I cherish working with students. I offer undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of architecture and the built environment, especially thinking from Africa and South Asia. My courses examine histories of materialities and landscapes; architectural histories of colonialism and empire; environmental humanities; and relationships between aesthetics, politics, and ways of knowing.
My doctoral and post-doctoral advisees work on histories of migration and settlement, histories of land and partitions, histories of heritage politics and craft practices, critical ecological practices and cultural production, intellectual histories, collectivity, and past and present pedagogical practices in art and architecture. I have advised undergraduate and master’s theses in architectural history, art history, anthropology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and religion. I have also enjoyed years of teaching architecture studios at introductory, advanced, and thesis levels.
I am growing my historical knowledge and familiarity with discourses on ecological environments, crafts production, and other material and aesthetic practices cultivated in specific habitats, and am interested in working with students who want to cultivate this area of inquiry.
Courses
Abolition Architecture
Jesse Krimes, Apokaluptein 16389067: II
Installation at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, 2015
This seminar introduces students to histories of abolition through constructed environments and artistic, material, and spatial practices. We study abolition of slavery, prisons, and borders during a period from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the distinct social movements and discourses sparked by these very different abolitionist targets, we examine the political, ethical, and aesthetic intersections that emerge.
We investigate these problems through architecture, landscapes, material culture, and art,
studying primary works, secondary texts, and methods. The course emphasizes study through
historical reasoning as well as analysis of sensorial and affective material. This multimodal approach is necessary in studying forms of injustice in order to comprehend unfreedom, a paradoxical concept that produces cognitive dissonance, because it counters liberal reason.
The course draws on architectural history as crucial to illuminating how place, space, design, and planning of built environments have enacted and archived people’s unfreedom, and relies on intersectional feminist and critical race frameworks to understand abolition as part of a tradition of emancipatory thought and teaching. We study practices and institutions that have produced and shaped enclosure and incarceration in contexts around the world, placing abolition in dialogue with the anticolonial. The course illuminates the roles that both reform and radical refusal have played in abolitionist struggles for spatial justice, and maintains attention to material, spatial, and aesthetic practices throughout.
Architecture and Environments of South Asia
Aslam Saiyad, @ bombay_ka_shana
Post #02, The Last Bhistees of Mumbai series: https://youtu.be/sHhiLjkWzYw
This course examines the entanglement of architecture and environments of the South Asian subcontinent, its diasporas, and the transregions connected with it conceptually and materially (Afrasia, Southeast Asia, SWANA, the Middle East), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We unearth South Asian questions, perspectives, and histories through buildings, landscapes, artworks, design, photography, texts, and other media and ephemera, to understand the relationship between architecture and the environment during a period of dynamic historical change. The course provides an introduction to figures, institutions, and discourses that were critical in the formation of schools and the foundation of fields concerned with histories of craft and constructed environments, in the real and imagined location/s of South Asia as a locus of empire, colony, and postcolony. Through materialities of concrete and bamboo; monsoon, forest, and delta environments; and contested territories from partitioned land to refugee encampments, we examine iconic and ordinary forms in a history of architectures, geographies, and ecologies that have become urgent for theorizing South Asia in the world.
Colonial Practices
This seminar considers colonial practices through architectures, institutions, and ecologies around the world. Each week, we study aesthetic and spatial practices alongside Black and Brown consciousness, Feminist, Indigenous, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. The places around which maps have been constructed, across which migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured form the intellectual problems of this course and strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with the constructed environment.
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Students lead discussions on shared readings, co-produce collaborative research with community partners for public dissemination, and write papers based on individual research. Our collective studies examine archives of colonial practices, museum-based institutional critique, insurgent art and design practices, and forms of geographical counter-cartography and architectural counter-occupation. Students are expected to conduct in-depth independent research, bringing their own interests and objects of historical inquiry into the course, and special sessions of the course will be targeted toward the development of students’ scholarly research and methods.
Constructing the Uganda Railway in British East Africa, culvert at mile 348 National Museums of Kenya
Histories of Architecture and Feminism
This seminar introduces students to feminist histories of the constructed environment. We examine architecture, art, urbanism, ecology, and material culture alongside feminist theory and pedagogy, in relation to the dominant practices that have driven the making and study of modern environments. Shared readings and discussion in this course attend to the construction of knowledge and deconstruction of power-knowledge formations as a liberatory feminist practice, centering on intersectional feminist histories of abolition and resistance in the built environment. Students in this course work in institutional archives (Avery Drawings & Archives and Barnard Archives and Special Collections) and engage directly in the construction of collections, curating a selection of archival materials along the themes raised in the course. This approach reveals the agencies and imaginations behind history writing, and the ways in which the focus on the material, aesthetic, and architectural can open up new avenues of understanding the past. Each student’s curated materials inform a final written project on historiographical methods, which contextualizes the institutional and ephemeral archives behind the histories we tell of the constructed environment, and the histories it reveals.
Histories of Architecture and Feminism windowsill exhibition, Barnard Archives and Special Collections, 2018
Life Beyond Emergency: Ecologies and Inhabitations of Migration
Refugee camp at Dadaab, Kenya, photo: Brendan Bannon/IOM/UNHCR
This course examines constructed environments and spatial practices in contexts of displacement, within the connected histories of colonialism and humanitarianism. People migrating under duress, seeking refuge, practicing mutual aid, and sheltering in governmental or nongovernmental settings invest in the built environment as a holder of knowledge, critical heritage, and imaginaries of life beyond emergency. The course considers a politics and poetics of architectures and infrastructures of partitions, borders, and camps: territories and domesticities of concern to authorities and inhabited by ordinary people forging solidarities and futures. We will investigate the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism, which have not only shaped lives as people inhabit spaces of emergency, but produced rationales for the construction of landscapes and domesticities of refuge, enacted spatial violence and territorial contestations, and structured architectural knowledge. The course examines iconic forms such as refugee camps in relation to colonial institutions such as archives. From Somalia to Palestine to Bangladesh and beyond, our inquiry into contested territories where people have been forced to migrate invites students to interrogate the normalized discourses and spaces, for example, of ‘borderlands,’ or ‘refugees,’ in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as constructions that people have resisted, endured, transcended, theorized, and inhabited.
Modern Architecture in the World
Edgar J. Kaufmann house, “Fallingwater,” under construction. Courtesy of Avery Library Drawings and Archives
How has architecture been “modern”? This course will introduce students to this contentious and contradictory concept emerging across the world during a time in which ideas and tools similar to ours were used for seeing and ordering constructed environments and architectural thinking. It introduces students to the history of modern architecture as an art of building as well as a discursive field, whose historical consciousness played a part in its historical development. Students will learn about the following things (via the structures and institutions through which they were recorded):
- Architecture as made, thought, and taught—as enmeshed with power and ideas, social concerns, intellectual and public debates, and diverse forms of cultural production
- Makers, thinkers, and organizers of the designed or built environment
- Material ends and means of extraction, refinement, trade, labor, and construction
- Sites, institutions, media, events, and practices which have come to hold meaning in architectural discourse
- Cultural concerns with the future and the past as a basis for architectural theory
- Modernity, modernism, and modernization as drivers for past events as well as their historical narration
- The conceptual writing practices of history, theory, criticism, and revision.
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The course is structured chronologically, but rather than presenting a survey of buildings, events, and people, it encourages experiential learning around episodes that informed the development of the built environment and the architecturally “modern.” Students will gain hands-on practice in researching and writing architectural history, theory, and criticism: skills that lie at the basis of conceptual architectural practices.
Modern Architecture of South Asia
Lalit Kala Akademi Library, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi. Architect: Habib Rahman.
Photo: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, 2018.
This course examines architecture of the South Asian subcontinent and its diasporas in the 19th and 20th centuries, through building, landscape, art, design, photography, writing, and other media and ephemeral activity. We study celebrated and understudied figures (such as Begum Samrū, Sris Chandra Chatterjee, Otto Koenigsberger, Minnette de Silva, Habib Rahman) and institutions (such as the Archaeological Survey of India, the Sir J.J. College of Architecture, the Dhaka Urban Study Group, the Sri Lanka Architecture Art Archive). We read writings that founded a discipline (by James Fergusson, Stella Kramrisch, Ananda Coomaraswamy) and modernist organs that captured its discourse (journals such as MARG, Design, Mimar), which connected architecture with the fine and applied arts. In the planning and growth of urban sites from Kathmandu to Lahore to Dharavi to Jaffna, and in contested territories from the Rohingya refugee camps to the Kashmiri line of control to the rocket launch district in Thumba, we debate the architectural and territorial history of war, scarcity, and borders, for which South Asia has been emblematic.
Partitions, Borders, Camps
Families separated while fleeing across new borders in 1947 were reunited at Kingsway camp in Delhi where refugees were housed, as barracks at the ends of multiple rail lines in the city could not accommodate them. (Photo and text: Siddiqi and Zamindar, “Partitions: Architectures of Statelessness , e-flux 2022).
This seminar turns a lens on partitions, borders, and camps. Whereas these iconic forms have been studied most often through legal, policy, or social science lenses, we will consider them conceptually, aesthetically, and historically as complex practices of architectural formmaking in the long twentieth century. The partition, the border, and the camp can each be understood as a legal and territorial concept, a symbolic and aesthetic marker of violent land demarcation, a material environment, and an intersection of spatial practices. Through careful readings and discussion, we will look closely at each as an illumination of irreducible entanglements between politics and aesthetics, and sensible expressions of colonial practices that persist in the built environment.
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In this course, students examine histories of partitions from Ireland to Somalia to Pakistan, and their reification as borders. Understanding partition as a concept and a process rather than a determinate end, the course examines histories of built environments that create the illusion of determinacy by reinforcing territorial markers: whether through large intentional projects, for example, the construction of a new state capital at Chandigarh in India, or less direct authorizations in design and form-making, for example, the responsive humanitarian or detention architectures of camps and production of borders in Palestine and East Africa. The course will examine the robust discourse on the materialities of borders, thinking beyond the construction of walls to sometimes obscured forms of spatial anchoring across divides, for example, mediatic traversals, animal crossings, or the work of crowds. The course examines histories of camps, from the concentration technologies used during the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Boer War in South Africa in the nineteenth century to twenty-first century ephemeral environments enabling people to crystallize forms of dissidence, whether at Wall street in New York or Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. We analyze processes by which the refugee camp enclosure racializes, genders, sexualizes, ethnicizes, and controls bodies, precipitating a self-partitioning by asylum seekers in the performance of vulnerability. Although camps serve as repositories of power (for example, whether as a last stand in a resistance or an environment for subjection of a population), and regardless of their orientation toward control or care (for example, whether made to confine migrants or to shelter refugees), their constructed environments are iconic for their impermanence, and it is precisely their partial persistence that establishes them as epistemic sources often needing to stand in for missing documentary archives.