108th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Open

Other Environmentalisms: Resisting Colonial Legacies in Architecture Education

Annual Meeting Proceedings

Author(s): Faysal Tabbarah

The paper describes a teaching pedagogy deployed simultaneously in a seminar and design studio, titled Other Environmentalisms. The pedagogy critically examines and reimagines the production of contemporary architecture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by interrogating the relationship between architecture, the environment, and colonial legacies. This has been developed within two ongoing challenges in the MENA: 1. The erasure of nuanced cultural specificities in the architectural imaginary; and 2. Climate crisis. Specifically, the paper problematizes how teaching about the environment in MENA’s architectural institutions, especially those driven by North American curriculums, reproduces a problematic form of Environmental Orientalism. By Environmental Orientalism I mean the systemic weaponizing of narratives that conceal the heterogeneity of the biophysical environment of the MENA, amplifying narratives around the homogeneity of a hot desert barely able to support a struggling pastoralism. This also permeates contemporary architectural production in the MENA and is made doubly problematic when the majority of the student bodies originate from diverse ends of the MENA. The paper is structured in three parts. First, I will unpack the theoretical framework and contextual background that enables the integration of orientalist critiques and environmental history methodologies. Second, I will outline a seminar course structure and the narrative logic that investigates these issues. Finally, I will describe the application of this framework into a design studio environment.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.106

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5