‘Development Issues’: Traveling Theories, Apartheid Criticism and the ‘Social Turn’ in Architectural Education

This paper is concerned with architectural pedagogical practices as a site of training architects to act as conscientious citizens. In the paper, I examine how a school of architecture goes about shaping its pedagogical practices to produced meaningful engagement with its social context. I use the example of a course taught at the University of Cape Town in the early 1980s as a means of uncovering how architects, during some of the darkest days of apartheid, framed the context within which they practiced, and the possibility for a critical architectural engagement with the problems of the day. I uncover that the course, called ‘Development Issues’, was a product of transnational circulations of architects, theories and practices. By examining the meaning of these circulations and influences, I argue that although the course itself was short-lived, it stands for an important moment in architectural consciousness and the practice of destabilizing the boundaries of architectural education.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4