Framing the Facts: Moving Beyond a Multicultural Survey of Architectural History

This paper analyzes the limits of multiculturalism for promoting diversityin architectural education to propose an alternative approach for teachingarchitectural history in professional schools. Multiculturalism has been animplicit paradigm in the National Architecture Accreditation Board’s requirementsfor professional architecture schools since the late 1980s. The latestpolicies require architecture schools to provide students with an “understanding”of global traditions of architecture including works completed by Easternhemisphere, minority, and women run practices (NAAB 2009). Despite newtextbook surveys that promote a global understanding of architectural history,canonical values associated with “civilizational development” and “monumentality”continues to promote the selection of “significant architecturalprecedents” (Jarzombeck, Prakash, Ching 2010, xii). Recent scholarshipdemonstrates the implicit effect these values have on marginalizing the presenceand agency of social minorities who do not exemplify these dominant socialvalues (Kaplan 2010; Stevens 2002; Chamberlin 2010; Wilkins 2011).Diversifying architectural education requires more than creating a multiculturalsurvey of monumental architectures; it requires exposing the continuedsocial function of architectural canons, past and present.Critiques of multiculturalism have emerged within the humanities since themid-1980s. For progressive academics, the political goal of multiculturalismwas the preservation of minority groups’ rights. In a democratic societythat elevates the defense of individualism, this required recognizing theformative role of group identity in individual formation (Taylor 1994). Thisontological account of social difference, however, has been used to promotea “politics of recognition” that merely recognizes cultural differenceswithout interrogating the causes of structural inequality (Barry 2001). Thisrecognition has paradoxically placed minority cultures in a vise that requiresthem to only define themselves in relation to canonical values. The tensionbetween increasing the representation of cultural difference and preservingthe protections afforded minority groups has played itself out in architecturaleducation as well (Davis 1991; Bozdogan 1999). The NAABs strategicuse of the term “understanding” over the more rigorous requirement to developone’s “ability” to work within global traditions strongly suggests thedominance of a politics of recognition within professional education.My paper situates the pedagogical aims and learning objectives of a course Ihave developed over the last four years, entitled ‘Race and Architecture’, withinthe shifting debates on multicultural education. The purpose of this courseis to demonstrate the historical influence of racial discourses on architecturalculture, a goal that aligns with postcolonial critiques of canonicity. However,this class expands its focus beyond the most obvious effects of racism innon-Western or Third-World contexts. It explicitly identifies the tendency ofmulticultural paradigms to mitigate the social responsibility of the architect.This means identifying the institutional function of racial discourses in promotingcultural norms that perpetuate racial inequality in architecture. Thisclass proposes that racial and ethnic discourses be considered a consistentelement of architectural culture, and insists that ‘race’ be understood as acultural construct with political and formal implications. These consequencesare explored through interdisciplinary reading and building case studies innineteenth and twentieth century transnational contexts.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1