Renowned West African architect Mariam Kamara will be among twelve new professors joining the faculty of the ETH Zurich, the school announced on its website late last month.
Her appointment represents a “turning point” for the ETH, as the school’s faculty is now predominantly female for the first time in its history. She is joined by another new full-time appointment to the department, Maria Conen, who had previously been on the faculty as an adjunct professor of architecture and housing.
Kamara’s previous academic experience has included stops at Brown and the Harvard GSD, where she was the Aga Khan critic for 2021. Kamara’s practice atelier masōmī is well-regarded across the design world for her innovative work surrounding memory, the elevation of non-Western architectural traditions, vernacular design, and placemaking. Recently she was named as an honorary fellow by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
The school ranks consistently among the best graduate and undergraduate design programs in the world. Kamara and her new colleagues are now tasked to help the ETH “reposition itself internationally” as it looks to compete for the world’s brightest students, leveraging a research-driven alternative approach to pedagogy which has thus far been presented in lectures at Harvard, the Columbia GSAPP, MIT, and her alma mater, the University of Washington.
She comes to the post with a host of prestigious accolades, including being named a 2017 LafargeHolcim Middle East + Africa Award winner, David Adjaye's 2018-19 Rolex Arts Initiative protégée, a Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture nominee, and the 2019 Prince Claus Award laureate. Recently announced projects include the Bët-bi Museum in Senegal and the Hayyan master plan for Sharjah, UAE.
“No matter where you are, architecture is a process of discovery,” she said in her 2020 interview with the New York Times. “It’s not just space-making; it’s about discussion and how you turn desire into form.”
The ETH's full list of new appointments and promotions can be found here.
6 Comments
This idea of 'non-western architecture' is fraught -- West Africa had contact with the Roman Empire as well as Islamic colonization. The West was in dialogue with as far as East Asia via the Silk Road. Differences in vernacular many times come from local materials and geography, but still have universal qualities that had already spread globally.
A lot of this new ideology has takes Critical Regionalism and strips its universal modern elements and focuses on trad nostalgia for cultural (and racial) essentialism.
Absolutely. And the complete cognitive dissonance, abandonment of reason, denial of history, denial of science, and total shoe horned reductionism, only makes sense when you view this for what it truly is - a religious impulse
The universal elements are imo where the “good” design exists. The things that tap into the deeper parts of the human psyche
It’s obvious that humans appreciate certain things universally. It’s why certain natural and architectural sites attract visitors from around the world.
I would argue the universal human [spirit] manifests differently in different places because of climate and geography, not race and made up distinctions. When you look at vernacular architecture in Greece, or Mali or Japan, they all have similar characteristics, while the monumental has other common characteristics of awe, scale and materiality.
A lot of this new ideology is trying to essentialize certain architecture features as 'western' or 'african' or 'native' which is anti-historical. If that were true you won't find so many similarities between Mongols and Native Americans, Egyptians and Mayans, etc.
Yeah. And this imaginary purity that is sought…”uncontaminated culture” who was the guy with the silly stache that tried this?
Get that drum circle going, x-lax. Beat that drum.
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