South-South I: Counter Reading the Built Environment

This course comprises mini courses that consider how and from where knowledge about the built environment is produced. In recent years, the southern turn in architectural humanities has brought perspectives from post-colonial, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, and community-engaged scholarship to trouble what counts as legitimate or canonical knowledge. Through close reading, writing, discussion, and project-based work, students engage authors, sites, and methods that reorient architectural thinking to and from its peripheries, and situate architecture within broader systems, histories and experiences. 

The A3 Mini course "South-South I: Counter Reading the Built Environment" looks from and beyond the American South to consider processes, relations, and histories that inform experiences of place, but which are submerged or invisible in dominant narratives of architectural and urban design. With frameworks from Black geographies, Indigenous studies, political ecology, and forensic architecture, students develop a final project that engages methods of counter-mapping, counter-modeling, archival work, and historical analysis to (re)read and (re)construct sites and spaces.