Race, Space, and Architecture

Race, Space and Architecture: Reflections on a Curriculum

Presentations by Suzi Hall, Huda Tayob, and Thandi Loewenson with a response by Emanuel Admassu, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP.

This event will be presented virtually, please register in advance for the Zoom webinar link.

Race, Space, and Architecture is an open-access curriculum shared of many voices which engages with three questions: What are the spatial contours of capitalism that produce racial hierarchy and injustice? 
What are the inventive repertoires of refusal, resistance, and re-making that are neither reduced to nor exhausted by racial capitalism and how are they specialized? 
How is ‘race’ configured differently across space, and how can a more expansive understanding of entangled world space broaden our imagination for teaching ​and learning?

Download Race, Space & Architecture: A Position

Suzanne Hall is an interdisciplinary urban scholar based at the LSE, and her work connects the asymmetries of global migration and urban marginalization. From the grounded perspective of peripheral street economies, she explores the racialized frameworks of citizenship and economic inequality and their everyday contestations. She has recently published the book The Migrant’s Paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain.

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction, and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status quo, whilst working with communities, policymakers, unions, artists, and architects towards acting on those provocations.

Huda Tayob is senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town and a Canadian Centre for Architecture Mellon Fellow on the project Centring Africa. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures and the potential of literature to respond to archival silences in architectural research. She is co-curator of the digital podcast series and online exhibition the Archive of Forgetfulness.

Emanuel Admassu ‘12 MSAAD, ‘13 AAR is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP. He is a founding partner, with Jen Wood, of AD—WO, an art and architecture practice based in New York City, and by extension, between Melbourne and Addis Ababa. He is also a co-founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. His art, design, and teaching practices operate at the intersection of design theory, spatial justice, and contemporary African art. The work meditates on the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces. Most recently, he has been analyzing the socio-spatial identities of two urban marketplaces: Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam and Merkato in Addis Ababa. Admassu has previously taught at RISD Architecture and Harvard GSD.


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