I have an overview provocation, which might be a good place to start (and will give us something ... more I have an overview provocation, which might be a good place to start (and will give us something to argue about). I found the unspoken parts in this book to be very productive in articulating a field of art, design, and architectural histories attempting to resolve its own violences. Designed objects as subjects of discourse or history cross epistemic borders, but as we know, histories of design, art, and architecture-as well as their critical counterhistories-are often coded as northern, white, masculinist, or universalist. The epistemic asymmetries between different chapters of the book indicate a thought process still in formation within the field, on decoloniality: a concept of restoration, which, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, distinguishes the bureaucratic and administrative functions of "colonialism" in the past from the conditional, affective, and everyday aspects of "coloniality" that continue into the present. IRIT KATZ: I very much agree that the violences of modern universalist designs, which are inherently linked to coloniality and are core to how the field of architectural design has been shaped, reappear in the various sections of this book. For me, the added value of this volume is the additional layer of seriously discussing design and displacement through the prism of colonialism and coloniality-or as Walsh and Mignolo describe it, the modern/colonial matrix of power. 1 In a departure from how coloniality is usually discussed in other fields, such as geography and sociology, here design is understood not only as a field of knowledge but also as a practical tool inherent to coloniality-that is, to modern/colonial patterns-a tool that might in itself produce displacement in different contexts, including the unstable contexts of displaced people.
This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historic... more This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre-her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft-through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her 'archives', documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft-interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.
In this collection, we examine people, places, and things as diffracted through migration. Migrat... more In this collection, we examine people, places, and things as diffracted through migration. Migration is an event and a concept. Diffraction is what happens in the moment when energy meets an obstacle. The feminist histories collected here speak of that moment.History & Complexit
W riting Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century gathers togeth... more W riting Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century gathers together recent scholarship to explore the opportunities presented by rethinking issues of evidence and narrative in architectural history. Unifying the volume is a set of intertwined questions: What kinds of evidence does architectural history use? How is this evidence organized in different narratives and toward what ends? What might these concerns tell us about architectural historians’ disciplinary and institutional positions in the past and present? And finally, how can consideration of evidence and narrative help us all reimagine the limits and the potentials of the field? These matters have not generally been addressed in architectural history.1 The twenty numbered chapters in Writing Architectural History represent a broad range of subjects, from medieval European coin trials and eighteenthcentury Haitian revolutionary buildings, to Weimar German construction firms and present-day refu...
I have an overview provocation, which might be a good place to start (and will give us something ... more I have an overview provocation, which might be a good place to start (and will give us something to argue about). I found the unspoken parts in this book to be very productive in articulating a field of art, design, and architectural histories attempting to resolve its own violences. Designed objects as subjects of discourse or history cross epistemic borders, but as we know, histories of design, art, and architecture-as well as their critical counterhistories-are often coded as northern, white, masculinist, or universalist. The epistemic asymmetries between different chapters of the book indicate a thought process still in formation within the field, on decoloniality: a concept of restoration, which, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, distinguishes the bureaucratic and administrative functions of "colonialism" in the past from the conditional, affective, and everyday aspects of "coloniality" that continue into the present. IRIT KATZ: I very much agree that the violences of modern universalist designs, which are inherently linked to coloniality and are core to how the field of architectural design has been shaped, reappear in the various sections of this book. For me, the added value of this volume is the additional layer of seriously discussing design and displacement through the prism of colonialism and coloniality-or as Walsh and Mignolo describe it, the modern/colonial matrix of power. 1 In a departure from how coloniality is usually discussed in other fields, such as geography and sociology, here design is understood not only as a field of knowledge but also as a practical tool inherent to coloniality-that is, to modern/colonial patterns-a tool that might in itself produce displacement in different contexts, including the unstable contexts of displaced people.
This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historic... more This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre-her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft-through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her 'archives', documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft-interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.
In this collection, we examine people, places, and things as diffracted through migration. Migrat... more In this collection, we examine people, places, and things as diffracted through migration. Migration is an event and a concept. Diffraction is what happens in the moment when energy meets an obstacle. The feminist histories collected here speak of that moment.History & Complexit
W riting Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century gathers togeth... more W riting Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century gathers together recent scholarship to explore the opportunities presented by rethinking issues of evidence and narrative in architectural history. Unifying the volume is a set of intertwined questions: What kinds of evidence does architectural history use? How is this evidence organized in different narratives and toward what ends? What might these concerns tell us about architectural historians’ disciplinary and institutional positions in the past and present? And finally, how can consideration of evidence and narrative help us all reimagine the limits and the potentials of the field? These matters have not generally been addressed in architectural history.1 The twenty numbered chapters in Writing Architectural History represent a broad range of subjects, from medieval European coin trials and eighteenthcentury Haitian revolutionary buildings, to Weimar German construction firms and present-day refu...
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