Mbembe to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sayak Valencia, Amílcar Cabral, Nick Estes, la paperson, Silvia Federici, and many more.

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FORM

Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education with intersecting form, history, theory, and media.

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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 platforms for intellectual solidarity, free exchange of knowledge, and with the creation and diffusion of critical processes, actions, positions, and discourses.

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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, the invention of private property, and the laws, systems, and institutions 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.

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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.

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Gentrification/Displacement: In order to engage with anti-racist approaches, studios that engage and aid institutions in the speculation, research, and implementation of gentrification processes should be questioned. Under no circumstances should students be used as part of development plans that facilitate the gentrification and displacement of oppressed, racialized, impoverished, and dispossessed communities.

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Repetitive Curriculum: Unless a class has been engaging with abolitionist, anti-racist strategies since the beginning, any form of curriculum that has been repeated for years (sometimes decades) must be questioned in order to address pressing interpersonal, social, political, and ecological challenges.

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Contextless Icons: The study of established references and iconic projects within hegemonic canons without context obscures the relationship between architecture, political, and economic power. References from the Eurocentric canon of architecture should always be presented in relationship to their political, economic, and colonial/imperial history. Whenever established architects are presented, rigorous effort should be made to discuss the social, cultural, political, and material contexts around them.

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Hegemonic Ideology Projects: Architecture syllabi should be critical about the assignation of programs like prisons, detention centers, police stations, and religious buildings that overlook the role of racial, gender, and sexual repression. Without providing a critical context and the possibility to engage, question, and subvert the problematic legacy of such institutions, the learning space would potentially help perpetuate hegemonic ideologies. If not to be completely avoided, these projects of hegemonic ideology should be accompanied by robust contextual information, and a series of strategies and methods of ideology critique.

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Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing, trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

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Trauma-Oriented Research: Over-emphasizing the trauma of oppressed communities through research and design projects could potentially inflict more trauma on the students and faculty and help perpetuate stereotypes. Although these issues are important, forcing oppressed people to engage with their condition through design exercises takes away the potential freedom an educational experience may provide them. An anti-racist educational experience should allow the student freedom to address issues that are important to them without forcing them into a particular difficult topic (tokenization). Educators should be critical about their position within the studio and pay extra attention to potential additional emotional, psychological, and intellectual labor that would be incurred by students because of their precarious or vulnerable conditions. Some examples of trauma-oriented research may include issues of poverty, geopolitical borders, imprisonment, and institutional violence. Architecture pedagogy must focus on freedom without reduction, following what Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity.”

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Prize-Oriented Education: Architectural education centered on goals and individual prizes reinforces the role of institutional subjectivity and individuality over collaboration. Other forms of recognition and distribution of funds pointed towards solidarity and collaboration may foster collective forms of worldmaking in tune with the challenges of our times.

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heteropatriarchal institution, centralized studios may silence the pluriverse of voices needed to diversify architecture and may reinforce white, male, and ableist supremacist assumptions.

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e r a b n no ce n Centralized Studio: Coordinated studios that enforce a central viewpoint or topic of interest of senior or e established faculty figures over pedagogical questions of other members of the faculty goes against the pos-vid sibility of diversifying standard teaching approaches and questioning the status quo. In a historically white,e

EastWest, Occident/Orient Division: An anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy would have to engage with the critical history of the East/West, Occident/Orient division and the inherent exotification of otherness. Products of imperial and colonial systems of power, these dichotomies should be addressed via projects and arguments that critically engage with them as ideological constructions. Global North/Global South Division: The Global North/South dichotomy must be challenged and replaced with models that look at specific cases and critically study the relationship between old and new economic and ideological powers. Growth, Progress, Development: Cartesian concepts like growth, progress, and development should be critically scrutinized in relationship with ecological justice, settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, gentrification, and displacement. Eurocentric/Male History of Modernism: An anti-racist architectural education must challenge the Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal construction of the concept of Modernism and question its relationship with settler-colonialism, empire, gender and racial identity, and systems of capitalist extraction. This history would have to critically dissect Philip Johnson’s Nazi affiliations, the collaborations of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with the Gestapo, the alliances of Modernist architects and urbanists with fascist regimes, and the role of collections and pedagogical programs in consolidating Modernist ideology as a hegemonic doctrine.

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Emphasis on Authorship: In the same way that newness and originality are problematic concepts, the idea of authorship in architecture should not be taken lightly, as it often erases all the labor that goes into making a project. New forms to understand the role of collective intelligence may create a more flexible, inclusive, and fair approach to the process of generating projects and designs.

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Emphasis on Newness and Originality: The concepts of newness and originality, so prevalent in architecture schools around the world, reinforce the misleading Eurocentric myth of the genius author. Anti-racist models of pedagogy would acknowledge that architecture is a collective intelligence that is built over time and that takes into consideration many intellectual and material cultures across periods and territories.

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US-Centered World History: The problem of architectural academia in the US is two-fold: it must simultaneously 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 imperial power around the world.

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HEGEMONIC HISTORY 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 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 core with isolated sidenotes of world events, but rather as an always evolving narrative that establishes relationships between local events and global systems of extraction, communication, and mobility.

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Humiliation and Punishment: The chauvinistic culture of intellectual humiliation, excessive punishment, and subjective grading criteria is one of the blatant symptoms of a structurally racist, sexist, and toxic supremacist culture in architecture education. These tasteless practices have no space in anti-racist pedagogical models and must be abolished from learning environments. In the increasingly neoliberalization of the university, grades should not be used as capital to maintain the status quo.

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Commercial Rendering: With the advent of computer-generated graphics and rendering software, architectural 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 either radically inclusive when rendering new worlds or critically subversive when exposing the ideology behind architecture.

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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. Rather than investing in texts that are meant to fulfill academic requirements, texts should be used as a tool to generate critical, emancipatory, and anti-racist content and exchanges of knowledge.

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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 should be added to not isolate them through a Eurocentric scope. A history of the avant-garde must engage with politics of exclusion, the role of colonialism and imperialism, and practices until now outside of the Europeanized and Americanized canon.

Post-Modernism: The emphasis on post-modernism on style on the one hand, and on a vernacular of a white, masculine, capitalist state on the other, while overlooking the role of race and gender in its argument, is symptomatic of the pervasive white supremacist ideology in architectural theory. This is declared first hand by one of its main proponents, as Charles Jencks is willing to overlook racial segregation in order to declare style as the reason Pruitt-Igoe failed in St. Louis. For a theory that was born at the same time as the Civil Rights movement in the United States it does absolutely nothing to address any of these challenges within its framework. Orientalism: Against the exotification of the other through the lens of colonialism and imperialism, new theories must provide lenses to study the complex histories of the majority of the world. Emancipating forms of knowledge have existed in the form of theories endemic to territories previously considered outside of the Eurocentric canon. Critical Regionalism: Forms of architectural knowledge generated outside of hegemonic institutions and discourses will have to replace the theories developed as umbrella terms to explain everything that happens outside of the Eurocentric lens. Deconstructivism: A continuation of post-modernism’s form for form sake approach, Deconstructivism resists engaging with any form of ideology critique, and instead approaches architecture as a methodology that disengages with political content at precisely the same time that neoliberalism makes a violent incursion on global markets. 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 its loudest advocate, an architectural defense of monocultural supremacy and unregulated capitalism. Post-Digital: In the face of pressing challenges, architecture would reject any form of apolitical approach to the post-digital collage as a purely aesthetic exercise, and would instead engage with the political content of images to generate collages with subversive potential. Absolute Architecture: In the tradition of Eurocentric architectural theory, “absolute” architecture focuses on case studies generated within the European framework of urbanism. Against the pressing challenges of our times, by claiming the “absolute” condition of architecture as something else than the city, this theoretical approach avoids any engagement with racial, gendered, and even ecological critiques on design.

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HEGEMONIC THEORY 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 cartesian values of development, order, and progress, the construction of gender roles, and the problematization of a singular, hegemonic European view of universalism.

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Apolitical History of Movements: To look at the history of artistic and architectural movements without 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, platforms, and institutions in their construction and distribution.

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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 architectural 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.

Object Oriented Ontology (OOO): Any theory based on the objectification of everything stands in opposition to anti-racist, transfeminist, and decolonial struggles against objectification and commodification. OOO must be challenged by positions that reveal its problematic approach to looking at the world through the lens of objectification. Non-Referential Architecture: A theory that claims a need for an architecture that is able to respond to the contemporary lack of universal meanings or beliefs, overlooking some of the most urgent global challenges. To claim that there are no great narratives today is to ignore the effects of a pandemic, collective calls for reparations that engage with ecological justice, global protests of Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous and feminist struggles and uprisings around the world.

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Evidence-based Design: Rather than rely on analytical information to make predetermined design decisions, an evidence-based approach should aim to reveal the racial, ethnic, and gender bias in the organizations and programs that generate policy research and analysis. HEGEMONIC MEDIA Mainstream Publishing: Historically created as a tool 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 discourses would have to create alternative channels to engage with the world. Mainstream Online Platforms: Although the internet promised to democratize information, mainstream online design magazines have become the pixel version of printed press. The lack of diversity already endemic to mainstream publishing has been echoed in online platforms. Orthodox Representation: Against drawing for drawing’s sake, new forms of architectural representation should replace the traditional techniques of depoliticized architectural representation. While a drawing in itself can’t be critical (in the way that it enhances struggles for human emancipation), the discourses surrounding it can aid in the formulation of critical and emancipatory architectures. Institutional Curatorial: Responding to institutional demands, curatorial programs rely on the same protagonists hailing from the same countries and the same elite institutions. Leading collections like the CCA and MoMA lack representation from outside of recognized domains. 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 the architectural horizon. The overdependence on leaders linked to the same elite cultural institutions of powerful nation-states ensures that the discourses presented don’t depart drastically from the hegemonic 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 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 programing and control of the news regarding the calls for anti-racist practices and approaches. However, as presented in the Anti-Liberation Paywall Diagram, they operate behind insurmountable paywalls sharply contrasting with the median Black, Latine, and Indigenous household incomes. Neoliberal University Programs: As Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades state, “Public Colleges and Universities 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, have been displaced by the economic role of serving corporations’ global competitiveness.” 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. Critical models of media would find alternative ways to exchange knowledge freely through the available channels of the internet.

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FORM Means of Production: An emancipating model of education must account for all the forms of labor, material, extraction, and exchanges of knowledge that shape and are shaped by architecture. Only through a critical position towards controlling the means of architectural production will a real form of emancipating practice begin to take shape. Controlling the means of production is one of the strongest acts of resistance. Ideology and Buildings: A building is never just a building. It is imperative to understand buildings as material manifestations of ideology. Anti-racist pedagogies must be able to address the relationship between buildings and the ideological systems and infrastructures that fund, envision, commission, and defund them. Contextual Artifacts: The history of humans is the history of artifacts that respond to specific material, political, spiritual, psychological, physical, emotional, and environmental needs, desires, questions, subjectivities, and objectives. An anti-racist pedagogy would aim to understand the complex material, cultural, political and historical contexts of artifacts and those who until now have had the power to construct their narratives.

Combahee River Collective , “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” United States, 2015. Web Archive. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .

Leah Penniman, Farming while Black: Soul Fire Farm’s practical guide to liberation on the land, (Hartford: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Adrienne Brown, Race and Real Estate, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, (John Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Post-Colonial Landscapes: In the process of constructing architectural imaginaries through images, critical forms of pedagogy must engage in revealing, challenging, and subverting the relationship of occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement, gentrification, and spoliation of ecological systems to the history of landscape. post-colonial landscapes engage with systems of power through the acknowledgment of ideological forces in the manipulation of territories and their direct effect on Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people. Inclusive Urbanism: Critical models of pedagogy must challenge classist and capitalist forms of urbanism with urbanisms of radical inclusion, care, connectivity, desegregation, radical integration, and anti-capitalist solidarity. Models of Collaboration: Against the fallacious understanding of architecture as a discipline of single authors, award-seeking entrepreneurs, and solitary geniuses, anti-racist pedagogies must foster networks of solidarity through collaboration, care, empowerment, and mutual aid. Critical Moving Images: New models of architectural presentation would expand beyond orthodox models of presentation and develop moving manifestoes that critically dissect the past, subvert the present, and speculate emancipatory futures. The critical culture that can be found in documentary journalism, speculative filmmaking, and what Hito Steyerl calls “poor images” has the potential to challenge the commodification of images and construct new ways of storytelling that allow formerly missing voices to enter the plethora of discourses and architectural desires. 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 invisible

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Hito Steyer, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal #10 , november 2009. < https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defenseof-the-poor-image/>.

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INTERSECTIONAL The following concepts are pedagogical approaches that have been intersected through the spiral of anti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and ecological justice. Together they act as a speculative anti-racist architecture planetary curriculum.

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8.

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V.R.: Virtual reality is not a replacement for the real conditions of subaltern worlds. As Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Social VR Chief Rachel Franklin awkwardly demonstrated while they strolled in the comfort of their VR experience in the devastated and flooded streets of Puerto Rico after the Hurricane Maria, these technologies provide a fake sense of place and experience and, if not engaged with critically, could potentially perpetuate the commodification of oppression.

Autonomous weapons that kill must be banned, insists UN chief, UN News, 25 March 2019. < https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035381>

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Robotics: The study of robotics in architecture without an ethical and explicitly anti-racist framework has the potential to enhance the development of an infrastructure for the use of fully autonomous weapons, automated displacement, and extraction of resources through architectural and urban knowledge that can be enforced by corporate, police, military, and paramilitary forces in the continuous oppression of disenfranchised and racialized communities around the world.

Ashley Murray and Katie Giammarise, Pittsburgh suspends policing program that used algorithms to predict crime ‘hot spots’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, JUN 23, 2020.

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A.I.: From prescriptive policing algorithms to bigoted conversations between chatbots, the racist and misogynist manifestations of AI simulations are well documented. A technology reliant on human subjectivity, Artificial Intelligence’s uncritical use by powerful institutions could result in architectures of accelerated segregation, increased policing, efficient occupation, and the dispossession of already vulnerable communities.

Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, 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.

Pëtr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) < https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution>

Reparations: As Angela Y. Davis affirms, free education would be a form of reparations that would benefit everyone. Emancipating forms of pedagogy need to recognize the damage done by a white supremacist, heteropatriarcal capitalocene and propose real and tangible forms of reparations. Emancipation can’t happen in a bubble of privilege.

Diversity Forum 2020: A Conversation with Angela Davis, University of Pittsburgh, July 28, 2020. < https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ae8DYsoUhVI>

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Collective Worldmaking: Against the idea of architecture as a one man or a one corporation enterprise, we need collective acts of worldmaking. We need collective utopias. We need collective pedagogies. We need ancestral utopias, queer utopias, trans utopias, Black utopias, Indigenous utopias. Collective worldmaking fosters and seeks out care, solidarity, and harmony with the environment.

HISTORY Global history of settler-colonialism: The history of architecture and its effects on societies, people, ecosystems, and the environment would be incomplete without engaging with the history of settler-colonialism. An anti-racist, anti-colonialist architecture must engage with the global (and cosmic) history of settler-colonial states and institutions, and the mechanisms of domination, extraction, and exploitation inherent to them.

Samia Henni, ed., Deserts are Not Empty, (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022).

Political Context of Movements: A critical pedagogy can’t engage with architecture in a bubble. Art, philosophy, and architectural movements must be studied within their respective political, historical, material, cultural, social, and ideological frameworks. A history of movements must depart from the Eurocentric epistemologies and approach the world as a complex network of positions and discourses of aggression and resistance.

Media Archeology: As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka explain, “Media archaeology rummages textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive and the material manifestations of culture.” A media archeology (that accounts of a geology of media) is interested not only in “media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy” but in the geophysical effects of this media culture, “from metals and minerals to its waste load.” A search of ecological justice must take into account media archeology and media geology in order to consider not only the dreams of technology but the devastating footprint of capitalist extraction. Political, Economic, and Ideological Power: Any form of critical pedagogy focused on anti-racist struggles must outline the connections between architecture, urbanism, political, and ideological power. This study would consider the multiple and complex forms of political influence in the shaping of the built and imaginary environment.

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Nation-State, Market, Ideological Grids: In order to understand the role of architecture in systems of oppression 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, progress, and development accounts for the fabrication of identities through abstract systems of varying scales.

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Critical History of Architectural Authorship: In order to challenge the myth of the single author, a critical history must reveal all the systems, forces, and relationships that create and foment the idea of architectural (and artistic) authorship. A critical history of architectural authorship should reveal how architecture is shaped through collective intelligence, collaboration, and many different forms of intellectual and physical labor.

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Critical History of Labor in Architecture: In the same way that it is imperative to critically engage with the history of authorship in architecture, a critical history of labor should study all the forms of labor behind

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Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, ed. Media Archeaology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).

Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, Electronic Mediations, Volume 46, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). < https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-billion-Black-anthropocenes-or-none>

OR glo Y po bal h l m itica istor e yo po dia l co fs nt l a ett i rc ex na tic ler to tio al, heo -co fm cr n e l o lon ov gy cr itic sta con ial em iti al om te ism en ,m ca h i c ts l h ist ,a ar o nd is ke to ry o t, ry id ideo fa eo lo of rc l gi h o la ca i g te bo i c lp al r i ctu ow gr ra n er id ar la s ch ut ho ite rs ct hi ur p e

means of production ideology and buildings contextual artifacts post-col onial lan dscapes inclusi ve urba nism mode ls of c ollabo critic ration al m oving inclu imag sive es s till im criti ages cal t ext crti cal and het incl ero usiv dox col e rh dra lec etor win tive rep ic g wo ara rld tio ma n HIS s kin g T

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 manifestos, to short stories to collective projects that allow generations to declare their intentions.

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Critical History of Architectural Pedagogy: A critical pedagogy of architecture must question and challenge the history of architectural pedagogy as it has been previously acknowledged, accepted, and implemented. This approach will aim to understand what educational formats and strategies exist, the historical role they had in shaping hegemonic and subversive discourses, the institutions that have shaped architectural education, and the people who have been overly included and overtly excluded. A critical history of architectural pedagogy will focus on the structures of recognized institutions and on those operating outside of the margins and canons.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and primitive accumulation, (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

Architecture, Racial and Gender Fabrication: As architecture shapes and regulates the spaces and infrastructures of societies with a settler-colonial legacy, it has also been central to the violent processes of gendered and racial fabrication and imposition. A critical form of architectural pedagogy has the duty to identify the connections between the use of architecture and control over the body, identity, and life. Colonial and Imperial Footprint: Instead of deferring to responses that focus on carbon economies and green capitalism, an anti-racist pedagogy focuses on understanding how the colonial and imperial footprint of architecture relates to a long history of exploitation of large parts of the world. By moving away from capitalist forms of sustainability, an intersectional approach that engages with ecological justice studies the struggles of resource colonies around the world, from Africa to the Indigenous nations in the Americas. The colonial and imperial footprint of architecture considers the networks and conditions that support the capitalist systems that fuel the continuous development of the built environment. Critical History of Ideal Cities, Ideal Buildings, Ideal Bodies: An anti-racist pedagogy should be able to dissect the challenges and threats of the utopias of the few. Through this critical dissection of visionary plans that go from provocative and subversive utopias to totalitarian and fascist regimes of ableist, classist, and racist terror, relationships should be established between dreams of ideal cities and buildings and the idealization of bodies and identities. Critical approaches to architectural education will provide platforms for the construction of anti-ableist, anti-racist, and transfeminist utopias of extended sensibilities and radical accessibility and inclusivity.

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Mario Gooden, Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, ed. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen, ed., Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Achille Mbembé, “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 373-405. muse. jhu.edu/article/173738.

THEORY Transmodernism: Instead of the continuous fixation on Eurocentric forms of modernism and critiques operating within the confines of its conceptual apparatus (post-modernism, deconstructivism, etc.) Transmodernism operates not as a manifestation of its late stages, but as civilization beyond it. Based on subaltern civilizations and imaginaries, Transmodernism (a term coined by Enrique Dussel), is a modernity of the “other” that occurs beyond and despite the European narratives of Modernism.

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Gore Capitalism: As architecture delves, shapes, and is shaped by the politics, economies, and narratives 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. Sayak Valencia grounds in a multiplicity of feminisms, a transfeminism that reinterprets brutal kinds of violence as tools of necroempowerment. Gore Capitalism explains how capital as “commodity production” is substituted with a “commodity-made-flesh in the body and human life.” This theoretical framework provides a lens to read the architectures that frame the border condition of the masculine hyperviolence of capitalism as a heteropatriarcal machine of accumulation, precarity, and death.

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Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. Erica Mena, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).

ISM L A I ER

P M I - in the words of Achille Mbembe, how “contemporary forms of subNecropolitics: Necropolitics Iexplores, T jugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, N sacrifice, and terror.” Necropolitics provides a framework to read StheMlegacy of the colony that, as Frantz I A L A Fanon argues, entails a division of space into compartments and “the setting of boundaries and internal fronT PI tiers epitomized by barracks and police stations.” A C 42 Anti-Racist Spiral IT M

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Cocoran, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

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Critical History of Architectural Institutions: As professional and disciplinary institutions have historically regulated, endorsed, and legitimized architecture, an anti-racist approach to architectural pedagogy should explore their role in challenging or facilitating practices of exclusion, displacement, oppression, and power.

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means of producti ideology and buildi contextual artifact post-col onial lan dsca inclusi ve urba nism mode ls of c ollabo critic rat al m o v i ng inclu i ma g sive e still criti i ma g cal t es ext crti c al and het incl ero usiv d ox d col e rh lec r et awi tive rep n g wo ara rld tio ma HIS ns kin g

FORM

architecture. This history will take into account slavery, indentured servitude, salaried wage labor, and the work involved in the production of architectural materials and technologies. A critical history of labor in architecture must question and challenge any form of analysis that overlooks the role that race, gender, and colonization play in the history of architecture.

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ly within the logics of transatlantic exchange.” To aim to understand the role of 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 between “colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.”

Indigenous Genders and Sexualities/Queer theories: A comprehensive approach to gender and sexuality must take into account how architecture enacts gendered and sexualized violence in order to regulate land, communities, and bodies. In relation to the material and ideological repercussions of settler-colonialism, an 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 queerness 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. Preciado, Butler, and Snorton is intersected with Indigenous, Black, and other anti-racist theories and frameworks.

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Amílcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization, trans. Dan Wood, (London / New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, (New York: Verso Books, 2019). Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future, (New York: Verso Books, 2019). Samia Henni, Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria, (Zurich: GTA Verlag, 2018). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Year: 2017). Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, “Loudreading in Post-colonial Landscapes (to the beat of Reggaeton),” in the Avery Review 48 (June 2020), http://averyreview.com/issues/48/loudreading. Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 62, no. 1 (1992): 3–37. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1963). Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2012) 111 (1): 95–109. Judith Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, (New Yorkk: Routledge, 1990). Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Raquel Salas Rivera, lo terciario/the tertiary, (Blacksburg: Noemi Press, 2019) Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century,” Rory Dieker, Alison Piepmeier, (Boston: Northeaster University Press, 2003).

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ICE T S U J L A C I G Decolonial Theory: Through fiction, poetry, and formal philosophy, an anti-racist architectural pedagogy O must move away from conventional hegemonic epistemologies and participate in complex processes of decoL lonial thinking. field of decolonial theory is as diverse as the forms that colonization takes, and includes OfromThepan-Africanists C discourses like Amílcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, to Indigenous theory by Nick Estes, Eve ETuck, and K. Wayne Yang, to the potential histories of Ariella Azoulay, to the transdecolonial poetry of Raquel Rivera Salas, passing through every ideological territory aroundIthe world Mspoiled by settler colonialism. S L A I N Post-Colonial Theory: Achille Mbembe argues in his “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony” that the O postcolony is “made up of a series Oof Lcorporate institutions and a political machinery which, once they are in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence” and is “characterized by a distinctive style of political C - to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which idenI improvisation, by a tendency T tities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation.” Both building on and departing from Mbembe’s definition, the term post-colonial is used here to describe the potential fabrication of such fictional narratives A Nimaginaries and emancipatory under the suppressive apparatus of S colonized territories. The post-colonial M I L as a speculative act of making takes the place of the historical anticolonial struggle and reimagines global A I system. R processes of solidarity and subsistence under an oppressive E P M I Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe defines as the “becoming Critique of Black Reason: In his book IBlack of the world” when “allT events and situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value” and thus have turned “the systematic slaves during early capitalism,” when N risks experienced specificallyLbyIBlack M S “men and women fromA Africa were transformed into human-objects, human-commodities, TA By delving into the work ofhuman-money,” I into the “norm for, or at least the lot of, all subaltern humanity.” Frantz Fanon and P A other critical thinkers, Mbembe renders the intersection where capitalism, exploitation, and race meet. Not Cthe creation of the concept of Blackness and the transatlantic much escapes Mbembe’s grasp, as he traces I slave trade to our current neoliberal moment, characterized by the climatological crisis, the postimperial T one N military complex, contemporary technologies of mass communication, and the commodification of death. NISM I A M Ethat “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no Subaltern Theory: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui affirmsF that S theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing Subaltern theory recognizes that decolonial pracNpractice.” tices resistance and subjugated forms of knowledge have been central subaltern women (the so-called Third A IStoM E World and Global South) and IndigenousR people around the world. These forms of scholarship and activism L Twith anti-racist-A are central to establish forms to engage andB decolonial models of architectural pedagogy. I MC. Riley Snorton references Claire S Trans Critique: In Black on Both Sides: A RadicalT History of Trans Identity, I C N Colebrook’s resistance to normalize “trans” as a “category of A gender, sex or species”, claiming that transiA R tivity “is the condition for what becomes known as the human.” I For Snorton, “Blackness” is an “apposition to Colebrook’s formulation of ‘trans’” in the way that T Blackness articulates the paradox of nonbeing, in the Nas fungible, thingified, and interchangeable, particularway that “Black” and “trans” have been “constituted

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, (New York: Continuum, 2005).

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po Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Based on Paulo Freire’s model, an architectural pedagogy of the oppressed challenges the banking concept of education as the deposit of institutional forms of knowledge into empty vessels (students), and instead proposes a model of knowledge exchange. A pedagogy of the oppressed searches for “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.”

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Claire Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be a Human?,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015). C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Radical History of Trans Identity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Claudia Irizarry Aponte, “A Conversation with Queer Boricua Writer Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia’s Newest Poet Laureate,” NPR Latino USA, April 16, 2018. < https://www.latinousa. org/2018/04/16/raquelsalasrivera/>

MEDIA narrative architecture loudreaders

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IT ISM C N A R “Abolitionist Abolitionist Feminism: Angela Y.ADavis writes-that strategies are especially critical because I radically they teach us that our visions of the futureT can depart from what exists in the present.” Abolitionist feminism—that is, trans, queer, intersectional, N anti-capitalist, solidarity feminism—aims to abolish the endemic and materialized forms of state and interpersonal racial, gendered, and sexual violence. Abolitionist feminism calls for the abolition of prisons and policing, recognizes the relationship of these institutions to settler-colonial systems of oppression, and speculates on the possibility of radically different futures.

MEDIA Narrative Architecture: Employing irony and humor as philosophical instruments, narrative architecture uses tools of presentation and representation within and beyond the confines of architecture (narrative texts and a vast repertoire of images, collages, photomontages, drawings, storyboards, comic strips, animations) in order to create allegorical stories that aim to expose the impasse and misfires of architecture in theory and practice. This form of architecture aims to critique ideology, after recognizing that ideology—in its multiple incarnations—has infiltrated all spheres of architectural production, including the sphere of criticism itself. Loudreaders: Learning from Puerto Rican feminist, activist, and utopian author Luisa Capetillo, the model of Loudreaders continues the centenary practice of the lectores in tobacco factories where workers organized in anarchist syndicates, creating a simple and fascinating alternative practice of education across the Caribbean. 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 workday. While the readings consisted mostly of newspapers, magazines, and literature, the Loudreaders focused on Darwin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx and Engels, fomenting an anti-capitalist, and decolonial imagination. New Loudreading platforms could offer accessible decolonial and anti-racist imaginaries using contemporary tools of mass communication. Trade School: Against the commodification of critical thinking and potentially emancipatory tools for 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 through free and accessible channels, tools of critical discourse must be freed from the paywalls of hegemonic 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. How-to-workshops: In combination with Loudreaders, trade schools, and other public education forums, how-to-workshops can challenge the model of pay-per-skill that elite and neoliberal universities have commodified. The experience of apprenticeships and internships that historically privileged students can afford to have should be challenged by accessible how-to-workshops that provide insights into the evolving array of architectural skills needed to respond to a constantly evolving world. These workshops should respond to contextual, material, and historical conditions, and should challenge institutional and professional forms of knowledge deposit and knowledge exchange. Community Design-Build: While design-build platforms have the potential to establish networks of solidarity that could aid communities without access to professional architectural services, special emphasis has to be put in the community and anti-imperialist aspect of this approach. Design-build has the potential to be an emancipating architectural approach as long as it is not instrumentalized by institutions and professors seeking to gain access to communities threatened by the same institutions. The charity/colonial approach of wealthy institutions doing international studio trips to impoverished parts of the world to implement projects and ideas or for “cultural tourism” without genuine local engagement must be avoided. In order to avoid further exploitation of economically disadvantaged people, design-build projects must always account for the unpaid labor executed by students and members of the local communities. Alternative Publishing: In the spirit of mutual-aid and anti-racist practice, new models of publishing should take advantage of unexplored digital and physical platforms. Rather than responding to the commercial demands, the academic criteria, and the endemic traditions of architecture publishing, new forms of alternative publishing must propose alternative formats of editorial, design, and diffusion practices. Alternative architectural publishing should engage with queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other subaltern models of publishing already materializing across the world. Alternative Curatorial: While the practice of curating is clearly associated with imperialism, colonialism, and racism, new formats of critical and anti-racist curatorial practice must depart from the problematic infrastructures of so-called cultural institutions and engage with discourses challenging the very same institu-

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Caroline Cottet, Manuela Lavinas Picq, Sexuality and Translation in World Politics, (Bristol: E-International Relations, 2019). Pedro Neves Marques, ed. YWY, Searching for a Character Between Future Worlds: Gender, Ecology, Science Fiction, (London: Sternberg Press, 2021). Angela Y. Davis, ‘Why Arguments Against Abolition Inevitably Fail’, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons, Level. Medium, October 6, 2020. < https:// level.medium.com/why-arguments-against-abolition-inevitably-fail-991342b8d042> Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, (Rotterdam: NAI010 Publishers, 2020). Araceli Tinajero, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, trans. Judith E. Grasberg, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). Taru Spiegel, ‘Luisa Capetillo: Puerto Rican Changemaker’, Library of Congress, 18 November 2019. (retrieved 20 February 2020)

Luisa Capetillo, Absolute Equality: An Early Feminist Perspective, Influencias de la sideas modernas, Lara Walker, trans. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2009). Luis Othoniel Rosa, The Tobacco Intergalactic School (Postnovis Branch in the Americas)’ Feb. 1st, 2019 – Feb. 1st, 2031 www.loudreaders.com

Jennifer Ceema Samimi, Funding America’s Nonprofits: The Nonprofit Industrial Complex’s Hold on Social Justice, Columbia Social Work Review, 8(1), 17-25 (2019).

c ory e h t n ter subal ue q t i r c trans ism n i m e f t nis abolitio

MEDIA narrative architecture loudreaders trade school how-to w orkshops commu nity des ign-bui altern ld ative p ublish alter ing nativ e curat hete orial rodo x repr criti esen cal s tatio kyn t oryb n ical o a r coll ds inte a g r e inte active tec hno com ractiv e log m i n y s u acc tall n i t atio fre esibl y eng ns eo age eu nli niv me ne nt p ers pla ity lat tfo for rm ms s

PLANTATION

PRACTICE

The Dialectical Double spiral is a tool of anti-capitalist realism, part of the post-colonial method. The spiral uses as a model the definition of “Feminist Poethics of Blackness.” See Denise Ferreira da Silva “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” The Black Scholar, 44:2, 81-97, 2014.

WHITE SUPREMACY

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Anti-Racist Spiral

EDUCATION

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MODERNITY

Interactive Installations: Emancipating models of architectural pedagogy must find ways to take the education of architecture outside of the university studio into spaces where children, elderly communities, and people with diverse forms of physical and intellectual disabilities can participate in the processes of imagining new worlds. Through interactive installations, architectural pedagogy can engage with models of knowledge exchange that inform the ways architecture is conceived, maintained, and manipulated.

Accessible Online Platforms: Anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist models of education must constantly explore platforms that are accessible across geographic and class boundaries, and through diverse bodily and intellectual sensibilities. Online platforms provide a unique opportunity to take 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 infrastructure laid out in place by hegemonic and ableist institutions and instead formulate universes that operate 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 collective intelligence of critical architecture with new languages, vocabularies, concepts, and forms of expression. Critical, radically inclusive, and solidary utopias must develop, master, rekindle, and share accessible anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist online platforms.

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Interactive Technology: Rather than accept the passive relationship with technology (from A.I. to robots), an anti-racist and anti-ableist approach to architectural pedagogy would demand an approach that considers the power of interactive technology as strategies for the inclusion of previously marginalized communities and disabled people.

Community Engagement Platforms: Anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-ableist architectural approaches must develop platforms for 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 pedagogical 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 who is formed by and comes from the community.

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Kynical Collage: Understanding that architectural images are political as much for what they show as for 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 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 content of references, spaces, frame-works, and positions in the construction of architectural images.

ACTION TR EX

SM LI

Critical Storyboards: Critical storyboards that feature diverse voices, perspectives, experiences, struggles, desires, and imaginaries are central to the possibility of critical forms of inclusive and anti-racist architectural presentation and representation. In the same way that cinema, documentary journalism, and post-internet 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 storyboards. Against the standardization of the heteropatriarchal, ableist, and Eurocentric narrative voice, new possibilities of Black, trans, queer, two-spirit, subaltern, subversive, alternative, invisible, anti-hegemonic, disabled, anti-capitalist, Indigenous voices, positions, sensibilities, and experiences can be rendered imperative, present, active, and solidary.

This dialectical double spiral uses the anti-racist spiral to confront the closed, self-destructive, white supremacist loop of Euro-American Modernity and its tools of “universal reason” (including architecture and education) with the transparent narratives of science and history.

ARCHITECTURE ECOCIDE

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Heterodox Representation: While the practice of drawing and imaging in architecture remains anchored in orthodox traditions, hetedorox strategies of presentation and representation that borrow from what are perceived as other disciplines is fundamental to the possibility of generating alternative models of architectural pedagogy. Heterodox forms of representation should engage with discourses and media outside of the institutionally perceived boundaries of architecture.

UPATION OCC

Dialectical Double Spiral of Modernity /Modernities

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tions that generate content. Critical and emancipating curatorial practices should find platforms outside the institutions responsible to construct hegemonic architectural narratives.

PART 3

After School

After School

Un-Making Architecture An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture is too obsessed with making. Trained as yes men and women, the vocation of the architect mostly exists and subsists as an appendix of hegemonic power. This power, always overwhelming and undisputable, 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 naive 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 terrorize 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.

C APITALISM Capitalism is often sold as a utopian dream of free markets and unobstructed, post-ideological competition. B UILDINGS Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foundations of the institutions that fund, envision, and desire them. Buildings are physical manifestations of the ideologies they serve. Although a naively detached or romantic position may be able to render buildings as semi-autonomous artifacts capable of sheltering or enveloping space, this depoliticized attitude overlooks their historical and material relationship to regimes of violence and terror. Buildings can protect but they can also confine, instill fear, crush, oppress. Buildings can school and foment hospitality but can imprison and torture. Buildings can be tools for ethnic segregation, cultural destruction, and historical erasure. Buildings can reinforce the status quo and aide in the implementation of settler-colonial desires of expansionism. An anti-racist democratization of access is only possible through the decolonization of buildings and public spaces. Architects should be aware of the programs of the buildings they design and be held accountable for doing so.

L INKS 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 neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and digital technologies.”1 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 transatlantic 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.

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However, as corporations, powerful lobbyists, and dominant classes build their power on the legacy of exploitation 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. In the footsteps of this legacy and 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 foment and maintain the status quo via the accumulation of wealth having enormous repercussions in the opportunities (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-colonial 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 in order to demolish the mechanisms of exploitation and the accumulation of wealth, and allow truly equitable, fair, and dignifying spaces to flourish.

K INSHIP Kinship may be a poetic aim to find alliances, but the empty hope rendered by milquetoast liberalism won’t be enough to eliminate anti-Black racism. The role of complicity played by institutions in the construction and perpetuation of the status quo is a real problem with material ramifications. It is not enough for academic and professional organizations to conveniently pen announcements that support Black and decolonial struggles if they do nothing to stop the design and construction of machines of oppression. Just like decolonization is not a metaphor, nor is anti-racism. The abstract call for making kin with one another is not a 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 sponsoring the architectures of anti-Blackness and racial oppression.

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V ALUE Value in contemporary societies is often confused with the illusion of a wealth that can be measured either through the accumulation of commodities or through the speculative ether of financial capital. In these scenarios, commodities, including architecture or architectural elements, could acquire a mystical status. The question that remains is, what is the value of architecture as a commodity in comparison to the value of a Black life? Can a broken window, a graffitied wall, or a burned police precinct be the equivalent of or more valuable than Black life? In this white-supremacist system of values are Black, brown, and Indigenous lives mere commodities that can be compared to disposable and replaceable objects and artifacts? After all, what is the value of your architecture? What is the value of Black life?

E NVIRONMENT European colonization and the extension of its spatial horizon was fueled by genocide and environmental 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 postimperial military complex that maintains the chain of material, environmental, and human exploitation is directly linked to the destruction of ecosystems. “Militarism is the largest single cause of environmental destruction in the world. The US Military is the largest single pollutant in the planet and the largest single consumer of oil in the world. The Pentagon is BP’s largest client.”2 There’s no racial justice without the protection of the environment. It is not enough to use LEED certified materials or photovoltaic panels in buildings if they contribute to the postimperial military complex. We cannot argue for environmental justice while condoning and participating in processes of militarization, deforestation, and the desecration, occupation, and destruction of Indigenous territories. There’s no sustainable architecture to the service of the military. There’s no ecological justice if architecture contributes to environmental racism.

L AW Legal systems and the institutions that enforce them have historically obstructed true fairness, justice, and equality. The bloody and racist history of the judicial mechanisms and codes that brought the world that existed in the West Indies to the United States with the plantation as its core structure plants its rotten roots in a legacy of racist architecture and planning. In the same way that Jim Crow laws in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were legally sanctioned systems of anti-Black oppression today we are still battling 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 directives that allow for the control and oppression of Black, brown, and Indigenous populations. We must challenge the perverse use of public space as a militarized territory for surveillance and violence against Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, and trans people. We must demolish both the material and immaterial legacies of colonization, the plantation, Jim Crow, and Apartheid. It is not enough to abide by the law when the law is part of a racist apparatus. We must challenge the architectures of racist occupation, of gentrification, of environmental destruction.

IInstitutional NSTITUTIONS racism is the wizard behind the curtain of Oz. Institutional racism operates in the governing boards, hiring committees, and admissions evaluations. Institutional racism is responsible for fabricating and maintaining hegemonic discourses while punishing and obstructing the construction and free flow of alternative, ancestral, and anti-racist forms of knowledge. It is not enough for universities, schools, studios, and professional organizations to post solidary messages on their Instagram platforms when they create invisible walls around their ivory towers. It is not enough to hashtag BLM when they are designing buildings for policing, detaining, and incarcerating, when they maintain the status quo through biased processes of evaluation and biased demands. It is not enough for institutions to pen beautiful #heartfelt letters in solidarity with activists struggling against police and paramilitary forces while they continue building their endowments with the money of their settler-colonial legacies. If they are serious about demolishing their legacies of institutional racism, academic institutions must rethink their recruiting strategies to attract, stimulate, and create safe environments for both educators and students. Simultaneously, architecture schools must embrace the deconstruction of their curriculums to question not only the future of architecture, but to expose the racist past they helped construct.

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S TATISTICS Success cannot be measured in empty data charts and dubious demographic indicators. That data crunched

For the English and Spanish versions of the manifesto as well as the animated manifesto readings go to:

in predictive policing software has multiple connections to gentrification, dispossession, and harassment. Stop-and-frisk. Heavy Policing. Random checks. The war on drugs. The war on crime. The war on terror. These miscalculated policy moves have been justified by the misinterpretation of contextless numbers. Numbers that quantify the specificities of effects without looking at the causes. Numbers that without context are manipulated to justify the mass incarceration and mass homicide of Black and brown people. The same can be said about the Cartesian ideal of progress, its settler-colonial legacy, and the unquenchable thirst for growth. We must learn to create new parameters for architecture to operate without responding to empty statistics and without serving its racist and ideological technologies and agendas.

See also: Reading Design:

The Architect’s Newspaper:

Arquine: < https://www.arquine.com/manifiesto-de-la-arquitectura-antirracista/> Revista Claridad: < https://www.claridadpuertorico.com/deshaciendo-la-arquitectura-manifiesto-de-la-arquitectura-antirracista/>

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T RICKLE-DOWN Trickle-down justice doesn’t work, just like trickle-down economics proved to be a hoax, magic that didn’t work. Trickle-down architecture suffers from the same problem. If utopias can only be conceived by those privileged 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 the status quo, we must find ways to build networks of solidarity. Black, Indigenous, brown utopias must occupy the space previously reserved by white imaginaries. We need new utopias. Utopias from below. We need trickle-up utopias by means of anti-racist architectures.

E NCOUNTER Encountering these dreary scenarios, it is not enough to be apolitical or to not be a racist. Due to the rise of populism and increasing levels of risk, the fabrication of racial subjects has been reinvigorated nearly everywhere. We need to acknowledge our role in this reinvigoration and oppose vehemently its destructive intentions. We must employ our ways of reimagining the world to question the one we have created. It is imperative that we use our critical faculties to deconstruct our ways of imagining the world. Other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary.

M ONUMENTS Military, confederate, philanthro-capitalist, and colonizer monuments are part of an apparatus that rewrites, white-washes, legitimizes, standardizes, and erases a history of genocide, destruction, and racism while maintaining the status quo. Monuments refer us back in time, as they concretize in marble, granite, bronze, glass, and steel objects that carry a dead weight of a murderous history. Together with these avatars shaped after leaders of regimes of death, racism, and colonial exploitation, other architectures recreate the effect of the monument, albeit at a different scale: train stations, palaces of colonial administrators, bridges, camps, fortresses, stadiums, and also buildings for schooling, endowments, and museums. An anti-racist architecture must dismantle the construction of these monuments and question their role in the construction of a “style of power and domination. The remains of the potentate are the signs of the physical and symbolic struggle directed against the colonized.”3

R ADICAL Radical means to go into the roots. For architecture to be radical it has to dig deep into its past, present, and potential future role into perpetuating the origins of social fragmentation, oppression, colonization, and racism. We must undo the damage created by the complicity of architecture with these systems of oppression. We must un-make detention centers. We must un-make prisons. We must un-make the military. We need to un-narrate the history of architecture, and construct new narratives that expose the racist, settler-colonial roots of its capitalist development, of its modernism and desperate afterbirths. In order to make new forms of radical architecture, we must learn to un-make architecture.

A GNOSIA Architecture suffers from an agnosia similar to what José Saramago described in his novel about Blindness. In Saramago’s text, a pandemic makes all the characters lose their sight, awash in a blinding whiteness. Thick like milk, this white blindness expands, creating havoc and a system of exploitation and cruelty. Architecture suffers from a similar white agnosia. Unable to see its complicity with a legacy of oppression, architecture relies on guiding itself through the sensations of its white, masculine, decaying hands. We must find ways to recover sight, to perceive the diversity in front of us.

T HEORY The potential fusion of capitalism and racism carries with it a number of architectural and urban implications: Systematic risk, impoverishment, and debt, the emergence of new imperial practices that borrow from both, the enslaving logic of capture and predation, and the colonial logic of occupation and extraction. Under the rubric of capitalism and racism, architecture remains, on the one hand, a discipline that filters and distills the possibility of other worlds into a canonical European, white ideological construction. On the other hand, it continuously reproduces itself by means of more settler-colonial strategies that tirelessly destroy the environment for the creation of new settlements while endlessly gentrifying the already existing ones. New theories and practices must be developed and implemented in order to question, subvert, and oppose architecture as a tool for control, domination, and oppression. New forms of knowledge must abolish architecture as an extension of capitalism and racism.

1 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 2 The relationship between militarism and environmental destruction was borrowed from Anne McClintock, “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice,” December 2, 2020, TBA21, Ocean Archive. 3 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason The manifesto includes parts from: Mbembé, “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture, vol. 16 no. 3, 2004, p. 373-405. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/173738. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1963). Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

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APPENDIX

Labor

Against the Precarization of Anti-Racist Education Labor

“Adjunct faculty members, the group that the AAUP says was hardest hit by pandemic-related institutional turmoil, were paid an average of $3,843 per three-credit course section in 202021 — ranging from $2,979 at public two-year colleges to $5,557 at public doctoral universities.” For more info on precarious adjunct labor see: Rebecca Kelliher, “A Precarious, Unequal Tipping Point for Faculty,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, July 19, 2021. https://www.diverseeducation.com/facultystaff/article/15109679/a-precarious-unequaltipping-point-for-faculty

After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still Black, still strong. –Stephano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

Isha Trivedi, “Faculty-Pay Survey Records the Largest One-Year Drop Ever,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2022 https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-paysurvey-records-the-largest-one-year-drop-ever?

Even when they are dangerous examine the heart of those machines you hate before you discard them

In the same way that it is not possible to have an anti-racist architecture education (or education in general) that overlooks asymmetrical accumulation of wealth, insurmountable student debt, and inaccessible tuition fees, the insurmountable weight of effective, transforming, transgressing, revolutionary anti-racist labor cannot be expected to be carried by undervalued, underappreciated, precarious education workers. If antiracist education operates as a critique and fundamental rejection of systems of extraction, segregation, exploitation, objectification, subjugation, and tokenization, to be an education worker without access to healthcare, basic benefits, and living wages is antithetical, counterproductive, and further reinforces the systems of oppressions anti-racist practices seek to dismantle. How can an institution claim to be fighting against the historical effects of white supremacy when performing the necessary tasks of the subversive, anti-racist intellectual can result in harassment, persecution, and even unemployment, and therefore the loss of healthcare during a global pandemic and housing during times of historical inflation? How can adjunct faculty members and student-workers confront the dangerous machine of the university without job (and life) safety?

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Appendix

As we write this appendix, a series of laws are being passed across the United States of America that seek to dismantle what politicians and right-wing activists have called Critical Race Theory or “diversity” initiatives in universities. For the original source of the concept of Critical Race Theory and intersectionalism see: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago. edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 By education worker we will refer to teachers, student-workers, staff, and all involved in making academic education possible.

The role of labor in the anti-racist university is to provide a critical perspective on the many diverse, historical, material, systemic, and epistemological ways in which racism and in a specific case, whitesupremacy, manifests in educational spaces and institutions. From the standpoint of workers, this means highlighting the ways in which racism or white supremacist structures and practices affect not only their ability to do their jobs and to advance in their careers, but to be healthy members of a community. It also means calling attention to the ways in which the university benefits from the exploitation of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white workers. Ultimately, the goal is to create a more just and equitable university for all, one that recognizes and values the contributions of all its members, and one that takes into account the important role of those historically marginalized, tokenized, and instrumentalized. In an award-obsessed, publish-or-perish system that overvalues exposure and access to closed circuits and clout circles, how can the subversive anti-racist education worker practice their critical project when their labor focuses on questioning (and hopefully threatening) those very same systems? How can these forms of radical inquiry truly question the antidemocratic protocols, militaristic hierarchies, commodified prestige, and illusions of knowledge scarcity that the elite schooling system and neoliberal university relies on in order to extract the globalized flows of capital that their fabricated gravitas magnetically attracts? Can a group of precarious workers without job safety, meaningful mentorship, allocated and remunerated time, or resources for continuous anti-racist education (continue to) challenge the crushing weight of universities that refuse to materially confront their history? What steps are being taken by universities to disengage from the neoliberal jargon that disguises a form of client-centered asymmetrical experience to instead construct healthy, radically inclusive, sensible institutions where community could thrive? How to imagine a space for pedagogy that doesn’t use its resources to replicate itself (its practices, relationships, forms of knowledge), but that thrives to continuously address, question, and subvert its injustices, cruelties, hierarchies, endorsements, legacies?

–Audre Lorde, “For Each of You”

The anti-racist struggle is also a class struggle. As anti-racism fights its way to the historically hermetic collective intelligence that makes the architecture school, the academic content that makes the syllabus, the curriculum remains inseparable from its material and interpersonal manifestations. At the moment that academic institutions struggle to grapple with the urgency of dismantling (or at least, addressing) white-supremacist and heteropatriarchal practices, forms of knowledge, recruitment, and admissions, the few hiring initiatives, awards, and fellowships that have been created these past few years should not overshadow how precarity is also a symptom of oppression. Concrete manifestations of anti-racist praxis are the reinforced dam that can contain the destructive waves of even more predatory policies that seek to drown any form of attempt to question (let alone dismantle) the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal status quo.

The role of the anti-racist educator, non-teaching worker, or administrator (of the many new positions created to address the problematically abstract concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion), whose labor is undervalued and underappreciated, becomes even more precarious with structural forms of oppression that not only alienate the workers from their means of production, but alienate them from their own communities, forms of knowledge, and networks of care. To hire anti-racist education workers into violent and exclusionary academic settings is to set them for failure, excessive emotional labor, and distress. To exclude the additional labor that the anti-racist education worker has to undertake in order to create a wholistic education is to perpetuate the very same forms of structural oppression anti-racist education seeks to address.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, (New York: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2013) la paperson, A Third University is Possible, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

In an academic system, every time more obsessed with outcomes and metrics, how can we measure the value that anti-racist, anticolonial Black or Indigenous educators bring to universities built by Black slaves, on Indigenous land violently dispossessed, occupied, and commodified? How is the labor of the antiracist worker protected when these same universities have historically hired, funded, and rewarded whitesupremacist, misogynist, classist translators and appropriators of anti-racist, anticolonial, transfeminist labor? What are the protections provided to anti-racist education workers in a time of draconian legislation and persecution of any form of challenge to hegemonic manifestations of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism? How can anti-racist workers organize in an era of accelerated workers’ disenfranchisement? Can anti-racist workers find space in the university when toxic practices, problematic faculty and administrators, and the construction of abstract and arbitrary criteria of evaluation and process continue to be fostered by the status quo? Without protection and empowerment, are anti-racist education workers condemned to the basement where the undercommons and the third university take place? Are the pedagogies of the oppressed and the possibility of a deschooled society only possible as a marginal islands in the ever-expanding oceanic footprint of the university? Without the proper infrastructures of care and support, is anti-racist architectural education even possible?

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This manual is a tool produced by collective intelligence. Many of its references, strategies, concepts, and approaches are the result of countless exchanges with many of our friends, comrades, collaborators, colleagues, members of the Post-Novis Collective, and Loudreaders. Special thanks to re:arc institute, Alice Grandoit-Šutka, Isabel Flower, Justin Garrett Moore, Ilze Wolff, Léopold Lambert, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Hilary Wiese, Johnny Leya, Léone Drapeaud, Insaf Ben Othmane, 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, Deborah Hauptman, Raquel Salas Rivera, Ophelia S. Chan, Holly Craig, Ana Olmedo, Elena Águila, Ellen Larson, Sadé Hooks, Khensani de Klerk, Sumayya Vally, Douglas Spencer, Ivan Lopez Munuera, Andres Jaque, Tamar Shafrir, Daniel Jonas Roche, Rasheedah Phillips, Bryan Lee, Nora Akawi, V. Mitch McEwen, Paulo Tavares, Sean Anderson, Mabel O. Wilson, Nora Wendl, Bz Zhang, Dele Adeyemo, Parity Group, Arch+, Vera Sacchetti, Jasiri X and 1Hood, and our students at Iowa State University, Virginia Tech, Columbia University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and The School of Architecture at Taliesin. This printed issue benefited from many of the collaborations and conversations that were part of the process of co-editing the “Networks of Solidarity” issue of InForma Journal at the Universidad de Puerto Rico and the “Reparations!” issue of the Journal of Architectural Education. To the amazing Ema Yuizarix... 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 institutions and as practitioners engaging with the possibility of critical, subversive, and emancipatory Post-Colonial imaginaries. Through the constant ethos of asking ‘What about it?’ WAI Architecture Think Tank has been a workshop for architecture intelligentsia that allows us to speculate on the possibility of: Workshops for Anti-Racist Imaginaries Workshops for Anti-Ableist Imaginaries Workshops for Anti-Capitalist Imaginaries Workshops for Anti-Alienating Imaginaries Workshops for Anti-Imperialist Imaginaries Workshops for Anti-Heteropatriarchal Imaginaries Printing: ODDI Printing ltd.

“The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively. This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible.” - Introduction to the Syllabus ‘The Tobacco Intergalactic School (Postnovis Branch in the Americas)’ Feb. 1st, 2019 – Feb. 1st, 2031

This publication was made possible by financial support from re:arc institute and LOUDREADERS. LOUDREADERS Publishers 321 Main St Ames, IA 50010 First Online Edition 2020 First Printed Edition 2023 Design and Content: WAI Architecture Think Tank Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski Editors: Ronald Frankowski Isabel Flower ISBN 978-2-9544145-0-8 www.waithinktank.com www.loudreaders.com

WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK

WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK