Teaching in Tumultuous Times
Two years ago, when we launched PLATFORM, we included a section for articles about teaching and working in anticipation, in part, of finding an academic community among our readers. We did not know that the COVID-19 pandemic and a summer of BLM protests would soon force swift and dramatic changes in how we teach, where we teach, and what we teach.
Fresh imperatives to decolonize curricula and scrutinize the legacies of settler (and non-settler) colonialism in shaping the landscape, coupled with the exigencies of the climate crisis, altered our historical imagination, design practice, and pedagogy. Many of us who teach introduced new content and methodologies (building upon a longer, ongoing conversations about the relationship between history and architecture, landscape design, and urban planning). Much of this effort was aided by collaborative, open-source bibliographies and other spaces on the Internet to share materials. It was also aided by PLATFORM.
Since spring 2020, our site has become a forum for making the case for changes in curricula and for sharing cutting-edge ideas for history classes and studios. And so, as we head into a new academic year, we are rereading some of the many articles we have found useful in thinking about teaching. Although focused on pedagogy, the reach of these pieces into the domains of history and memory, materials and construction, racism and the social responsibility of architecture and urbanism, we hope, will also resonate with those who are not teachers.
A first set of articles focuses on a recurring theme in our pages: the social and environmental responsibility of practitioners.
Jessica Sewell’s and Andrew Johnston’s “Rethinking History in Design Education Through the History of Materials” encourages us to ask students to actively engage with the history of the materials with which they design. “Materials,” Sewell and Johnston argue, have histories that “deeply affect the ways they have been used, the meanings they carry, and the consequences of their use.”
Figure 1. Architecture students wearing hats they made out of paper as a foundation studio assignment at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. Photograph by Jessica Sewell, 2012.
Thaisa Way’s “Why History for Designers?” extends Sewell’s and Johnston’s argument and asks, “Where is the voice and imagination of the designer in grappling with the legacy of enslavement, indigenous genocide, Japanese internment, the oppression of women, LGBTQ+, or those with a different range of abilities? Do we truly think we can address the root causes of climate change without considering how we have come to be a society dependent on fossil fuels? Or, how can we provide clean water without acknowledging a long history of neglecting the public health of our most vulnerable communities?”
In “Architectural Humanities in the Time of Pandemic and Revolt,” Michael R. Allen argues that suspension of in-person teaching offered an opportunity—one still worth considering—to recenter professional education in humanistic inquiry. The pandemic, he writes, presented an opportunity to shift focus in architecture schools from how “to secure lucrative commissions” to “digging into questions and values.”
Stephen Leet’s “Teaching Architectural Design in Xenophobic Times” describes his efforts in leading architecture studios in Italy and in St. Louis, Missouri, to draw students’ attention to the “parallels between the xenophobia and racism of the past and the present.”
A second set of articles urges us to “decolonize” our approach to spatial history and to move beyond habitual neglect of disability, race, class, and gender.
Figure 2. BLC Field School students interview community residents in the basement of the Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Fall 2019. © BLC Field School.
D. Medina Lasansky’s “Unhiding History” documents her experience teaching a new seminar about the impact of the built environment on users whom designers too often forget, including those with differently abled bodies and who service buildings, like house cleaners.
In “Walking the Field in Milwaukee” Arijit Sen took us on a tour of Milwaukee’s “disinvested, poor, and Black,” Northside in an architectural history lesson of how to read and collaboratively theorize this landscape of resistance, creativity, and community.
In “Histories of Architecture and Feminism,” Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi relayed how, inspired by the Center for Research on Women at her college’s archives, she created an undergraduate course teaching students to “gather diverse histories of architecture and feminism.”
And William Littmann proposes a course model in which students play a role in choosing what is covered in the course in “How I Found the Courage to Decolonize my Syllabus.”
Figure 3. Eno Chen, “NYC Kitchen Models: Evolving Spaces of Domestic Resistance” exhibit, December 2018. Photograph by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi.
Together these articles serve as roadmaps for rethinking architectural education today, as we negotiate profound social and technological change. Recognizing the need for the classroom to be a thinktank for the future of architecture and its histories, our authors propose novel pedagogical insights that we hope will inspire our readers – practitioners, teachers, and students alike.
