Seminar Overview:

This course is the fourth and final graduate-level seminar on the built environment within the history, theory, and culture sequence of the M.Arch program. Arch 595 introduced students to the historical canon and traditions of architecture, Arch 596 introduced students to landscape as artifact and multi-disciplinary knowledge base for design thinking, and Arch 597 provided students with a multidisciplinary overview of contemporary theories related to the built environment. This course, Arch 598, again invites us to consider contemporary discourses on the built environment, this time with a specific emphasis on engaging topics outside of Europe and North America.

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This pedagogical framework raises the question: what characteristics define the built environment of Europe and North America such that a course should be dedicated to a scope beyond their boundaries? How and why are these defining characteristics differentiated from those found in Antarctica, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia/Oceania? If the human construction and modification of the environment is proportional to the economic resources available to a continent, then a corresponding analysis of wealth distribution may provide insight. According to a 2023 estimate from the International Monetary Fund, the per capita GDP (PPP) by continent are: North America $64.2K, Oceania $62.9K, Europe $50.1K, South America $19.5K, Asia $18.0K, Africa $6.3K, and Antarctica N/A. That is, despite only supporting 16.9% of the global population, Europe and North America account for more wealth per capita than the rest of the world combined.

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Within the context of a College of Design: how does this quantitative wealth disparity translate to qualitative differences in the built environments between Europe/ America and the rest of the world? Why did these disproportionate accumulations of capital and associated capacities for construction occur where they did? And, most importantly, why does the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few matter to the future generation of designers?

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Alongside these questions, consider the results of another study performed at the University of Bath, titled “Young People’s Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon”:

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Background: Climate change has significant implications for the health and futures of children and young people, yet they have little power to limit its harm, making them vulnerable to increased climate anxiety. Qualitative studies show climate anxiety is associated with perceptions of inadequate action by adults and governments, feelings of betrayal, abandonment and moral injury. This study offers the first large-scale investigation of climate anxiety in children and young people globally and its relationship to government response.

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Methods: We surveyed 10,000 young people (aged 16-25 years) in ten countries. Data were collected on their thoughts and feelings about climate change, and government response.  

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Findings: Respondents were worried about climate change (59% very or extremely worried, 84% at least moderately worried). Over 50% felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. Over 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change. Respondents rated the governmental response to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance. Correlations indicated that climate anxiety and distress were significantly related to perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.

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Interpretation: Climate change and inadequate governmental responses are associated with climate anxiety and distress in many children and young people globally. These psychological stressors threaten health and wellbeing, and could be construed as morally injurious and unjust. There is an urgent need for increases in both research and government responsiveness.

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This course posits that our collective overwhelming sense of negativity regarding the future, and governments’ glaring lack of responsiveness despite irrefutable evidence of climate change, isn’t due to global leaders’ unwillingness to take action, but rather their inability to do so. Everybody, including even the far-right climate change denying politicians, wants clean air and water. So if humans as a species collectively agree that conserving a healthy global environment is necessary, yet are unable to sufficiently address the issues causing the collapse of ecosystems at a planetary scale, where renders us impotent?

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The hypothesis for this course is that we, as humans, have invented abstract machines for governing ourselves at the scale of 8 billion people which, paradoxically, cannot be controlled by us. These entities (nations, states, multi-national corporations) were invented by us, but they aren’t us. They do not exist without us and have no material reality, but are rather ideas that consciously and unconsciously regulate the infinitude of relationships between us. Furthermore, this course suggests that our collective inability to organize and take action lies not solely with the lumbering dysfunctional political machinery of nations, states, and corporations, but also their alliances with a powerful yet dangerous 16th century European economic invention and a remarkably efficient source of energy: capitalism and fossil fuels, respectively.

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Capitalism, as an economic system built on interest rates, the privatization of land, and the commodification of all natural resources, it demands infinite growth on a finite planet with limited abilities to replenish its resources. Nevertheless it has succeeded in colonizing our subjectivities through the incessantly whispered mythology of the profit-motive, enriching a few (mainly Europeans and North Americans) while disenfranchising the rest. As an ideology which values profit over people, capitalism – or more precisely its contemporary form, what Félix Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) – has since the mid-19th century combusted with the historically unprecedented energy concentrations of oil, gas, and coal to fuel Europe and North America through the greatest economic expansion in the history of humanity. We are only now fully realizing the repercussions of this growth, and lack the ability to control the components which drive its dynamics, resulting in a world where 59% of its young people feel its future is doomed on account of our collective lack of ability to organize and control ourselves.

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If the invention of capitalism in 16th century Europe and its subsequent spread to North America are those continents’ defining characteristics over the last 500 years (including expressions of landscape, architecture, and urbanism) – and the unquenchable thirst for labor and land which underpins integrated world capitalism engendered planetary-scale European colonization and slave trades – then the necessity to study cultures, geography, architecture, and landscape, outside of Europe and North America comes into focus.

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But why Latin America? Why not Africa, Asia, and Oceania? Indeed, the built environments developed of those continents outside of the European and North American hegemonic sphere of influence should, and are, being studied. As capitalism toppled communism as the dominant planetary economic system in the second half of the 20th century, and its tendency to colonize and assimilate (i.e. annihilate) local cultures covered the globe, the astounding diversity of innovative design thinking which articulated those environments have been lost. The loss of the traditional ecological knowledge of Africa, Asia, and Oceania are slowly being recovered and reintroduced into Euro-centric design thinking, alas not fast enough and to the scale that is necessary to offset the negative impacts of Integrated World Capitalism and its addiction to fossil fuels.

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This course focuses our studies on the traditional ecological knowledge of ancient and indigenous built environments of Latin America, not as a retrograde nostalgic desire to turn back time and return to a pre-Columbian arcadia, but as a design research efforts geared towards understanding artifacts, material systems, architectures, landscapes, settlements, and cities through the lens of cosmology and ecology. If history is written by the victor, in this case the colonizing forces of Spain and Portugal, then we are interested in hearing the story of the colonized, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the dispossessed. It is in these voices, cosmologies, ecologies, and worldings that we find counternarratives to Eurocentric histories and develop dialectical analyses. It is through their stories, the reconstruction and celebration of their narratives, that we hope to collectively shift our thinking towards stewarding our planetary environment in new ways. If Frederic Jameson once famously stated that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” then we challenge him and refuse his cynicism by looking towards the ancient and indigenous assemblages of Latin America for notions of inclusive futurities beyond the limits of European and North American ideologies of colonial capitalism.

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Methods and Format:

The seminar will meet for 50 minutes on Wednesdays and 1 hr 50 minutes on Fridays. Wednesdays will be dedicated to the discussion of assigned texts or films to be read or watched in advance outside of class time. Students are expected to arrive to class on Wednesdays prepared for a critical discussion of the material, with a collection of quotes and corresponding notes developed as the basis for group discourse. Fridays will be dedicated to the collective development of An Incomplete Atlas of Latin American Assemblages. The atlas will consist of two parts, Part 1: Prehistory to 1492 and Part 2: 1492 – 2024. Students will work in groups of three, with each group focused on one of eight regions within Latin America. The instructor will provide feedback on groups’ research development through presentation reviews and desk crit formats throughout the semester.

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Learning Objectives:

The learning objectives of this seminar are:

1. the growth of students’ ability to engage in intellectual discourse on the built environment related to ancient and indigenous Latin America.

2.  the growth of students’ capacity to develop design research related to the built environment of Latin America from multiple perspectives, with an emphasis on understanding the differences and similarities between indigenous and settller colonial material systems.

3. the growth of students’ aptitude for considering the historical and theoretical relationships between architecture, global cultures, geography, landscape, and urban planning in Latin America.

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Readings:

Required readings will be shared with the class in advance on CyBox, or will be available at the Design Reading Room.

Belanger, Pierre, Pablo Escudero, and Ghazal Jafari. A Botany of Violence, 2021.

Bergson, Henri . Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 1900.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990.

Capetillo, Luisa. A Nation of Women, 1911.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera . A Ch’ixi World Is Possible: Essays from a Present in Crisis, 2018.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera , and Molly Geidel. Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa : On Practices and Discourses of Decolonisation, 2020.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, n.d.

Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, 2012.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 2014.

Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. S.L.: Verso, 2019.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 1961.

Félix Guattari. The Three Ecologies, 1989.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, 2000.

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 1971.

Graiber, David , and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Hayden, Tom. The Zapatista Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002.

hooks, bell. All about Love: New Visions, 1999.

Jones, Chris. The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality, 2023.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 2014.

Kopenawa, Davi , and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, 2010.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2005.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 2007.

Rolnik, Suely. Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious, 2023.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture without Architects : An Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, 1965.

Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I, 2010.

Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics II, 2010.

Watson, Julia. Lo–TEK : Design by Radical Indigenism, 2019.

Whitehead, Alfred North . Process and Reality, 1929.

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Students:

Adrian Saari, Amanda Lopes Altelino, Daniel Ricardo Mosquera Benitez, Derenik Mahmoodi, Ekra Alberunee, Emma De Jong, Golnoush Tavakkol, John Stensland, Kendra Schulz, Maryam Dalili Aghjehkand, Matthew Brau, Mustafa Kilinc, Neda Kordbacheh, Negin Tavoosi, Nivedita Hattarki, Pooja Agarwal, Rawya Osman, Reihaneh Esfandiari, Rutvi Ashvinbhai Goyani, Ryan Willison, Samuel Olorunfemi, Seyed Mohsen Bokaei Qomi, Smita Sabnam, Surya Gopalam

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Course Catalog Description:

A research seminar which considers a topic within contemporary discourses on the built environment outside of Europe and North America. The topic will be studied from multiple perspectives highlighting the historical and theoretical relationships between architecture, global cultures, geography, landscape, and urban planning. Credit counts toward fulfillment History, Theory, Culture requirements.