Expanding the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism

This seminar is an enquiry into the boundaries of the Canons that dominate the discourse in Architecture and Urbanism globally. The seminar will interrogate the limits of the Canons propelled in the West — their histories and production cultures across material, political, economic and social spheres. Over the centuries, the legacy of colonization, the industrial revolution and globalization have insidiously proliferated monolithic, singular truths, which have dominated architectural and urban imaginaries in most geographies around the world. The philosophical underpinnings of modernity and the establishment of the global normative has conditioned the conversations of space and time largely to responding to and privileging the facilitation of universal tenets and notions of efficiency. This seminar intends to transcend these conservative, ideological imperatives that determine the contemporary understanding of cultural significance in the discourse of Architecture and Urbanism globally, and to draw theoretical frameworks from practices that often have been ‘othered’ by western dominance of the discourse in the academy as well as the professional media.  The intention of the seminar is to not locate the conversations in any one geography or in the various rubrics such as the global south etc., rather the intention is to develop theoretical frameworks around a shared or common set of issues and conditions that are shared by different geographies outside the west — (Europe and North America). Drawing from case studies largely from South Asia, but also Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia etc., the seminar will illuminate philosophical orientations, traditions and knowledge systems which allegedly fall outside of the standards, values, and prescriptions of the west, but have existed over thousands of years and display relevance in the broader discourse on Architecture and Urbanism today. Through reviewing architectural, cultural, urban practices, students will delve into the complexities of societies globally, understanding geographies and landscapes as inherently dialogic, relational, and interdependent.

Some of the questions that will be central to the seminar include the following. What forms of practices do the contemporary political, social, and economic conditions suggest and inspire in geographies beyond Europe and North America more broadly? As practitioners and pedagogues, what constitutes our values, significance, and agency? The seminar aspires to interrogate the tenets of modern thought and expand the Canon to rethink contemporary culture, public life and a more situated agency of the architect. And lastly, the seminar will also facilitate the discerning of models of practices in other geographies that could propel the process of expanding the Canon.