Conversation Rooms: Critical Dialogues in Architectural History and Theory at the GSA, Johannesburg

Abstract

This paper discusses Architectural History and Theory at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg in 2019. The curriculum is centered on a series of conversations as the means to generate forms of engagement for a plurality of voices, contested views and dialogic encounters, as a way of working toward an alternative institutional imaginary. The focus on conversation and dialogue aims to create a space for slow and shared scholarship, to become a manifestation of spatial resistance to the imperatives of the neoliberal university and global economies of higher education. This paper discusses some of the key conceptual and practical moves undertaken in the development of a new history and theory course through examples of student work. The paper points to inclusive and reflexive pedagogical methods and modes of collaboration as central to resistance, and as the means that enable generative and supportive networks across geographic and institutional boundaries.

Keywords:

• architecture
• architectural pedagogy
• architectural theory
• postcolonialism
• race

Notes

1. Gugulethu Mthembu, “The Port of Sihr” (MArch thesis, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, 2019).

2. Lesley Lokko, “A Minor Majority,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2017): 387–392; Fees Must Fall protests took place in 2015 across South African universities. While initially spurred by the Rhodes Must Fall movement, directed at the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, the later widespread protests focused on student demands for decolonising the curriculum and free access to higher education.

3. Lesley Lokko, “African Space Magicians,” in …And Other Such Stories, eds. Yesomi Omulu, Sepake Angiama, and Paulo Tavares (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019).

4. Ibid., 389.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Much of the existing research on modern and post-independence architecture on the African continent focuses on the role of expat architects from Poland, Israel, Germany and, notably, Britain among others.

8. Ikem Okoye, “Architecture, History and the Debate on Identity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa,” JSAH 61, no. 3 (2002): 382.

9. This is shown to still be the case in a more recent study by Mark Olweny which illustrates the dominance of technical aspects of architecture across sub-saharan Africa: Mark Olweny, “Architectural Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Investigation into the Pedagogical Positions and Knowledge Frameworks,” The Journal of Architecture 25, no. 6 (2020): 1–19.

10. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 8.

11. Lesley Lokko, White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture (London: Athlone Press, 2000).

12. Itohan Osayimwese, “Architecture and the Myth of Authenticity During the German Colonial Period,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22.

13. Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 4 (1999): 207–215.

14. There are a wide range of projects, including the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), and the 2020 revised Bannister Fletcher edited by Murray Fraser.

15. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

16. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, eds., Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

17. Anooradha Siddiqi, “Crafting the Archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture and History,” Journal of Architecture 22, no. 8 (2017): 1301.

18. Lokko, “A Major Minority,” 390.

19. Ahmed, On Being Included, 20.

20. Ibid., 21.

21. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

22. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Classics, 2008(1974)).

23. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988).

24. Miriam Tlali, Soweto Stories (London: Pandora Press, 1989).

25. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313, 301.

27. David Roberts, “Why Now: The Ethical Act of Architectural Declaration,” Architecture and Culture 8 (2020): 1–19.

28. Ibid., 9.

29. Gloria Pavita, “Manifesto,” Honours Architectural History and Theory (Johannebsurg: University of Johannebsurg, 2019).

30. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1986): 64–81.

31. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

32. Azraa Gabru, “Manifesto,” Honours Architectural History and Theory (Johannebsurg: University of Johannebsurg, 2019).

33. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, (1923)1985).

34. Leslie Kanes Weisman, “Prologue: Women’s Environmental Rights: A Manifesto,” (1981) republished in Gender Space Architecture, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–5.

35. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, ed. bell hooks (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 145–53.

36. See Instagram page @kota_vol.2_2020 Curated and designed by Mbali Vilakazi, Natalie Harper, Dylan Fernandes, Gio Rech and Claudine Williams.

37. Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoḡlu, “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘History of Architecture’,” Assemblage 35 (1998): 8.

38. Colloquium presenters included students and staff of the GSA, in addition to invited guests. They include: Gugulethu Mthembu, Leopold Lambert, Roanne Moodley, Farieda Nazier, Kgaugelo Lekalakala, Sumayya Vally, Suzanne Hall, Olasumbo Olaniyi, Israel Ogundare, Anja Ludwig, Sarah de Villiers, Atiyyah Khan, Thelma Ndebele, Anna Abengowe, Mark Raymond, and Huda Tayob.

39. Break//Line is a project of creative resistance by and for those who oppose the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice today. The Break// Line collaborative includes Thandi Loewenson, Miranda Critchley, David Roberts, Thom Callan-Riley and Sayan Skandarajah (Breakline.studio.com) @break_line_res

40. Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, Race, Space and Architecture: Towards an Open-Access (London, UK: 2019); See also racespacearchitecture.org (Huda Tayob, Suzi Hall, Thandi Loewenson).

41. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 156.

42. Ibid., 157.

43. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “For Slow Institutions,” E-Flux 85 (2017), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/.

44. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

45. Thandi Loewenson and David Roberts, “Institutional Imaginaries,” 10 September 2019. Available at: https://breakline.studio/projects/institutional-imaginaries#content; This note was intended to be presented as part of a roundtable conclusion discussion on the 10th of September, however due to a problem with the internet connection in Johannesburg it was sent as an email instead. It has since been published on Break//Line’s website.

46. Loewenson and Roberts, “Institutional Imaginaries.”

47. Ahmed, On Being Included, 14.

48. Loewenson and Roberts, “Institutional Imaginaries.”

49. Ahmed, On Being Included, 3.

50. Ibid., 6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huda Tayob

Huda Tayob is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town. She was former History and Theory of Architecture Programme Convener and co-leader of Design Unit 18 at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. She trained as an architect at the University of Cape Town and subsequently worked in architectural practice prior to completing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in 2018. Her doctoral research looked at the spatial practices of African migrants, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Cape Town, with a particular focus on mixed-use markets established and run by these populations. Much of this work is grounded in feminist approaches to both historiography and methodologies of practice. She received a Commendation from the RIBA President’s Medal Research Award committee for her PhD. Her wider academic interests include a focus on minor and subaltern architectures, the politics of invisibility in space, and the potential of literature to respond to archival silences in architectural research. Her recent publications include “Subaltern Architectures: Can Drawing ‘tell’ a Different Story” (Architecture and Culture, 2018) and “Architecture-by-migrants: The Porous Infrastructures of Bellville” (Anthropology Southern Africa, 2019).