Editorial
Texte intégral
- 1 Beatriz Colomina [et al.] (eds.), Radical Pedagogies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. See also (...)
- 2 Kim De Raedt, “Policies, people, projects. School building as development aid in postcolonial Sub- (...)
- 3 Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (ed.), Doors of Learning. Microcosms of a Future South Africa, Leipzig : (...)
- 4 For an early use of the term, see Libby Porter. Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning, Farn (...)
1The current issue of ABE Journal-Architecture Beyond Europe continues the dossier investigating “Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy” initiated in ABE 21 and focuses on the role of (architectural) education and pedagogy. In doing so, it engages with a topic that has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, notably through the Radical Pedagogies project initiated by Beatriz Colomina,1 and which was already given some attention in ABE previously, among others by Kim De Raedt and Ayala Levin.2 Education and pedagogy form a powerful lens to investigate particular relationships and interactions between groups and individuals connected by colonial or postwar developmental constellations, and to ask pertinent questions of the postcolonial/decolonial. The most recent volume of the Bauhaus Taschenbuch (no. 27, 2023), entitled “Doors of Learning. Microcosms of a Future South Africa,” for instance, draws attention on educational centers of the African National Congress (ANC) set up in rural Tanzania since the 1970s with the support of international solidarity movements. Built according to designs of GDR architects, based on a simple, modular construction system of prefabricated concrete columns and panels, the story of these centers “challenges previous Cold War historiographies of the Eastern Bloc’s global engagement by giving voice to the entanglements of ‘global socialism’ with decolonial educational movements and social transformations in Africa.”3 In an era when the call for ‘unlearning’ and questioning the ‘epistemic imposition’ of knowledge disseminated through colonial and developmentalist agendas is on the rise,4 we feel that contributing to the writing of histories of (architectural) education and pedagogy beyond Europe is, indeed, a timely endeavor.
2Apart from this dossier, this ABE issue also includes a Varia article by Cathy Keys, entitled “House elevation and the British military settlement of Port Essington in Northern Australia,” in which she urges us to understand the practice of elevating houses in tropical Northern Australia not as exclusively informed by considerations of disease and discomfort, voiced in 19th-century colonial sources, but perhaps also, and more importantly, by a diverse tradition of elevated Indigenous architectures across the region, thereby suggesting the possibility of exchanges of architectural knowledge between Indigenous peoples and British settlers which architectural historians have tended to overlook.
Notes
1 Beatriz Colomina [et al.] (eds.), Radical Pedagogies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. See also the review of the book in this issue of ABE.
2 Kim De Raedt, “Policies, people, projects. School building as development aid in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa”, ABE Journal, no. 12, 2017. DOI: 10.4000/abe.3854; Ayala Levin, “Basic Design and the Semiotics of Citizenship: Julian Beinart’s Educational Experiments and Research on Wall Decoration in Early 1960s Nigeria and South Africa”, ABE Journal, no. 9-10, 2016. DOI: 10.4000/abe.10900.
3 Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (ed.), Doors of Learning. Microcosms of a Future South Africa, Leipzig : Spector Books, 2023 (Bauhaus Taschenbuch, 27).
4 For an early use of the term, see Libby Porter. Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. For a seminal, recent study: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism, London: Verso, 2019. On the notion of “epistemic imposition”, see David Hutama Setiadi, Building Practice in the Dutch Indies. Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century, London: Routledge, 2023, and the review of the book in this issue of ABE.
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Johan Lagae, Sarah Melsens, Tania Sengupta et Ricardo Costa Agarez, « Editorial », ABE Journal [En ligne], 22 | 2023, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2023, consulté le 14 janvier 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/15301 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.15301
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