Archinect - Features

AI Bias and Digital Colonialism; A Conversation with Morehshin Allahyari

2023-10-16T08:16:00-04:00

Whether through her art, writings, or lectures, Morehshin Allahyari's work evokes a range of emotions among its audience. There is wonder and intrigue at her reinterpretation of centuries-old Middle Eastern stories, images, and artifacts. There is introspection on our preconceived views on concepts from open-source data to digital archiving. Finally, there is a blend of frustration and motivation to act as Allahyari takes us on a journey through the exploitative history of colonial power relations between the West and the Middle East.

Using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication, Allahyari warns us of a modern landscape in which power dynamics straddle both digital and physical worlds, articulating her theory of Digital Colonialism as a "framework for critically examining the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations." In an age of artificial intelligence, the messages and critiques found within Allahyari's...

Architecture Gave Me a Black Eye: A Note to Architectural Educators

2021-11-19T08:32:00-05:00

I was eight years old when I entered my first slave quarter—that was the first time architecture hit me. It was the first time that I can recall thinking about spaces that dictated where my race belonged. But, more than anything, the hit was mostly a surprise, and I questioned if something so much older and so much larger than me was allowed to hit me. Was I, in turn, supposed to fight back?

While I do not blame the building, I do, in fact, blame the education responsible for curating that experience. I can only imagine the difference felt if this field trip was anchored by discussions about inequality and self-worth, rations and resourcefulness, or degradation and fortitude. Instead, I spent my time on the plantation that day trying to figure out if I would have been a field slave or a house slave. In that moment, what everyone failed to realize was that whether they recognized it or not, the slave quarters were also telling my white classmates where they belonged. And just like ...

The AIA Praised Trump and Biden's Infrastructure Plans But Lacks Political Vision to Draw Connections to Structural Racism

2021-06-08T08:01:00-04:00

In November 2016, the Executive Vice President and CEO, of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Robert Ivy, issued a statement congratulating President-elect Trump and the new Congress. Speaking for the organization’s 95,000 members, Ivy said they were “ready to work” with Trump to improve America’s infrastructure. Within liberal and progressive circles, the backlash was swift, given the divisive nature of Trump’s infrastructure plans, which included significant expansion of the southern border wall with Mexico and more coal power plants.

Undoing Apartheid Architecture with Wandile Mthiyane

2020-07-23T09:52:00-04:00

Wandile Mthiyane’s story captures a special reality about architecture and its unique relationship to people. Growing up in Durban, South Africa, Wandile lived in a community designed as a part of the nation’s oppressive apartheid regime of the past. And while the unjust laws of that history have been abolished, the consequences of its effects remain. Wandile decided early on that he wanted to counteract the remnants of this “apartheid architecture” that loomed over his fellow South Africans, and so he embarked on a journey few would have the grit to see to the end.

Determined to study architecture in the United States, the young dreamer raised himself to a position to eventually gain the support of one of the most powerful men in Durban, a crucial step in his path to realize his vision of a better future for his people. Today Wandile is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ubuntu Design Group, a social enterprise design firm with a non-profit arm that is transforming the lives of families in ...

Archinect's Statement on Racial Injustice

2020-06-03T13:03:00-04:00

The Archinect team has written a statement in support of the powerful protests taking place around the United States (and the world) seeking justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others.

The Geometry of the World

2019-04-30T12:14:00-04:00

City-States

Permanent Crisis

The American City seems to exist now in a state of permanent crisis.

That is to say: our cities seem lashed to a self-renewing state of emergency driven by entrenched and multiplying acts of violence. We bear witness to police violence against civilians; civilian aggression towards officers of the peace and, inevitably, mass shootings by radicalized citizens against communities: Las Vegas, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Poway and so on and so on. Add to this ongoing acts of seemingly retaliatory public rioting and counter-violence organized by the citizen militias as far afield as Portland and Charlottesville. In this context and we can and should consider the possibility that our cities have become settings for persistent urban confrontations pitting citizens against citizens and civilians against the police, the very branch of local government retained to maintain a civil society.

Rethinking Frank Lloyd Wright: Thoughts from a trip through the Rustbelt

2017-09-07T12:00:00-04:00

While in New York this July I visited MoMA’s retrospective of Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘Unpacking the Archive’, an extensive collection of Wright’s production to celebrate his 150 year anniversary. Despite his revered position as America’s protégé architect and seminal figure—and having studied his work in the past—a number of surprising and unexpected thoughts from the show stuck with me during my subsequent month-long journey through the American Midwest. Both a pioneer of radical experimentation and a deep-rooted member of the status quo, Wright’s projects draw from many cultural histories and are, at times, divisive. But is it time the architecture press retires from reinventing Frank Lloyd Wright, the tireless self-publicist, and instead focuses the spotlight elsewhere? I discuss my thoughts with architect, cultural historian and Wright scholar Mabel O. Wilson, who currently teaches architectural history and theory at Columbia GSAAP.

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