SAH, Society of Architectural Historians
78th Annual International Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
Co-chaired with Giulia Scotto
As advanced by feminist and ecofeminist scholarship (Mies and Schiva, 1993; Duffy, 2007; Federici, 2012), curbing unlimited growth on a planet with finite resources necessitates reconsidering the approach toward maintaining, retrofitting, and preserving existing infrastructure, spaces, and buildings.
In contrast to the emphasis placed on design and construction phases, the subsequent stages of utilization, maintenance, and potential dismantling—often enduring the longest in a building’s lifespan—have attracted scant attention from architectural historians. Despite being pivotal in shaping the character, quality, and accessibility of built spaces, these phases remain underexplored. This session seeks to redirect attention to the post-construction life of buildings, spaces, and materials, investigating the practices, actors, and politics involved in their maintenance, whether carried out collectively, individually, or institutionally.
What is institutionally maintained and what is not is a political question, exposing the state and city agendas’ unequal treatment of diverse social groups. Space management and maintenance raises questions about ownership and responsibility and the appropriateness of some construction and technological solutions that are not rooted in local traditions, knowledge, and material availability.
Exploring maintenance standards and practices across historical moments and geographies, this session focuses on their evolution in response to societal, economic, and political changes. It invites contributions from the global south, indigenous practices as well as institutionalized Western standards and their critique. The session aims to foster a dialogue that spans – to give some examples – from Zurich’s Graffiti Removal “brigades” and Tokyo’s public toilet service to the maintenance activities sustaining vernacular mud architecture in rural communities with kinship-following social clusters or Johannesburg’s bottom-up network of trash collectors.
We seek to engage in a discourse on the potential of crafting a history of architecture through the lens of evolving maintenance standards and practices, contributing to the contemporary debate on resource conservation and systemic crises.
Panelists:
“Municipal Politics and Vacant Building Maintenance in Cincinnati”
De Peter Yi, University of Cincinnati, USA
“Maintaining the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century Paris”
Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
“Reconstructing the Chinampa Through Soil and Water Systems”
Elis Mendoza, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
“Report from a Bucket” – Cleaning as Architectural Practice”
Erik Sigge, Lund University
Balzan, Silvia. “Shake up the Councilors, Shake Well”: The Writings of Pancho Guedes in Late Colonial Mozambique. gta papers, no. 10 (2025): 100–108. Zurich: gta Verlag.
This paper explores two journal articles authored by the Portuguese architect Pancho Guedes during the late colonial period in Mozambique (1950s-1974). Through a sharp critique of the urban condition of the colonial capital Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), and more specifically, its emerging spontaneous suburbs, the two writings denounce the colonial regime’s policies in their spatial counterpart.
The initial text, “The Sick City,” serves as a political manifesto aimed at colonial administrators. Published in 1964 in the local newspaper A Tribuna and subsequently censored, Guedes enumerates urban issues of the time in the form of bullet points, proposing potential solutions. The second, “The Caniços of Mozambique” (1973), comprises a visual ethnography capturing the growth of spontaneous and illegal housing on the capital’s outskirts. Guedes views these areas as vital contact points between indigenous and Portuguese realities of Western modernity, presenting annotated photographs documenting indigenous homemaking practices and celebrating the beauty and vitality of the “slum.”
Viewing the texts in isolation from Guedes’ broader practice, one might think of Guedes as an activist and militant architect, yet his eclectic, excessive, expensive works, irreverent toward the notion of style (the experimental Stiloguedes) made for part of his clientele – the wealthy Portuguese colonial bourgeoisie – could cast him as the archetypal settler.
Guedes embodies neither role nor both, existing as a “third way or space,” as conceptualized by Bhabha. Pedro Gadanho characterizes Guedes as an “altermodern architect,” showcasing another facet through his collaboration with the Swiss mission, not aligned with the regime and his friendships and support to emerging African intellectuals who would later rule postcolonial Mozambique.
Considering Guedes’ persona and historical context, a nuanced reading of these texts unveils a more ethical than political stance – a Portuguese humanist with a self-proclaimed “conservative anarchist” identity. This challenges inappropriate classifications that depict his work either as a decolonial project from within or mere foreign aid.
These texts provide a historical-anthropological testimony through the voice of a multifaceted character – architect, artist, anthropologist, patron, and friend – participating in and observing late colonial Mozambique. Through his writings and works, Pancho Guedes contributes to rewriting the history, not solely architectural but also political, of the late Luso-African colonial reality, necessitating “a more refined chronology,” as suggested by Claudia Castelo in 2012.
Human Geographies: Critical Perspectives from the Margins
Convenors: Mosè Cometta, Noa Levin, Giulia Scotto, Johannes Herburger, Silvia Balzan
Speakers:
Leandra Choffat, Deniz Ay
“Land access and queer temporality: Negotiating power in invented urban commons in Switzerland”
Pambana Bassett, Deniz Ay
“This is a way to make change”: commons in Ghana’s urban centres”
Lucas Lerchs
“Terra de Deus, moradia do Povo: Socio-ecological territorialization and deterritorialization of the margins in peripheral São Paulo”
I will be research fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan from September 2024 until April 2025.
Space, Society, and Politics of the Milan Metro (1964 – 1992)
The proposed research is part of my current postdoctoral work, situated within a larger project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and directed by Prof. Dr. Andri Gerber (ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences). This project, titled “Challenging or Reproducing the Status Quo? The Leftist Architect in Milanese Architecture, 196X-198X,” explores the political and social roles of architects in Milan during this period. My specific focus is on the expansion of the Milan subway from the late 1950s to the early 1990s.
I analyze how the development of the M1 (red line), M2 (green line), and M3 (yellow line) intersected with urban planning changes, especially the 1970s master plan revisions, and how these infrastructures reshaped the city’s mobility, public transport, and real estate landscapes. This research examines the roles of political, social, and architectural actors, including the influence of parties like PSI and PCI, as well as the architectural styles of the subway stations, from Franco Albini’s rationalist designs to Claudio Dini’s postmodern approach.
The Milan subway is used as a metaphorical lens to explore the intertwining of architecture and politics, offering a critical reading of Milan’s post-war evolution up to the post-Tangentopoli period. Through this lens, I address key questions about the subway as a political act, the agendas of its social actors, and its impact on urban and social dynamics. My research seeks to understand how the subway’s development contributed to either challenging or reinforcing Milan’s status quo, from its industrial roots to its later transformation into a global fashion and design hub.
In the framework of the Fall 24 Event Global Mini Series at Syracuse Architecture Flore
16 October 2024
Toxic Modernity: Asbestos Cement in Architecture, Media, Land and Bodies
The lecture traces the historical trajectory of asbestos, a mineral once hailed for its indestructible properties, widely used across the building construction industry worldwide. Beginning with its ancient origins, moving through the Industrial Revolution and 20th-century technological enthusiasm that fueled global mining and production, the lecture will eventually point out its classification as a hazardous substance with severe health impacts, focusing on its persistent use in the building construction industry despite early warnings about the dangers of related diseases.
Incorporating theoretical perspectives on the nexus between modernity and toxicity, the lecture critically engages with concepts such as “failed modernity,” obsolescence, and the environmental afterlives of technology. Drawing on works like “Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects,” “Entangled Geographies” (Hecht et al.), and the recent work of Hannah le Roux (2019-2023), the lecture situates asbestos within broader debates about technological progress, colonialism, and the developmentalist projects that shaped the postcolonial world. The promise of modernity in these contexts—whether through infrastructure, housing, or industrial development—was often tied to materials like asbestos, which embodied the contradictions of Western-driven technological progress. This included the hidden toxic legacies left behind by extractive industries and the waste products they generated.
Case studies from postcolonial nations, particularly in regions like South Africa and Botswana, demonstrate how asbestos and other industrial byproducts were repurposed for housing and infrastructure. These projects, once viewed as symbols of modernity and national progress, instead became sites of “slow violence,” (Nixon) as toxic materials leached into the soil, water, and air, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
Students are invited to inquire into technology’s environmental, social, and ethical dimensions, using asbestos as a focal point for broader critiques of modernity and developmentalism. Industrial waste, far from being neutral, played an active role in environmental degradation, colonial exploitation, and the socio-political inequalities that persist to this day.
Image: AC Tiefbau, Issue 15, 1983, Source: ETH Zurich/gta archive
Relational Modernities.
Pancho Guedes’s Social Architecture for the Swiss Mission in Colonial Mozambique
Zurich: Park Books
(forthcoming 2025)
Synopsis
The proposed book examines an overlooked part of the colonial modernist architecture heritage in Lusophone Africa that resists essentializing dualisms present in dominant narratives on the late Mozambican colonial society and necessitates more refined scholarly research. Drawing from methodologies proper of visual ethnography, oral history, and material culture studies, this book aspires to situate these buildings within the postcolonial architectural historiography by attentively considering the process and the actors responsible for their realization in late colonial Mozambique. Tracing the “biography” of this built legacy throughout the last sixty years of Mozambican history from the Afrocommunism era until today’s neoliberal regime, the book discusses the socio-political agency of these spaces that outlasted the socio-political stances of their promoters.
The series of educational, healthcare, and religious infrastructures commissioned to Pancho Guedes by the Swiss Missions and by other Protestant Missions opposed to the Portuguese Catholic regime facilitated the formation of a network of supporters of these initiatives who included an emerging African elite – educated at the alternative Swiss schools – and the Gulbenkian Foundation. The text brings to the fore a still understudied set of modernist colonial buildings, underlining the complex palimpsest of “other” protagonists harbored by the late colonial society in Mozambique – who cannot be described either as colonizers or subjects. The book illustrates the ambivalences of Guedes, the conservative anarchist’s ethical and political attitude, and the religious Missions’ neutrality.
Through the analysis of three Guedes’ buildings for the Missions in particular: the Khovo Lar students’ house in Maxaquene, Maputo; the St. Cipriano Anglican Center in Chamanculo, Maputo; and the Eduardo Mondlane Primary School of Facasizze in Magude, the book attempts to shed light on the meaning these infrastructures acquired throughout history within the a posteriori internalized as “urban, peri-urban, and rural” contexts in which they are respectively located. These buildings were commissioned to equip the native population with religious and educational spaces, whose access to educational services the colonial regime sought to block. Nonetheless, the book interprets these spaces, and their network of promoters, as not ascribing to colonial or anti-colonial struggles, instead advancing the hypothesis that their agency resides in suggesting the possibility of an alternative “third way.” It presents these buildings as the physical embodiment of an alter-modern, relational modernity in colonial and postcolonial Mozambique, where they served – and indeed still serve – the preservation of the public sphere amidst highly divisive social contexts.
The book has two main sections. The first is structured in three essays in which the main actors (the architect Pancho Guedes and the Protestant Mission, particularly the Swiss Mission) are presented in their socio-political context of late colonial Mozambique.
The second section opens with a map of Southern Mozambique that illustrates the location and the number of buildings Guedes built for the Protestant Missions and continues with three other essays, each one dedicated to one case study. These essays examine three aspects related to Guedes’s missions’ buildings: i) specific architectural spatial configurations, what I call “middle grounds,” shared common spaces; ii) socio-technological elements (devices) that regulate the climatic conditions inside the buildings; and iii) the buildings’ construction processes. The essays explain how these aspects of Guedes’ building partially collaborated to transform the social worlds in which they unfolded, enduring throughout Mozambican history from the late colonial period until today.
The book ends with a core, conclusive essay that proposes a possible reading of these spaces as the manifestation of a relational alter-modernity belonging to the spectrum of Arjun Appadurai’s “alternative modernities.”
Sections 1 and 2 are enriched with other kinds of documents consisting of image compositions: PLATES, which illustrate the essay and author’s INTERVIEWS with key personalities that inform the argument each essay discusses. Both the PLATES and the INTERVIEWS are tied to the text but, simultaneously, can be consulted separately, triggering the readers’ own visual understanding of the connections between the images that form the plates and the interviews’ transcriptions.
Two timelines indicating Pancho Guedes’s lifetime events and the mission’s presence in Mozambique can be looked upon at any time during the reading and help orient the readers chronologically.
Edited Journal Issue
Ardeth, A magazine on the power of the project, Issue #13
Energy Landscape, Spatial Agencies of Energy Transition
Co-edited with Sascha Roesler and Lorenzo Stieger
Call for Papers
While in the recent decades, the field of architecture has primarily focused on the self-sufficiency of individual buildings, the current ARDETH issue wishes to bring back scholarly attention to an approach that prioritizes energy conservation and generation at the urban scale. Such an approach relies on the idea of the productive (and not only consumptive) urban environment, in which the built fabric, topography, soil, bodies of water, green spaces, as well as regional climatic conditions (determined by sun, wind, rain flows, and seasonal temperatures), serve as potential parameters for energy production.
Since the late 1960s, landscape architects such as Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, and Michael Hough, and urban planners such as Ralph Knowles, Vladimir Matus, and Dean Hawkes were increasingly aware of the urban dimension of energy. Hough introduced the notion of “energy landscape,” pioneering “an ecological view that encompasses the total urban landscape” (Hough 1984). Today, Hough’s notion of energy landscapes is of fundamental significance for rethinking the relationship of practices of space-making to energy on several scales, integrating novel technological systems and built structures with natural processes responses (Roesler 2022; Roesler, Kobi, Stieger 2022).
The ARDETH issue promotes the conceptual framework of “energy landscapes” to question energy as cheap, abundant, and at the disposal of urban development. It critically examines concepts and methods for shaping future energy landscapes. Understanding energy transition as practice of spatial transformation, the issue looks for contributions that uncover the mutual dependency between energy and urbanization, analysing the possible influences of settlement structures on promoting renewable energy production. The contributions should thus conceive “energy futures” as intrinsically tied to a broader discussion on space-making futures and highlight “the spatial elements through which urban energy systems evolve […] and the spatial consequences of [energy] transition” (Rutherford & Coutard 2014). For example, how do different built fabric densities contribute to and limit the emergence of post-carbon energy landscapes? What are the implications of a British suburb, an Italian medieval town, or Greek informal settlements densities on the production, distribution, and use of post-carbon energy in those areas?
The editors particularly welcome scholarly papers and visual essays that promote a transversal view of energy landscapes, integrating the urban and architectural scales and the transition from energy consumption to production. The editors seek contributions that offer a transdisciplinary view of energy landscapes, considering actors (companies, institutions, people), technologies (carbon-based and renewable), flows (of resources, energy, money), scales (from buildings to the globe), and patterns of urbanization.
The issue departs from the regional focus on Europe in light of the recent geopolitical situation tied to the war in Ukraine, which exacerbates European external energy dependencies, urging us to explore novel strategies of self-reliability. Nonetheless, contributions that present valuable insights from different regions will be taken into consideration in relation to the challenges that the European cases present.
Scholars of history and theory of architecture and urban design, social anthropology, urban studies, and science and technology studies are invited to present recent findings and novel methods at the intersection of archival and ethnographic approaches for studying energy landscapes in transition. Contributing to a contemporary environmental theory of architecture, papers might be centered around the following four thematic threads: energy hinterlands, spaces of cohabitation, net zero cities, and spatio-temporal frameworks.
Image: Romande Energie’s demonstration floating solar park on Lac des Toules. Image credits: Romande Energie
The Challenge from Within: Progressive Architects in Capitalist Systems
Conference Venue: ZHAW Winterthur, Switzerland
Dates: 5-6 July 2024
Conference Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in architecture as a tool for social and political reform. From academic curricula to various international events like Biennales and Triennales, the discussion surrounding our discipline’s potential to address global inequalities has become a prevalent theme, continuously gaining momentum. As a result, architectural practitioners and educators are increasingly embracing a progressive agenda in their work, with many doubling as activists. Yet, how does a commitment to progressive social ideals translate into pedagogy and practice? And what does it really mean to be a radical architect within a system that prioritizes profit above all else? This conference proposes to examine the challenges, contradictions, and aporias inherent in progressive architectural practice and teaching within and against capitalism, tracing its trajectory since the postwar period.
“Pedagogy” Panel Moderation
with Torsten Lange (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
featuring:
Lucia Pennati (Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio)
“ETH Zurich’s ‘Experimentierphase’: Architecture Students and Institution after 1968”
Alessandro Toti (University of Westminster)
“Learning in Conflict: Jörn Janssen and the Development of a Marxist-Leninist History and Theory of Architecture”
Patrick Düblin (Independent Scholar, Switzerland)
“Protecting Wild Shepherds: Notes on the Pedagogy of Stalker”
Ole W. Fischer (Stuttgart State Academy of Art)
“Design Build Bluff: Preliminary Thoughts on Public Interest Architecture for the Navajo Nation”
The event was supported by ZHAW’s Institut Urban Landscape and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
SAH 2024 Albuquerque, New Mexico
77th Annual International Conference
April 17-21 2024
Panel: Modernism and Healthcare in Africa
Chairs: Prof. Dr. Ola Uduku and Prof. Dr. Stuart W. Leslie
Paper Abstract:
A Healthcare Cluster in Late Colonial Mozambique
Pancho Guedes and the Swiss Mission’s Social Architecture
“At Chicumbane, the (Swiss) mission’s hospital was too small, so I designed alternatives for three extending wards linked to the existing building. We only built the first one, the maternity ward. (…) The whole community participated in making it this building for their children. Muchlanga, the mission’s foreman, could not read or follow conventional architectural drawings, but he knew how to build like a craftsman – a Swiss missionary builder had taught him.”
These Pancho Guedes’s (Portuguese emigré architect in Mozambique) words pertain to a series of educational, religious, and healthcare infrastructures that were commissioned to him by the Swiss Mission during the late colonial era (the 60s, 70s). Against the Portuguese Catholic regime, the Protestant Swiss formed alliances with Guedes – the outsider, an emerging African milieu, and foreign donors to provide the indigenous population with a frugal yet efficient architecture that catered to primary needs.
The paper focuses on the healthcare cluster in the village of Chicumbane, where Guedes designed a maternity ward and a nurses’ school, which to this day continue to serve their original purposes. Guedes and the Swiss’s medical modernism represents an overlooked part of the colonial material legacy worthy of examination within this SAH panel. Guedes’ architectures for the Swiss Mission exemplified a form of ambivalent material heritage and tangible manifestations of (alter) modernity within a deeply segregated socio-spatial context. By facilitating the nurture of the public sphere, these spaces resisted the divisive dynamics of colonial and anti-colonial struggles, instead promoting an alternative political project centered on postcolonial reconciliation. Consequently, they stand as exemplars of pioneering foreign assistance originating from within the country itself.
“Bargains in a tropical bush style,” as Guedes named these architectures, “avoid the complications, expensive gymnastics, and frills of International fashions.”
Leakage. Inaugural stsing Conference
Conference Venue: TU Dresden
Dates: March 19-22, 2024
Paper Abstract:
Leaking Regimes: Techno-politics of Swiss Asbestos Cement Pipelines
in Southern African Water Schemes (1950s-80s)
Following decolonization, Western building technologies and their socio-technoenvironmental impact on Global South regions became intertwined with a neo-imperialistic political economy. This paper investigates Switzerland and Southern Africa’s connections, tracing the deployment of Swiss-made asbestos cement pipelines within apartheid South Africa’s water projects. The study applies STS and postcolonial theory methods for architectural historiography writing an environmental history of built infrastructures. The research furthers South African architectural historian Hannah le Roux’s studies on asbestos cement low-cost building components and post-extraction landscapes (2019-23), focusing on a.c. water pipes in postcolonial development and their global circulation. The study is grounded on an unexplored primary source: the Swiss periodical AC Tie’bau, sponsored by Eternit AG (sold to its sibling company, today’s Holcim, in 1986) and released twice yearly from ‘74 until ‘85. AC Tie’bau showcased projects using a.c. pipes in developmental water schemes worldwide, emphasizing their adaptability in extreme environments and connecting the technology to notions of progress. The research examines AC T.‘s narrative in light of the ban on asbestos (a later discovered carcinogen) in Western countries and its persisting use in countries with weak legislation, exposing AC T.‘s narrative inconsistencies and revealing “leaking regimes”: interplays between urban planning, technical advice, commercial interests, and environmental pollution in postcolonial neo-dependencies dynamics. The study aims to organize AC T.‘s articles into three thematic threads: a) water for settlements, b) water for industry, and c) water for agriculture. It delves particularly into water schemes in South Africa and Botswana involving a.c. pipes produced by Eternit’s subsidiary Everite.
Swiss technologies for Southern African water schemes demonstrate that the displacement of power through technological artifacts is neither permanent nor predictable, exceeding the expectations of designers and builders. These responses in vulnerable geographies are evidence of blawed technologies shaping the globalized world and its neocolonial “leaking regimes.”
How did a.c. water pipes reshape the physical environment and socio-political dynamics of the regions where they were implemented? How did the ability of a.c. pipes to bestow or deprive power unexpectedly provide other actors with unforeseen opportunities for action? How can evidence be gathered to demonstrate the dual impact of postcolonial shady developmental initiatives? And ultimately, in what ways did Swiss extractivism and its global market exchanges manifest in post-WWII habitat infrastructures?
The Material Transition Lab
Timber Futures in Switzerland
Spring Seminar 2023, 3rd year Bachelor students
Prof. Dr. Sascha Roesler, Dr. Silvia Balzan
Associate Professorship for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments
USI, Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio
Timber Futures in Switzerland is the first of a series of seminars we introduced during the Spring Semester of 2023 titled Material Transitions Lab. The Material Transitions Lab series intends to challenge sustainability within architecture pedagogy. Today’s paradigm shift in building construction shall be examined by enabling students to develop an ecological perspective through an analytical and critical attitude. The five workshops conceive sustainability in architecture not as a given formula but as an ongoing set of collective sociocultural practices that students will need to actively embrace as future architects and global citizens.
Within the scope of the Lab, we explore commonly used construction materials, such as clay, cement, glass, steel, timber and plastic, referring back to Mark Jarzombek’s 2019 article “The Quadrivium Industrial Complex.” Shifting our attention from the operational emissions of the built environment to its embodied emissions—the total emissions involved in producing architecture—we examine building materials’ mining, production, delivery, and assembly processes, their enormous impact on a planetary scale for humans and non-humans and their possible evolution in the context of energy transition policies. Energy transition and material transition are to be understood as one and the same process.
Inspired by Gottfried Semper’s “Stoffwechsel” theory, building materials transitions involve the symbolic and physical transfer of forms and materials to meet new needs. Semper’s approach underscores the sociocultural exchange of building construction across regions and times. Similarly, the seminars focus on the process of repurposing and blending architectural elements and materials from the past to create contemporary, sustainable materials for architecture. This aligns with Semper’s idea and lays the foundation for a comprehensive shift towards ethical, sustainable architecture, educating students on the ecological and social impacts of the construction industry and the global metabolism of architectural production.
The upcoming seminar series for Spring 24, titled Timber Futures in Switzerland, will centre around the exploration of timber – a material with a rich history in construction and a promising role as a future building material. Students will learn about timber culture, scales, resources, in building construction. The regional focus of these reflections on timber is Switzerland.
After an introductory meeting that will recap the Material Transition Lab, the first session, titled “Timber Culture,” will start the investigation on timber by examining main construction systems in timber, underlining the importance of prefabrication in past and present building cultures in Switzerland.
The session will also explore the question of architectural typologies, related to each the specific timber construction systems and whether housing designs constructed with concrete can be successfully replicated using wood. This inquiry connects to the second session dedicated to high-rises. In the second session, “Timber Scales,” we explore contemporary timber construction at an unprecedented scale, focusing on its increasingly urban and territorial dimensions and discussing the possibilities and structural limitations of timber high-rise buildings and cities. Additionally, we critically look at the technology of digital timber, addressing its challenges and opportunities, examining the intersection of corporate capitalism and timber cities, and assessing wood as a virtuous material, however, within capitalist exploitative models. The third session, “Timber Resources,” will propose the critical theme of wood construction maintenance and forest regrowth. Our discussion will spotlight the time factor in timber construction, exploring the delicate balance between timber architecture’s high maintenance needs and the regrowth pace of forests. We will also examine the concept of cooperatively owned forests and the importance of diversifying tree species for sustainable practices. Further, we will unravel the Swiss supply chain of timber for architecture, assessing both criticalities and excellence. The session will conclude with a focus on net-zero territories, emphasizing less energy-intensive approaches and considering embodied energy in timber-related processes.
During the sessions, guests will join us to provide perspectives from architectural history, engineering, social sciences and practice on timber architecture.
Toxic Modernity: Asbestos Cement in Architecture, Media, Land and Bodies
Hochschule Luzern, Technik & Architektur
Focus Lecture HS 202
Architecture, Building Materials and the Environment
Dr. Davide Spina, Dr. Nitin Bathla
20 November 2023
Buildings are products of architectural and engineering techniques that provide form and aesthetics to an assemblage of building materials. Historically, these materials were drawn from proximate landscapes and commons, such as local stone and sand quarries, mineral and metal deposits, and clay that was turned into bricks. However, with modernity, the extractive landscapes for building materials have stretched wider across the planet. A cursory glance at architectural environments around us is sufficient to reveal the global provenance of spaces we consider hyper-local. Materials like timber, stone, plastic (petroleum), and fabric (cotton and petroleum) come from distant operational landscapes worldwide and are transported at high environmental costs. Consequently, architecture in its current form is an inherently energy- and material-intensive practice, and it plays a decisive role in the formation and progression of the multiple intersectional crises that we understand today as the ‘Anthropocene’ – the age that sees ‘homo urbanus’ as a catalyst of climate change.
In reaction to this phenomenon, we are witnessing a rise in ideas of degrowth and designing for decay rather than against it, along with a focus on the environment in general. Squatting groups, radical planners, and architects are increasingly attending to marginal sites and decaying buildings, assigning new and unintended uses to them. This inevitably raises the question: What actions can we, as architects, take to address this issue and reroute architecture towards a non-conflictual relationship with the environment through degrowth and relocalisation? Can we fully grasp the political economy and political ecology of construction materials and adjust our practice accordingly? This course examines architecture’s embeddedness within global processes of material extraction and territorial transformation while also exploring how architecture and engineering contribute to shaping, perpetuating, or challenging these processes.
The course is structured in two phases. In phase one, students will attend lectures and participate in reading seminars on the environment, climate change, materiality, and building materials (including wood, cement, asbestos, glass, steel, and aluminium). In phase two, students will identify, carry out, and present their research project focusing on a single building, building material, or environmental issue. Readings will include texts from architectural history, construction history, environmental humanities, and new materialism. Students completing the course will be able to understand buildings’ relationship with the environment and extractive practices.
Image: Highly carcinogenic blue asbestos waste on the Owendale Asbestos Mine tailing dump, near Postmasburg, Northern Cape, South Africa, 21 December 2002. Image credits: David Goldblatt.
Urban Futures: Rethinking Architecture and Infrastructure in View of Rising Seas
Fall Seminar 2023, 2nd year MA students
Prof. Dr. Sascha Roesler, Dr. Silvia Balzan, Dr. Noa Levin
Associate Professorship for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments
USI, Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio
Many of the world’s megacities and densely populated areas are located in coastal areas that are particularly vulnerable to flooding and rising sea levels. Depending on how much CO₂ will continue to be emitted, sea levels will rise by 30 centimeters to one meter by 2100, according to current scientific insights. If the 1.5-degree climate target is met, the seas worldwide are likely to rise in the coming centuries by up to two to six meters. How would such sea level rise affect existing urban structures and what are possible infrastructural and architectural responses?
Rising seas and the adaptation of coastal cities are some of the multiple challenges city planners and designers face today. The unprecedented process of global warming introduces new layers of uncertainty to urban and architectural design. Architectural theory is therefore increasingly turning its attention to the future (and thus questioning the primacy of history). As argued by Dipesh Chakrabarty, by diverging from the previously stable parameter climate, the future is put “beyond the grasp of historic sensibility” (2009). In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of “urban futures”. Using this notion, urban scholars attempt to tackle the myriad of challenges cities are facing today by using methods of foresight to anticipate desirable futures and adapt cities to climate challenges. Some of these studies combine the perspective of risk and resilience studies with infrastructure and urban planning, highlighting that cities are especially vulnerable to climate hazards and disasters (Hamstead et al 2021). Other studies suggest that cities should explore future visions elaborating multiple scenarios in order to tackle long-term transformations of the urban fabric (Rohat et al 2021).
The seminar will focus on the ways in which architects can address the ecological shifts to come and the implications of challenges such as rising seas for architecture, infrastructure and urbanization. Nowadays, future thinking literacy must be part of an effective skillset of architects and urban designers. They require methods and tools to translate predictions on the future into urban planning measures. Although architecture is a future oriented practice, little effort has been made to systematize the approaches to futuring in design practice and to critically reflect them in the field of architectural theory. It has been noted that ever more detailed climate predictions entail the threat of “false precision” (Rodrigues 2022) and that an approximate approach outlining general trends might be more helpful for climate action on a local scale. Deliberate ambiguity instead of precision as a futuring strategy is also highlighted by Aquilar (2021).
During the seminar, future challenges of architectural design, infrastructure construction and urban development are discussed in light of the expected rise in sea level, which will threaten numerous cities and ecosystems. What strategies and scenarios can architectural design embrace to respond to this threat? Students will be introduced to the practice of research in architecture producing speculative design solutions in conjunction with a written theoretical reflection. They will work in small groups to develop their own research projects on the given topic – urban futures and rising seas – which will culminate in a final paper and a small exhibition.
Following anthropologist Donna Haraway’s idea that “scientific facts and speculative fabulations need each other,” urban futures scenarios should be informed by scientific knowledge. Thus, the seminar asks students to challenge themselves by considering the interdisciplinary character of today’s architectural design practice that must take into account science and technology, sociology, urban planning and policy insights.
The Third Ecology Conference
EAHN Thematic Conference in collaboration with
MoMA Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment
Conference Venue: Harpa Austurbakka 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland
Dates: October 11-13, 2023
Conference Abstract:
The effects of the anthropogenic climate crisis have compelled a resurgence in scholarship about the often fraught relationship between the built and the natural environment. The connection between the building sector and the disruption of the physical systems of the planet are not merely coincidental, but causal. Currently, global building activity produces nearly 40% of the world’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions, making architecture, broadly, one of the most polluting activities in human history. That a new “climatic turn” appears to be taking shape in architecture history is no surprise, but does the changing climate also require new methodologies for writing architecture history? If historians now know that architecture is causing ecological harm, how should the field of architecture history respond? Seen through the lens of environmental justice, does the climate crisis impel architectural histories of the environment to address decolonization and anti-racism?
“Empire’s Shadow” Panel Moderation
featuring:
Caitlin Blanchfield (Columbia University)
“Cold Colonialism and Environmental Knowing”
Łukasz Stanek (University of Michigan)
“Designing Acceleration: Ghana, 1951-1966”
Elena M’Bouroukounda (Columbia University)
“Colonial Force Majeure: Materiality, Colonial Scripts and the Eruption of Mount Pelée (1902-1910)”
David Franco (Clemson University)
“Displacement, Self-Reliance and Informal Spaces in the Geechee Community of Sapelo Island, Georgia”
Seminar Toolkit for Today with DocTalks
“Reimagining Post-Pandemic Collective Pedagogy in Architectural History”
CCA Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, Canada
10-11 July
Led by Demetra Vogiatzaki and Cigdem Talu on behalf of DocTalks
What can collective scholarship in architectural history look like? The globalization and marketization of academia in the post-pandemic digital sphere have increased competition, but have neglected to foster mutual education, support, and care among scholars. These conditions are especially manifest in architectural history, where a rising number of graduates are scrambling for fewer positions, while under increasing pressure and with limited support structures. Initiatives that build collegiality, mutual support, and a sense of community are especially needed at the graduate and postdoctoral levels. How can alternative pedagogical and collective models help us bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes, in the research and teaching of architectural history? This seminar aims to investigate practices that build support structures for early career academics while also bringing horizontality, equity, and inclusivity to research, the text, and the classroom.
DocTalks is an informal, peer-to-peer, weekly online forum by and for Ph.D. students, postdocs and early career researchers in architectural history and theory. It is organized by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, McGill University and Harvard University. To this day the platform has featured researchers from more than 100 institutions worldwide, and has spearheaded collaborations with renowned institutions, such as the Emilio Ambasz Institute at MoMA, helping to amplify the voices of the presenters.
→ www.cca.qc.ca/en/events/90881/reimagining-post-pandemic-collective-pedagogy-in-architectural-history
Marginal Urbanities: The Hidden Face of Planetary Urbanization
Symposium, USI Accademia di architettura Mendrisio
July 10-11, 2023
Symposium Abstract:
There is no need to resort to old cartographic binomials to describe the contemporary territory. In particular, the “city-countryside” pair shows all its limitations in describing the production of today’s space. Although intuitively comprehensible, these terms are in fact polysemous and inaccurate (Angelo, 2017). This cartographic crisis calls for a rethink based on new criteria and categories. The planetary urbanisation hypothesis (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Schmid & Brenner, 2011) responds to this challenge by emphasising, in close proximity to the assessments of political ecology and urban political ecology, the way in which different territories contribute to the maintenance of the global urban structure. This perspective is part of a trend that attempts to overcome paternalist, normative and Eurocentric paradigms. Today it is possible to discover the urban by talking about territories, processes and phenomena that occur in what would once have been excluded from the study of cities (Brenner, 2018; Reddy, 2018). Thanks to the introduction of these externalities, contemporary urban analysis can develop creative tools and interdisciplinary hybridities.
This symposium is interested precisely in these non-centralities that today are becoming one of the main assets of urban analysis. The aim of the event is to propose a series of heterogeneous interventions that can enrich contemporary urban analysis from original and innovative perspectives. The focus will be on case studies of marginal places and groups, as well as on innovative and original perspectives and modes of analysis that are able to enrich urban studies by reintegrating the externalities of the urban system that have long been ignored.
“Metabolisms and operational landscapes featuring” Panel Moderation
featuring:
“The daily building of a capital city from its margins: the red brick supply chain and the urbanization processes in Cairo” (C. Pérez-Houis)
“Living on Unstable Ground: Marginality, Ruination, and Resilience in Datong’s Sinking Mining” Settlements (J. Audin)
“The incremental city. Embedded practices of incremental housing in Lima” (N. Nowara)
ISUP Day
Istituto di Studi Urbani e del Paesaggio
USI Accademia di architettura, Mendrisio
May 11, 2023
The Material Transition Lab
Spring Seminar 2023, 3rd year Bachelor students
Prof. Dr. Sascha Roesler, Dr. des. Silvia Balzan
Associate Professorship for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments
USI, Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio
The Material Transitions Lab series intends to challenge sustainability within architecture pedagogy. Today’s paradigm shift in building construction shall be examined by enabling students to develop an ecological perspective through an analytical and critical attitude. The five workshops conceive sustainability in architecture not as a given formula but as an ongoing set of collective sociocultural practices that students will need to actively embrace as future architects and global citizens.
Our entry point will be represented by materials most commonly employed in the construction industry. Drawing from Mark Jarzombek’s article “The Quadrivium Industrial Complex” (2019), questioning the most important building materials, concrete, glass, steel, and plastic, we will intentionally shift our attention from the so-called and the often debated operational emissions of the built environment to the embodied emissions – intended as the sum of all the emissions required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that emissions were incorporated or ’embodied’ in the products themselves. Mining, production, delivery, and assembly processes [the embodied emissions] of these materials have never been more extensive and cheaper than today, causing an enormous impact on a planetary scale for humans and non-humans and their possible evolution in the context of energy transition policies. Energy transition and material transition are to be understood as one and the same process.
The five workshops (plus a wrap-up session) will elaborate on different thematic threads related to the sustainable transition of the construction industry and its materials, discussing innovation and criticalities. Referring to Gottfried Semper’s theory of “Stoffwechsel,” material transition is intended as a symbolic and physical transfer of forms and materials to new needs. In particular, Semper’s approach highlights the transregional sociocultural exchange of building construction and its materials from one culture and moment in time to the other. With the notion of material transition – translated from German “Stoffwechsel” – the workshops foreground the process of outliving and mixing architectural elements and materials of the past to develop contemporary sustainable new materials for architecture. Semper’s intuition sets the stage to convey the complexity behind a holistic transition toward an ethical, sustainable construction industry. All five workshops will be centered on the theoretical and practical understanding of the often invisible consequences determined by the construction industry on an ecological and social level on humans and non-humans alike, thus informing students on the global metabolism of architecture production.
During the workshops, guests will join us to provide practitioners’ and scholars’ perspectives on a sustainable transition of materials combining theory and practice.
Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes, II International Congress
Conference Venue: Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
Dates: January 18-20, 2023
Panel: The Architectures of War in Lusophone Africa and Beyond
Chair: Lisandra Franco de Mendonça
Paper Abstract:
Maxaquene Khovo Lar Students’ House in Maputo
On Social Repair and Material Decay
The paper analyzes the Khovo students’ house in Maputo designed by the altermodern émigré architect Pancho Guedes and commissioned by the Swiss Mission and the African intellectuals’ milieu emerging in the late colonial Mozambican society (1960s-70s).
When inaugurated in 1973, the building began hosting African students from the countryside who could afford higher education precluded by colonial educational programs through the Swiss missionaries’ patronage. The building – an outcome of the alliance among other actors of the late colonization (neither colonizers nor colonized) – is a paradigmatic example of space endowed with the exceptional agency of making and repairing “the social.” As opposed to Khovo’s relentless material decay, what is indeed striking is the persistence of this educational infrastructure in surviving six decades of turbulent Mozambican history that spans from the colonial war (60s-70s), post-independence Marxism (70s-80s), a civil war (ended in 1992) to the current neoliberal state.
Khovo, giving youngsters refuge in the city, kept facilitating the formation of a Mozambican socio-political and national awareness and the resulting evolution of young Africans’ subjectivities in the complex transition from the colonial past to post-colonial uncertainties. Khovo was and still is a material actant that, despite increasingly being threatened by the neoliberal logic of the market that wishes to turn it into a hotel, stands still as a locus of creation of a common civic imaginary where traces of socialist ideals revive in “everyday utopias” (Cooper 2014, Sliwinski 2016, Gastrow 2017).
Utopias – albeit per se conceived by utopian thinkers – are effectively enacted by “ordinary people who are bonded by the same dream of living a better future and rooted in present patterns and possibilities.” Khovo, as this paper demonstrates, provides a socio-spatial “alternative” (Hardt, Negri 2012) that facilitates conceiving a shared better future after having mended a fragmented past.
Participatory Images
Fostering Dialogue Through Image Making in the Context of Urban Planning
Edited by Michael Renner, Ina Dietzsch, Aylin Tschoepe, Susanne Käser, and Silvia Balzan
Transcript Verlag
(forthcoming 2024)
This edited volume addresses theories and methods in participatory processes in the context of urban development. The publication presents perspectives from different geographical contexts, incorporates diverse forms of knowledge, and critically reflects on the role of images in collaborative processes aimed at developing visions of urban futures. The authors deal with different definitions of “participation” and “image” that go beyond conventional ones, especially in the practice of urban development, and shift disciplinary boundaries. The contributions pursue different approaches that focus on imagin(eer)ing (Färber 2008) as an emancipatory practice and participatory images as assemblages of such practices that enable discussions and imaginations of urban futures among a broad spectrum of actors. In participatory processes of urban planning, images themselves become actors, are entangled in complex relationships, and enable alliances between actors who might otherwise not have entered into a dialog, ideally fostering mutual understanding, but in any case compromise (Renner 2016). The term “participatory image” in the title of the book picks up on these developments and findings and serves as a conceptual thread running through the entire volume.
Image: Workshop “Unser Bild von klybeckplus. Critical Image-Making,” Organizers/Promoters: CIELab team, Verein ZukunftKlybeck; Participants: ZukunftKlybeck Team; Date: 8th December 2018; Location
Café Hammerstrasse, Basel, CH. Image credits: CIELab.
Editorial Workshop
EAHN 2022 Madrid, Biennial Conference
An introduction to publishing for emerging and under-represented scholars
The two-and-half-hour-long workshop will be held in a hybrid format allowing both virtual and in-person attendance. This workshop is intended for participants to gain an understanding of editorial processes. It will offer an overview of the different roles of editors, reviewers, authors, copyeditors, and layout designers as well as the timeframes and the revision stages of an article undergoing from submission to publication.
Members of our editorial board and guest critics will run through the review process and what they are looking for when they review manuscripts. They will also lead up to a mock-up review process during
which mock editors/reviewers will selectively discuss samples of participants’ writings in small groups. In conjunction with discussing the pragmatics of publishing in academic journals, the workshop aims to reflect on these larger points:
-Highlight current discussions in architectural historiography – especially how calls for rethinking the discipline’s hierarchies, diverse archives, and environmental crises are shaping academic work.
-The qualities academic journals and editors are looking for in new articles and how important it is to be rigorous, argumentative while speaking from context to foster a voice in scholarship.
-Establish the relevance of publishing within an academic journal as opposed to, but also in dialogue with other web-based platforms, while considering the increasing role of social media in disseminating research to diverse audiences.This workshop will provide a platform where participants are able to deeply communicate with editors and reviewers from Architectural Histories and EAHN on how to enrich their reach, diversify their content, and expand their media presence. It aspires to support emerging scholars to contribute to more inclusive cultures in architectural histories and their academic publishing outlets.
Guest critics: Sheila Crane (University of Virginia), Kenny Cupers (University of Basel), Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University College Dublin), Isabelle Doucet (Chalmers University of Technology), Maros Krivy (Estonian Academy of Arts), Sebastiaan Loosen (ETH Zürich), Alona Nitzan-Shiftan (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology), Adedoyin Teriba (Vassar College), Ying Zhou (University of Hong Kong)
“Istruire, organizzare e tradurre: un’interpretazione storico-linguistica del processo architettonico”
In Tra le righe dell’Architettura: lingua, stile e testo
Edited by Alessandro Armando, Giovanni Durbiano, Costanza Lucarini and Raffaella Scarpa
Mimesis Edizioni, Milan, Italy, 2021
La trasmissione di istruzioni per informare il processo produttivo è un momento chiave del progetto architettonico. Per Roberto Gabetti, la ricerca progettuale architettonica «ha bisogno di far convergere l’apporto di competenze diverse sull’unico tema dell’intervento, e di rendere chiari, trasmissibili agli altri, i contenuti del progetto» (1997, p.57). Assumendo che le modalità con cui si è svolta questa dinamica si siano presentano in diverse forme in vari momenti storici, viene ipotizzato che sia possibile definire una correlazione tra queste formalizzazioni, il ruolo del progettista e, in senso lato, un modo linguistico di trasmettere il progetto.
Co-authored with Tommaso Listo, Politecnico di Torino
→ www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/9788857588216
“Maxaquene Khovo Students House in Maputo. On Social Repair and Material Decay”
In Mending and Repairing Across Africa
Edited by Paul Wenzel Geissler
Intellect Books
(forthcoming 2024)
Embedded in the biography of the building Maxaquene Khovo Lar located in Rua Aniceto do Rosario amidst the former colonial city of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, one can assert that the whole controversial sequence of events that determined the history of the country is visible.
The building was designed by the Portuguese modernist architect Pancho Guedes in late colonial times and commissioned by the Swiss missionaries; it survived a military socialist regime, civil war, and today it participates in the complex dynamics that mark the neoliberal regime in which the country is precariously dwelling in.
The building hosts today, as much as it used to host when newly inaugurated in 1966, Mozambican students coming mainly from the countryside who, through the protection and patronage of the missionaries, could afford higher education. Along its almost sixty years of life, the building helped create communities of individuals seeking something more than education but rather the construction of a national consciousness that needed to be first and foremost liberated by the Portuguese regime, cultivating a form of socialism that was able to speak with the Church.
Both the Swiss Mission and the eclectic architect Guedes played an ambivalent role between sincere social commitment, personal interests, local affiliations, and metropolitan (Portuguese and Swiss) agendas in exotic Africa. The building carries these ambivalences in itself.
Today the Khovo, named from the near mission center in the heart of the busy capital, rests in a state of advanced decay to the point to make one think when passing by that the infrastructure is dead. However, the Khovo is not dead; it is simply a lived ruin: an infrastructure that collaborates continuously to take care of the lives of those who are still inhabiting it and who, on the other hand, act as humans “infrastructures of repair” – “people as infrastructure” of everyday 2021 Africa.
Image: Khovo Lar students house’s loggia squatted by a street vendor. Image credits: Mário Macilau, 2020
The Observers Observed: Architectural Uses of Ethnography
Conference venue (and online): Het Nieuwe Instituut, NL
Dates: 24-25 November 2021
Paper Abstract:
Julian Beinart’s Patterns of the Street and Pancho Guedes’ 1001 Doors of Caniços
Icono- Ethnography in Architectural and Urban Research from 1960s Africa
Julian Beinart and Pancho Guedes, respectively South African and Portuguese architects and educators active in Africa during the Apartheid regime and the late Portuguese colony of Mozambique, offer a remarkable example of how the ethnographic gaze can inform architecture and urban studies. Indeed, their early experiments with icono-ethnographic methods provided a radical approach to architecture studies and education that is still relevant for today’s call of decolonizing universities curriculum – if critically discussed.
Beinart and Guedes collaborated in elaborating a series of educational workshops in Southern Africa based on participative art criteria in which unskilled locals took part through innovative teaching methods based on ethnographic practices that Beinart was testing at the time. Apart from the educational occupation, Beinart also conducted an innovative research published through the well-known article “Pattern of the Street” in Architectural Forum, Sept 1966. The article reported Beinart’s five-year project that visually mapped the façades of two thousand standardized government housing units in Western Native Township in Johannesburg as painted by inhabitants with decorations motifs.
Similar visual research can be found in Pancho Guedes’ photographic collection that contains a thorough survey of every vernacularly decorated door of the self-built houses in the Cidade do Caniços, the city of reeds, the counterpart of the Cidade do Cimento, the city of cement, that formed the colonial center of the capital of Laurenço Marques.
The paper intends to critically discuss the pioneering power of these research methods for architecture and urban studies, locating them temporally and geographically and understanding their inherent ambiguities and shortcomings derived from these aspects. Beinart and Guedes’ position as modern (or, more precisely, alter-modern ) architects of Western origin amidst colonial dynamics is multifaceted. On the one hand, both represent an extraordinary example of “architects-anthropologists” who make use of architects’ visual tools to anthropologically sense a complex spatial reality where modern normativity as imposed onto indigenous ontologies was subverted through the mean of decoration (“decoration as an act of resistance and a primordial act of participation” as argued by Ayala Levin, 2016). On the other hand, their permanence in Africa and the funding behind their research raise several questions that restitute the intricacy behind the challenge of an authentic possibility of decolonization.
These icono-ethnographic inquiries elaborated in the early 1960s in decolonizing Africa provide an excellent occasion to reflect on the social, cultural, and ultimately political role that architecture cover in creating communities, negotiating, and reclaiming contested identities.
→ Link to conference proceedings
“Social, Political and Material Endurance of Amâncio Pancho Guedes’ Social Architecture in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique”
Noon Talks, Colloquium University of Basel, Department of Social Sciences
This paper highlights a notable case of modern architecture’s resilience, represented by a modest yet significant building in a remote village in rural Mozambique. Amid the diverse and unique architectures throughout Mozambique, the Portuguese architect Amâncio (Pancho) Guedes created works that are particularly relevant to my research due to their social impact. Past historiographical accounts have often overlooked the social contributions of Guedes, focusing instead on his eclectic, “alter-modern” style, which lends itself more readily to aesthetic and technological analyses by architecture historians. Within the complex dynamics of Mozambique’s colonial history, Guedes, in collaboration with the Swiss mission as a client, occupied an ambivalent role balancing sincere social commitment, personal interests, local affiliations, and metropolitan (Portuguese and Swiss) agendas in exotic Africa. This paper aims to reveal the political and material agency of Guedes’ work.
The project for a small primary school in the former missionary station of Antioka (now Magude, 200 km north of Maputo, the capital) commenced in the early 1960s. A Swiss missionary, who had settled in the Mozambican countryside, commissioned Guedes to design the school. Guedes worked pro bono, creating simple, understandable drawings for local peasants who collectively built the school. Today, the school continues to serve numerous children from the vibrant community of Facazissa.
Remarkably, the building has withstood a military socialist regime and a civil war, and it continues to fulfill its role in the current neoliberal era, despite the country’s precarious situation. A significant insight into the building’s importance today came from the school director during my visit in July 2019. She, a strong woman who greeted me upon arrival, explained how she personally oversaw the 2012 renovation. Her efforts ensured that the school was not expanded by an additional floor, which would have been beneficial but would have altered Guedes’ original design.
Ultimately, this paper aims to illuminate the biography of this school as a testament to sixty years of Mozambican history. It explores its genesis, its enduring legacy, and its resilience—both as a form of political resistance and social adaptability—reflecting a Western concept of modernity implanted by the Portuguese and reimagined by Mozambicans in the African savanna.
Architecture and Endurance
EAHN Thematic Conference
Conference Venue (and online): METU Ankara, Turkey
Dates: September 30-October 2, 2021
Panel: Resistances and Endurance
Chair: Finola O’Kane Crimmins
Paper Abstract:
Political and Social Endurance of a Colonial Modern School in Postcolonial Mozambique:
The Primary School of Facazisse
This paper highlights a notable case of modern architecture’s resilience, represented by a modest yet significant building in a remote village in rural Mozambique. Amid the diverse and unique architectures throughout Mozambique, the Portuguese architect Amâncio (Pancho) Guedes created works that are particularly relevant to my research due to their social impact. Past historiographical accounts have often overlooked the social contributions of Guedes, focusing instead on his eclectic, “alter-modern” style, which lends itself more readily to aesthetic and technological analyses by architecture historians. Within the complex dynamics of Mozambique’s colonial history, Guedes, in collaboration with the Swiss mission as a client, occupied an ambivalent role balancing sincere social commitment, personal interests, local affiliations, and metropolitan (Portuguese and Swiss) agendas in exotic Africa. This paper aims to reveal the political and material agency of Guedes’ work.
The project for a small primary school in the former missionary station of Antioka (now Magude, 200 km north of Maputo, the capital) commenced in the early 1960s. A Swiss missionary, who had settled in the Mozambican countryside, commissioned Guedes to design the school. Guedes worked pro bono, creating simple, understandable drawings for local peasants who collectively built the school. Today, the school continues to serve numerous children from the vibrant community of Facazissa.
Remarkably, the building has withstood a military socialist regime and a civil war, and it continues to fulfill its role in the current neoliberal era, despite the country’s precarious situation. A significant insight into the building’s importance today came from the school director during my visit in July 2019. She, a strong woman who greeted me upon arrival, explained how she personally oversaw the 2012 renovation. Her efforts ensured that the school was not expanded by an additional floor, which would have been beneficial but would have altered Guedes’ original design.
Ultimately, this paper aims to illuminate the biography of this school as a testament to sixty years of Mozambican history. It explores its genesis, its enduring legacy, and its resilience—both as a form of political resistance and social adaptability—reflecting a Western concept of modernity implanted by the Portuguese and reimagined by Mozambicans in the African savanna.
“Welcome to Makonde”
Log 51, New York: Anyone Corporation
25°56’37″S, 32°37’14″E
Avenida da Marginal
Maputo, Mozambique
Along Avenida da Marginal, the coastal road that wraps Mozambique’s capital city of Maputo, overlooking the Indian Ocean, one can still find informal entrepreneurs among the sites targeted for waterfront development via Chinese-African agreements. One recent holdout specializes in selling a variety of woods – as many as 52 different kinds. Some of it used for reproducing the art of the Makonde people, who live thousands of kilometers to the north, on the Mozambique and Tanzania border. In the 1930s, under Portuguese colonial rule, Makonde sculptures came to define a genre of African art that was exported and collected internationally. Today, local craftspeople fashion Makonde-style sculptures from unprocessed logs and slabs of red chanfuta or blond jacaranda to sell both to locals and to foreign tourists flocking to the beach.
www.anycorp.com
Image: Avenida da Marginal, Maputo, Mozambique. Image credits: Silvia Balzan, 2019
“Other Spaces. Race and Class in Late Colonial Mozambique”
Ardeth, A Magazine on the Power of the Project, #Race 09, 2021
The late Portuguese colonialism in Africa was characterized by paradoxes and ambiguities inherent in the “assimilation” policies, which generated a series of “othernesses”: of “other” protagonists of colonization, initiators of “other spaces” exceeding the oppositional logic between colonizers and colonized, Whites and Blacks.
Departing from the necessity of a more accurate reading of these “other spaces”, the text presents a critical analysis from a social point of view of: a) an example of agricultural colonization of rural and conservative nature, the Limpopo Colony; and b) the social utopia, envisioned by a Portuguese housing cooperative, COOP, active in Mozambique in those years.
Through the analysis of these two case studies, this article intends to prove how part of the spatial production of late Portuguese colonialism indicates the presence of a multiplicity of social actors and ideological instances entangled with codetermined notions of race and class.
Image credits: Archivio Storico Ultramarino, Lisbon, AHU-10345-MU-CSFU
Unmasking space is a reading group and safe space at ETH Zurich, an epistemic community around decolonizing knowledge. We are interested in unmasking the use of spatial design and representation in the construction of ideas of race, gender and other forms of othering and exploitation. We will meet online a total of 5 times in the autumn semester. Every session will start with a 30-minute presentation by a researcher working on unmasking, followed by a 1-hour discussion based on the presentation and a preselected reading. Through this epistemic community, our idea is to build a group for critical action in space.
Organized by Nitin Bathla and Ludwig Berger
→ girot.arch.ethz.ch/courses/lecture-series/unmaskingspace
“Entangled Dichotomies. Fieldnotes from Maputo, Mozambique”
Trans Magazine, D-ARCH ETH Zurich, Issue 36 Spannung, Feb 2020. Zurich: gta Verlag.
The article presents a curated selection of images taken in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, during my fieldwork in July 2019 as part of my Ph.D. research.
These photographs capture the intricate relationship between nature and the urban environment in an African city. Unlike the highly regulated Western cities, Maputo’s socio-anthropological and economic context fosters a unique and continuous dialogue between green spaces and urban landscapes.
In this environment, nature reclaims its presence, persistently emerging from the man-made surroundings. This natural resurgence shapes unexpected spaces, drawing people in and creating symbolic landmarks within the city. These interactions contribute to the unique concept of urbanity and lived space in Maputo.
Building on the longstanding debate about the relationship between nature and culture, this article aims to delve deeper into this topic. By visually and theoretically exploring the inherent “tension” between the natural and the artificial, it seeks to shed light on the dynamic interplay that defines Maputo’s urban fabric.
Anthropology and Geography
Conference Venue (and online): RAI 2020 Royal Anthropological Institute, UK
Dates: September 14-18, 2020
Panel: Anthropology and Geography in Postsocialism
Chair: Vesna V. Godina
Paper Abstract:
Access to Land in Mozambique
FRELIMO’s Legal Frameworks during the Socialist and Democratic Phases
The paper sheds light on two different moments in the political life of post-independence Mozambique after the Portuguese colonialism lasted until 1975. Precisely it analysis the evolution of the political party FRELIMO from its socialist one-party phase to the following multi-party system from the ’90s onward. The paper focus on one aspect of FRELIMO’s policy: the development of legal frameworks that regulate dispossession, rights of access and use to land, and their socio-economical and anthropological effects on local communities.
During the Portuguese colony, the land was occupied through various types of titles. Following the en masse departure of colonizers, the land was nationalized by FRELIMO in 1975. The population was organized into communal villages and cooperatives, retaining their right to use land.
Successively FRELIMO grew in favor of the neoliberalist market. Through policy as the 1997 Land Law, the State owns all land and grants communities use rights (DUAT). The law also enables investors to acquire 50-years renewable rights, which they negotiate with community consultations, in many cases, flawed and leading to dispossession. These deals are filtered by local elites, which exercise control over Mozambican land. It is not simply the global capital that acts upon a developing country.
The paper aims to expand on the progressive erosion of socialism and the politics of privatization of land in Mozambique. These policies accompany a reorganization of territorial units that, in turn, leads to a change of power structure in the Mozambican society previously organized by the customary system.
“The Work of Pancho Guedes for the Swiss Mission: Modernist Colonial Architecture in Postcolonial Mozambique”
DocTalks, 23 April 2020
Drawing from theoretical and empirical approaches of anthropology and ethnography to answer questions concerning the history and theory of architecture, this Ph.D. research intends to document the history of production and the current social, political life of a selection of buildings commissioned by the Swiss Mission to the Portuguese émigré architect Amâncio (Pancho) Guedes during the long-lasting Portuguese colonization of Mozambique which ended only in 1974 with the independence of the country.
Through the localized study of Guedes’ architecture for the Swiss Mission in Mozambique, the research aims to contribute to the broader historiography of post-war ‘modernist architectural diaspora’ (Sharp, 2005) beyond the European metropolises. The thesis brings attention to this country, still profoundly overlooked in the broader discussion of colonial modernism today and to this specific segment of the work of the ambivalent figure of Pancho Guedes: ‘alter-modern’ (Gadanho, 2007) architect, educated in Africa, who spent most of his life in the colony.
Shading light on his artistic, social, and political position, the research also wishes to enhance the understanding of the role of the religious institution of the Swiss Mission in the country.
The collaboration between these two actors led to the creation of a consistent amount of worship and educational spaces across the country. The Ph.D. intents to critically examine the spatial agency of these spaces in fostering an ‘African consciousness that was broader than the early ‘ethnic’ consciousness, and encouraged a national rather than a local perspective of opposition to Portuguese oppression’ (Cruz e Silva, 2001).
The study aspires to understand the significance of these spaces as political spaces (spaces of agency) during the late colonialism and in the contemporary postcolonial and neoliberal Mozambique. In this sense, the investigation points to going beyond an evaluation of modern colonial projects through welfarist terms of success and failure, instead of focusing on the aligned and unexpected relations that they set up’ (Le Roux, 2014).
The chosen case study works as a paradigmatic example to contribute, methodologically speaking, to the interdisciplinary fields of historical anthropology, integrating approaches derived from liminal fields as material culture studies (Buchli, 1999) and architectural anthropology (Amerlick, 2001).
Through the employment of ethnographic methods in historiographical research, the inquiry wishes to discuss methodological issues of current ways of writing about modern colonial architecture in postcolonial times from architecture historians. It positions itself in the tradition of cultural history: a ‘history from below’ (Sharpe, 1991), adopting what Lloyd (1993) describes as the ‘attractiveness of anthropological method’ for historians, which permits ‘a dynamic interest in culture to the historical study […] by way of «scale reduction». Large questions are posed to intimate settings.’
A visual essay is meant to constitute the backbone and the narration guideline of the theoretical dissertation, combining images conceived as historiographical sources in archives and images as ethnographic outputs of the fieldwork, theory-generating in the anthropological sense.
Image: The primary school in former Swiss mission station named Antioka, now Magude, Mozambique, Pancho Guedes, 1964. Image credits: Guedes Archive.
DocTalks is an informal, peer-to-peer, weekly online forum by and for PhD students, postdocs and early career researchers in architectural history and theory. It is organized by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, USI Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, IE University Madrid, UMass Amherst, Hong Kong University, McGill University and MIT.
The series started in 2018 as in-person meetings among PhD students at ETH Zurich/gta. In 2020 it moved online and opened to participants from other universities. Today, DocTalks is run by an international team and hosts a broad range of speakers and audience members from numerous universities worldwide.
We are all working in architectural history, in a broad range of geographical foci and chronologies, from early-modern to 20th century and even more recent history. The aim of the colloquium is not so much to guarantee fact-heavy input on whatever topic is presented (as would be the case in a research-peer group), but rather to try and draw parallels between different topics and to discuss more broadly how we do research, how we write, how we deal with historiographic tropes and conventions, and how we can situate our (often rather specialized) work within broader contexts and audiences. DocTalks works as a platform in which one can test their work beyond the narrow boundaries of their specific area of expertise.
We meet every week to present work-in-progress, exchange feedback and discuss matters of methodology, writing, narrative, terminology and periodology to draw links between different topics and areas of expertise. Meetings are structured around the canonical twenty-minute presentation, followed by a Q&A open to everyone attending. The format is designed so as to afford useful and direct feedback in a low-pressure environment. You may present anything that is useful for you according to the stage you are in: from the outline of your entire project to the draft of individual papers and/or chapters; from broader historiographical hypotheses to specific case studies.
We are looking for contributions from PhD students and Postdocs and early career researchers within the areas of architectural history and theory, from early-modern to contemporary. Besides those who wish to present their own work, our door is open to anyone that wishes to attend the sessions as an auditor and contribute with constructive comments and feedback.
DocTalks is Gregorio Astengo, Silvia Balzan, Matthew Critchley, Nikos Magouliotis, Stella Rossikopoulou Pappa, Davide Spina, Linda Stagni, Çiğdem Talu and Demetra Vogiatzaki
“The Team 10 on Pancho Guedes: An Energy from the New World that has European Roots”
Joelho, Journal of Architectural Culture, Issue 10, 2019
University of Coimbra, Department of Architecture
This article considers the work of the Portuguese architect Pancho Guedes and his relationship with the group of dissident architects Team 10 which he attended occasionally. Guedes, émigré in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Africa, joined the Team 10 conversations during the so-called third phase of the movement when the group assumed more the character of family meetings compared to the formal CIAM gatherings. The Team 10 seventies phase re-considered the universal principles of the modern movement by assuming a contextual, local, and regionalist attitude toward architecture and urban projects. Residents’ participation and controversies surrounding urban renewal policies as carried out by modernist masters, were topics of discussion which characterized the Team 10 third phase.
The article examines how Guedes took part in this debate by bringing “energy from the new world that has European roots” quoting Alison Smithson. The dissident attitude of Team 10 against the modernist doctrine resonates with Guedes’ alternative architecture as an exception to the colonial modernist utopia in Mozambique.
The article explores the contents of the meetings between Team 10 members and Guedes; their exchange of ideas and shared concerns. Following an analysis of these meetings’ records, the article provides a deeper understanding of Team 10, of Guedes, and their relationship with the post-war, socio-political architectural discourse.
→ impactum-journals.uc.pt/joelho/issue/view/_10
CIELab
The CIELab is a collaborative research and action lab that emerges from the SNF project “Visual Communication in Participatory Urban Planning Processes.” It is intended as a place to revisit, develop, and critically reflect on theories and methods regarding participatory processes that engage urban imagin(eer)ing as emancipatory practice, and participatory images as media that facilitate negotiations over urban futures among a diverse range of actors. Images themselves become actors in this process as they have the potential to enable compromise, possibly even consensus, and, ideally, mutual understanding and possible alliances between actors who might not have come into dialogue otherwise. The workshops we co-organize with various groups are a platform for participants, including ourselves, to (visually) communicate what it means to be part of the city and how to envision (and realize) a more inclusionary urban space.
Outcome of SNSF, Swiss National Science Foundation Project (2018-2022)
→ Visual Communication in participatory process of urban planning
→ Visuelle Kommunikation in partizipatorischen Stadtplanungsprozessen
SNSF 100013_176459
Team: Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Susanne Käser, Silvia Balzan, Ina Dietzsch, Michael Renner
→ www.cielab.ch
Image: CIELab’s Seminar/Workshop “Stadtplanung aus ihrer Sicht!”, Organizers/Promoters: Gewerbeverband Basel-Stadt, Mittelstand Vereinigung Basel, Verein ZukunftKlybeck CVP; Participants: ZukunftKlybeck team, Gewerbeverband Basel-Stadt, Mittelstands-Vereinigung Basel; Date: 18th May 2019; Location: FHNW HGK Basel. Image credits: CIELab.
F.A.T. stands for Forum for Architectural Theory, run by Marco Zelli and Fabio Don in Zurich. It is a horizontal teaching-learning program based on an open debate about fundamental topics related to architecture.
The F.A.T. believes in the primacy of theory as a project tool. Indeed, the word theory comes from the Greek word theorein, meaning the contemplation of an idea prior to action. Therefore, it provides a space for projection, rather than sheer reaction to contingencies.
The F.A.T. aims to produce synergy among thinkers and practitioners regarding this project dimension.
It promotes critical consciousness among emerging architects through debate and confrontation.
It aims to actively involve scholars in the act of planning, encouraging their engagement with the operational level of the discipline.
The F.A.T. believes in architectonic discourse as a form of collective intelligence and stands against the current cultural atomization. The construction of a common ground of understanding is the premise for broad synthesis.
In the framework of one of F.A.T. session, I presented and discuss Hvattum, Mari. 2018. “Mere Style?” Editorial, Architectural Histories 6(1): 14, pp. 1–4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.342
→ www.f-a-t.org
Image: November 2019 Session, Lochergut, Zurich. Image credits: F.A.T.
SI/NO The Architecture of Urban-Think Tank (itinerant pavilion)
ETH Hauptgebäude, Zurich
Architekturmuseum der TU, Munich
Reporting from the Front, 15th International Architecture Biennale, Venice
The first retrospective exhibition of “Urban-Think Tank” aims to question how design can create better cities. The exhibition is comprised of a modular, off-the-shelf, pipe structure, layered fabric panels, videos, and models. It shows an overview of U-TT’s research methods, proposals, and built projects from the past two decades. The presented work is premised on an urgent curiosity. Faced with crises of inequality, resource scarcity, and ecological volatility, U-TT argues that designers cannot remain passive. They must ask difficult questions. They must ask themselves and the world at large whether their work can make a meaningful difference. Yes or no?
With: Danny Wills, Daniel Schwartz, Alexis Kalagas, Helle Bendixen and Claudia Wildermuth (Integral Ruedi Baur)