Archinect - News

Thandi Loewenson honored with 2024 Wheelwright Prize for examining racial capitalism and Earth's resources

2024-06-27T10:00:00-04:00

The Harvard Graduate School of Design just announced this year's winning proposal for the coveted Wheelwright Prize, featuring an examination of colonial systems and racial capitalism from the UK-based Zimbabwe-born researcher Thandi Loewenson.

The $100,000 award is provided annually with the chance to give a lecture at the GSD and be published in one of five different school publications. Loewenson will have the chance to uncover "how we get free" through a series of what she calls "Black Papers," breaking down the "entanglement of Earth and Air" in the endemic landscape of seven different countries. The prize money supports her study of "Outer Space," which includes examining aerial land surveying techniques as well as the mining of precious metals used in smartphone devices and unwittingly underwriting a system of "digital dispossession" worldwide.

Loewenson, currently a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, also holds a PhD from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.

Tha...

Activists claim censorship as Mexico City plans to replace feminist 'anti-monument'

2022-08-22T14:16:00-04:00

Residents of Mexico City are decrying a decision by officials to remove a statue protesting gender violence that had been mounted by activists last year. El Universal reported that Claudia Sheinbaum, who serves as Head of Government in Mexico City (a position akin to a state governor), had made the call to remove the feminist “anti-monument.” The statue currently appears in a roundabout in the city, and will soon be replaced by another monument

Sheinbaum has previously announced the commission of artist Pedro Reyes to replace a colonial-era sculpture by Frenchman Charles Cordier that depicted Christopher Columbus in light of the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples protest last summer.

Previously on Archinect: Christopher Columbus statue to be replaced by a monument to Indigenous People in Mexico City

Reyes’ commission was quickly scrapped in favor of an “anti-monument” that debuted in its place on the roundabout in September, prompting officials to almost immediately announce it would be supplanted by a recently-discovered pre-Hispanic relic titled The Young Woman of Amajac. Now the non-hierarchical group behind the protest piece says Sheinbaum is dishonoring what has become a symbolic site for feminist causes nationwide.

“The government trying to take back anti-monument spaces is another way of them trying to silence us,” Ceci Flores, founder of the group Searching Mothers of Sonora, recently told Courtho...

Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) details the push behind its new name

2022-08-19T18:27:00-04:00

Concerns about the university’s association with and commemoration of Ryerson had been voiced by its Indigenous students, staff and faculty for years. How the university addressed those concerns with statements on its website or revised plaques placed next to Egerton Ryerson’s statue fell short of the steps necessary to speak to his legacy or the continued harm it was causing

Egerton Ryerson’s name is inextricably linked to the legacy of murder and abuse within Canada’s residential schools, as he is often cited as the system’s principal designer through his role as the country’s first Chief Superintendent of Education starting in 1844. This relation made the university a target of a nationwide protest movement which eventually took down a statue of the educator in a well-publicized June 2021 kerfuffle.

The rebranding was the product of a working group called Standing Strong (or Mash Koh Wee Kah Pooh Win) that convened with a 22-strong list of recommendations a year ago. Over 2,000 unique names (including the temporary 'X University' moniker) were considered in a public consultation. Dr. Eva Jewell, an Indigenous faculty member who detailed her own past experiences with racism at the school, tells University Affairs it "signals a willingness to listen and an attentiveness to the issues of our time."

Related on Archinect: National Gallery of Canada establi...

Artist Hew Locke will activate the Met facade with a quartet of trophy-like reflections on the museum's history and collection

2022-04-11T15:31:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced that Hew Locke will be the next artist featured in its provocative Facade Commission series.

The Guyanese-British artist’s effort is titled “Gilt” and will follow recent interventions by Carol Bove and Wangechi Mutu for the third version of the commission, which was begun in 2019 as the museum looked for new ways to engage its collections, history, and neoclassical exterior with the public and its newfound mandate for institutional self-reflection.

Hew Locke. Photo copyright Danny Cozens, 2020.

Architect Richard Hunt Morris was never fully able to realize his vision for the museum’s facade by the time of its completion in 1902. As a result, four extended niches were left empty until the commission began and will now showcase a quartet of trophy-like sculptures from Locke that are “informed by [his] deep knowledge of the Met’s collection and […] reference the institution in ways both direct and indirect,” according to Director Max Hollein....

Christopher Columbus statue to be replaced by a monument to Indigenous People in Mexico City

2021-09-07T15:41:00-04:00

As part of an International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples celebration in Mexico City on Sunday, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced a major new addition to a space in the city’s historic Paseo de la Reforma recently vacated by a monument to its colonial past.

Artist Pedro Reyes has now been commissioned for a replacement of a monumental bronze sculpture depicting Christopher Columbus by the Frenchman Charles Cordier that has moved around the city to its eventual place on the historic boulevard since being inaugurated by the controversial President Porfirio Diaz in 1877.

The statue was removed in October of last year in advance of the Dia de la Raza, a holiday that has in recent years drawn protests marking the arrival of the infamous colonizer in the Americas.

Reyes’ commission will depict an Indigenous woman from the Olmec civilization and come with a title that refers to a Uto-Aztecan word for “land.”

Franco Stella's $800 million reconstructed Humboldt Forum finally opens amidst controversy

2021-07-21T18:20:00-04:00

The long-awaited opening of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum took place yesterday afternoon, ending a years-long wait that saw a torrent of missives, protests, and other public backlash against the €680 million ($800 million) project hosted by the city’s Museum Island.

Franco Stella’s reconstructed royal palace stands as a "meeting place with the cultures of the world" in the city of roughly 3.8 million, maintaining within its mix of modern and Baroque styles a dual look at both the history of Germany and of its namesake. The latter being mired in controversy owing to the erstwhile Humboldt brothers’ involvement in Colonialism.

Originally set for an opening in 2019, its construction has been delayed several times because of overruns and a slate of technical issues. Faulty air conditioni...

Protesters in Canada have toppled monuments to Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II

2021-07-06T21:21:00-04:00

Two statues of queens on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature were pulled down Thursday during a rally aimed at replacing Canada Day celebrations with actions in memory of hundreds of Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country. [...] The grounds were the destination of an Every Child Matters walk in Winnipeg on Canada Day afternoon to protest the fallout of Canada's residential schools system.

The demonstrators were part of a Canada Day protest meant to draw attention to issues surrounding the forced removal and integration of 150,000 indigenous school children begun during Victoria's rule of the former UK Dominion. 6,000 of the children are reported to have died, and the recent discovery of the remains of 215 in an unmarked grave at a site near Kamloops in British Columbia has renewed calls for the observance of the holiday to be canceled.

Similar scenes have played out throughout the US and UK recently in light of the George Floyd protests, Charlottesville, and other events that have caused a sea change in societies grappling with their own ugly histories of racism and colonization.

Thousands of people attended the demonstrations in Manitoba's capital, Winnipeg. More details on the protest can be found at artnet.

Narendra Modi launches controversial effort to redesign India's parliament complex

2020-12-14T15:23:00-05:00

Despite widespread opposition, the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has begun a £2bn overhaul of Delhi's grand complex of government buildings in a bid to sever the nation from its colonial past. At a ceremony held last week, Modi laid the foundation stone for a new building to replace Parliament House, designed by English architects Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker, which upon its completion in 1927 became the seat of power for British-ruled India.

The ambitious plan by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to overhaul the sprawling complex of historic, colonial-era government buildings in Delhi is off to a rocky start: despite ceremonially laying the foundation stone for a new parliament building on December 10, further spending on the project was blocked by India's Supreme Court within the same week.

Since its official reveal in May, Modi's plan to have the heritage-listed central vista redesigned by architect Bimal Patel has been sharply criticized as an "expensive vanity project," including by Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor. In his Guardian Op-Ed, he writes: "Architecture is an effective propagandist tool. [...] This is not the redesign of buildings, it is instead Modi’s way of placing himself at the centre and cementing his legacy as the maker of a new Hindu India."

The new parliament building is expected to be ready for India's 75th anniversary of independence in 2022.

'Undoing of objectification:' Adjaye Associates unveils design for new Edo Museum of West African Art

2020-11-16T13:55:00-05:00

The three-story building, designed by David Adjaye, looks almost like a palace from the ancient Kingdom of Benin. On Friday, the architect, the British Museum and the Nigerian authorities also announced a $4 million archaeology project to excavate the site of the planned museum, and other parts of Benin City, to uncover ancient remains including parts of the city walls.

In October 2019, Adjaye Associates was selected to design a new museum to house historic artifacts looted by colonial powers in Benin City, modern-day Nigeria. Designs for this planned Edo Museum of West African Art were unveiled on Friday.

"We are proposing an undoing of the objectification that has happened in the West through full reconstruction," said Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye in a statement. "The new museum design reconstructs the inhabitation of these forms as pavilions that enable the recontextualization of artefacts. Decoupling from the Western museum model, this museum will perform as a reteaching tool — a place to instill an understanding of the magnitude and importance of these civilizations and cultures."

Image: Adjaye Associates

"Adjacent to the Oba’s Palace, the new EMOWAA draws inspiration from its historical architectural typologies and establishes its own courtyard in the form of a public garden, exhibiting a variety of indigenous flora and a canopy tha...

Colonial Williamsburg embraces its queer histories

2019-12-20T13:00:00-05:00

Alongside a wider effort to uncover and rediscover the lost and forgotten histories of historically marginalized groups and populations, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has recently taken steps to uncover the 18th century living-history museum's queer legacies.

In a recent report, Atlas Obscura takes a look at the nascent efforts being undertaken at Colonial Williamsburg to shed light on these historical narratives in order to present a more complete picture of the time.

Photo of the Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Humberto Moreno.

A recently formed research committee is digging through court records, historical accounts, and other forms of documentation pertinent to the era of the museum in order to better understand and communicate the lived experiences of people who did not conform to the gender or sexual norms of the time, with the eventual goal of incorporating these stories into the "living" aspects of the museum in some way.

Of par...

Adjaye Associates selected to design museum in Nigeria for repatriated artifacts

2019-10-04T13:39:00-04:00

Architect David Adjaye has been selected to design a new museum in Nigeria that may one day hold cultural and artistic works that were previously looted from the region by colonial powers.

Adjaye Associates, who helped design the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., has been commissioned to undertake a feasibility study with local partner Agram Architects for the new Benin Royal Museum in Nigeria, Art News writes.

Adjaye currently consults for the Benin Dialogue Group, a cultural repatriation-focused entity that includes representatives from major European and Nigerian museums. During the colonial era, many of West Africa’s most precious art and cultural objects were stolen by colonizing powers, and as a result, now sit scattered across the world’s museums, including the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, according to Art News.

The Benin Dialogue Group is working to coordinate the tricky task of repatriating some o...

An Open Letter to Jean Nouvel

2018-12-21T15:15:00-05:00

All architects must be fully responsible for the political conditions and consequences of the projects they accept; any position that would make them only an executant constitutes an insult to their function and their ability to act.

"This Monday, we were many in Algeria, in France, and elsewhere to be shocked when we learned that the Wilaya (prefecture) of Algiers had signed a convention with the region of Île-de-France (Paris’ region) whose President is a conservative Republican politician, and French architect Jean Nouvel to “revitalize” Algiers’ Casbah. The Casbah before being a UNESCO world heritage site is one of the most important sites of the anti-colonial history, as well as the home of thousands of residents who had no say in this decision. Three of us decided to write an open letter to him, asking him to renounce this commission, as part of what we believe is our strategy and our legitimacy (only one of us is from Algiers) from the Northern side of the Mediterranean Sea — we leave it to Algerians to form their own strategy against the Wilaya’s decision if they decide to do s,o and we will bring them the support they will ask from us in that case. 410 people all around the world (including from the Cas...

A new urbanism in the Global South

2017-08-16T15:43:00-04:00

But what is the repertoire of concepts, ideas and visions that inform the work of urban planners in the Global South — in Asia, Latin America and Africa? Are they still under the spell of their colonial and postcolonial masters? Or have they developed their own ideas and their own yardsticks, commensurate with the respective culture of their country and region?

"This insight leads to the most important quality of sustainable urban planning in countries of the Global South," urban planning expert Einhard Schmidt-Kallert writes in his commentary piece on Citiscope, arguing that "Planners need to develop urban planning visions that take into consideration the needs of all citizens, of the urban middle class as well as those of the urban poor in informal settlements. Those visions need to translate these needs into a comprehensive concept plan for an entire city, thus overcoming fragmentation and segregation."

Former US Embassy Building Is Declared Culturally-Inappropriate for Canadian Indigenous Center

2017-06-20T19:20:00-04:00

Classical revival is perhaps the architectural style most identified with colonization. This building, which references Washington architecture, is a building of formal rooms, offices, and hierarchies, echoing structures of European authority.

This June the federal government announced that the US' former embassy building in Ottawa will become a space dedicated to Inuit, Métis and First Nations communities which the task force of the RAIC finds to be a deeply inappropriate space for an Indigenous Centre.

"Canada's Indigenous communities have, for too long, been forced into leftover spaces that fail to connect in any meaningful way to their cultures and unique connectivity to place" says the task force, composed of about 30 mostly Indigenous architects, architectural students, interns and academics.

Dr. Patrick Stewart, the chair of the task force suggests that the federal government should provide capital dollars for the design and construction of a structure based upon Indigenous knowledge and through the use of Indigenous architects.

Ho Chi Minh City′s historic architecture is quickly disappearing

2017-06-12T17:38:00-04:00

Others are concerned the demolition of its famed French architectural gems will render Ho Chi Minh City indistinguishable from other Asian megacities. "In the 1960s and 1970s it was very much French, but now it's very Americanized, McDonald's on every corner," said Hiep Nguyen, born in Ho City Minh City and author of several books on its architectural history. "A streetscape without a story has no value," he added.

"City officials are now writing a nine-point plan to classify buildings and mark some for protection," DW writes, "but admit such a huge task could take years to be implemented."

As Ho Chi Minh City develops rapidly, historic colonial architecture comes under threat

2016-02-26T14:22:00-05:00

“What I realized is that they have very little power,” Mr. Viet, 28, said of his fellow urban planners. “The fates of the buildings were being decided by someone else.” [...] when Ho Chi Minh City’s property market perked up after a slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis, dozens of prewar buildings — spanning the colonial to modernist eras — were razed to make room for new ones. As the city’s modest skyline grows, residents are watching with a mixture of awe and trepidation.

‘The proliferation of the Western quest for exotic adventures has led to a new form of educational colonialism’

2015-05-01T12:49:00-04:00

Colonialism found in the Modernist project a powerful and willing partner for the shaping of conquered territories in the southern hemisphere. Today, amid a new wave of colonial activity based on subtler and less easily identifiable strategies, little is done to understand its effects on the way people live and give form to their shelters. Neo-colonialism is an urgent issue but one which most of the profession is ill-prepared to interrogate. In order to address the underlying questions of the appropriateness of architectural concepts and their technical implementation, local and foreign experience needs to come together in an unbiased way to negotiate the challenges of intercultural communication. This is an indispensable prerequisite if such cooperation is to have sustainable and productive results.

Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks

2014-12-02T16:56:00-05:00

They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation

Eyal Weizman - architect, writer, activist and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London - is explaining how architecture and power are inextricably linked, even within structures that appear largely to serve an aesthetic purpose. Buildings or cityscapes that a tourist crosses the world to see were often conceived with the intent to oversee their populations.

Weizman has just returned from a trip to the US. Like Israel, highways in Los Angeles serve more affluent communities and bypass the poorer areas. In the Gulf, he says, the labour force is contained, separated and supervised. Such capitalist tools of separation, seen across the world, "are all part of the growing toolbox of architecture and planning in the West Bank – it's composed, I mean it has a sort of colonial history, but it's contemporary vocabulary exists overall, everywhere you look, everywhere you go you have the politics of surveillance, separation, supervision and sometimes even oppression. Pal...