1The existing historiography on architectural pedagogy in the Global South is rather limited and fragmented. The recently published hefty Radical Pedagogies tome, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister, is not only a convenient book for a stocktaking of contemporary scholarship on the topic but is also in itself a significant contribution to it.

2Based on the various iterations of the eponymous exhibition and accompanying website for more than a decade, the editors have collected in this volume 113 entries on architecture pedagogy across the world, with a focus on the half-century from the 1940s to the 1980s. While the entries are loosely organized into 14 thematic sections, preceded by a succinct introduction, alternative cross-readings between the entries are encouraged, as is clear from the inclusion of a second and a third table of contents, arranging the contents by date and by geographic longitude. The experiences in the US and Europe—Germany, Italy, and the UK in particular—are more than well represented. But with roughly a third of the contributions addressing pedagogy in the Global South, the book is a considerable effort towards a more geographically balanced historiography.

3The overall framing of the book emphasizes the notion of “radicality”, by which the editors aim to foreground specifically “experimental” teaching practices across the globe that, in one way or another, challenged the normative thinking of mainstream education (p. 11). By challenging the norm, this type of pedagogical practice served as a transformative power able to change and reshape architectural culture. Paradigmatic is of course the 1968 revolt in Paris and its impact on rethinking architecture curricula across the globe (and with which the book symbolically opens through the entry of Caroline Maniaque, “The Revolt before the Revolt” p. 22).

4When selectively reading the entries on pedagogy in the Global South, the first thing that stands out in this historiography is its intrinsically global, dynamic, and transcultural nature, as well as the importance this dimension has for recounting its history. On the one hand, we read about Polish expats professionally active in Nigeria, Swiss architects in Algeria, Italians in Cuba, Americans in India, Hungarians in Chile, etc., and, on the other, about Egyptians, Singaporeans, Nigerians, etc., attending architecture programs mostly in the UK and the US, and becoming impactful pedagogues in their home countries. Histories of migration of the protagonists involved are grateful entry points and frames of reference to orient oneself and to grasp the intellectual luggage that formed the framework of their thinking and acting. But they also inevitably ask for theorizing the process of transculturation: how do ideas, practices, or pedagogies migrate from one context to another, and how exactly are they negotiated and rearticulated in their new context? In the set of contributions co-authored by Łukasz Stanek in particular (Stanek, “When Decolonization Was Not a Metaphor” p. 29; Ghada Al Slik & Stanek, “Reflexive Acceleration” p. 65; Stanek & Ola Uduku, “Cosmopolitan Pedagogy in the Post-Colony” p. 366), this train of thoughts is pushed one step further, conceptualizing post-independence schools as nodes of intersecting global networks, opening up “to multiple worlds of knowledge production and professional experience beyond the former colonial center” (p. 30). For instance, for Stanek and Ola Uduku, the Kumasi school in Ghana was a cosmopolitan cocktail of British community planning, Hungarian resettlement experiences, state socialist regional planning, and Anglo-American planning traditions—a melting pot that resulted in an intellectual productivity that is irreducible to its various components and that perhaps urges us to provincialize these various established frames of reference.

5When it comes to the pedagogical practices themselves, especially the contributions on the highly politicized culture of Latin America show a high degree of experimentation in how education was organized in order to break down established hierarchies or subvert existing power relations. For instance, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, through a federation of architecture studios and community projects, pedagogy was mobilized to produce militant knowledge to subvert the repressive state power (Cristina López Uribe, “Autogobierno: Militant Learning” p. 44). In Cordóba, it was the hierarchy between teachers and students and the compartmentalization of knowledge that were challenged in the horizontal studio system of taller total (Sebastian Malecki, “A Total Study of Architecture” p. 42). And in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, the alienation of higher education from real-life concerns was combated by extensive surveys of rancheríos (squatter settlements) in Montevideo, reorienting the curriculum towards “revolutionary organization” instead of “composition” (Martin Cobas, “How to Train ‘Postrevolutionary’ Architects” p. 196), by removing the distinction between education and practice in Tucumán, involving students in the design of their own campus (Horacio Torrent, “Critical Unity Beyond Professional Realism” p. 194), and by turning architecture into a socializing totality in Valparaíso where learning, working, and living blend into one another (Ignacio G. Galán, “Autonomy… to Join Life, Work, and Study” p. 154).

6Related to these pedagogical practices, a series of contributions highlight how the curriculum was shaped to align with national development goals or to resist its instrumentalization for these aims. At the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, for instance, industrial design was to support the nation’s development (Anthony Acciavatti, “Design in the Service of Nation-Building” p. 272), while at Cairo University, the Egyptian Yousef Shafik advocated a Miesian technological modernism for the same sake (Shaimaa Ashour & Zeinab Shafik, “Engineering Architecture Education” p. 297). More experimental was the Portuguese-Mozambican Pancho Guedes’s mix of modernism, African arts, and surrealism in the “Department of Invention” in Johannesburg and his visual-culture-focused traveling workshops with the South African Julian Beinart, rearticulating Bauhaus pedagogy in the context of newly independent countries’ industrialization process (Hannah le Roux, “The Department of Invention” p. 68; Ayala Levin, ‘Basic Design’ toward Decolonization” p. 86). Similarly, Selby Mvusi and Derek Morgan developed a foundation course at the University of Nairobi, incorporating social theory and phenomenology to prep architecture graduates for the post-colonial reality they’ll be operating in (Daniel Magaziner, “Time-Consciousness for the Postcolonial Present” p. 119).

7Apart from technology, avant-garde visual pedagogy, and social theory, a frequently recurring foothold to attune the curriculum to the reality it was aiming to serve, was vernacular architecture. Unlocking the tacit knowledge of vernacular architecture required fieldwork, and along these lines we see Houchang Seyhoun, the dean of Tehran’s architecture department, initiating a series of field trips exploring Iran’s architectural heritage (Pamela Karimi, “An Iranian ‘Grand Tour,’” p. 75), the Middle East Technical University in Turkey installing a program of summer fieldwork in rural Anatolia (Onur Yüncü & Berin F. Gür, “Constructing Practice” p. 364), the Nigerian David Olatunde Aradeon traveling West Africa in search for a localized modern language (Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Designs on Tradition” p. 299), Valparaíso’s architecture school embarking on a pan-American trip called Amereid, producing a new architectural origin tale for the continent (Ignacio G. Galán, “Autonomy… to Join Life, Work, and Study” p. 154), and a massive, international survey program led by Hiroshi Hara as an antidote to Japan’s frenzied modernization (Lily Zhang, “Learning from the Village” p. 179).

8Within the rethought pedagogical practices and curricular transformations collected and recounted in this volume, several authors have sought to read the archive against the grain and to creatively pursue several new avenues of thought when historicizing the history of architecture pedagogy in the Global South. Worth highlighting here are, firstly, several contributions that challenge the limits of historiographic categories. Ijlal Muzaffar does so by going beyond the single case study approach and attempting to deconstruct the figure of the foreign expert and to recognize patterns in the operations of Charles Abrams, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and Michel Écochard (Muzaffar, “Counting Quality, Seeing Patterns” p. 278). Sandi Hilal and Pelin Tan’s contributions, on the other hand, challenge the notion of education and open up the field to alternative forms of training: through Palestinian neighborhood schools and a social agricultural experiment in Jericho (Hilal, “Self-Organization toward Self-Determination” p. 210; Tan, “An Agricultural School as a Pedagogical Experiment” p. 334). Secondly, while most of the contributions focus on the pedagogues and their ideas about pedagogy, surprisingly few adopt the perspective of students and their ways of learning. Both Pamela Karimi and Ruo Jia aim to do so by tracing back the influence of education on later-day practitioners in the cases of the Iranian-American architect Nader Khalili and his indebtedness to the earlier mentioned Seyhoun’s series of field trips, and a batch of Chinese students, amongst whom Wang Shu, who graduated from the theory-heavy Nanjing Institute of Technology (Karimi, “An Iranian ‘Grand Tour’” p. 75; Ruo Jia, “Riding the Reformative Wave of Postmodern Theory” p. 150). And thirdly, in a more assertive tone, Łukasz Stanek shows how some of the statements that can be typically found in the biased archives of the Global North are in need of being actively debunked. When the British leadership in Nigeria, for instance, belittles Nigerian students’ abilities to think in three dimensions, drawings in courses surveying vernacular architecture easily contradict such statements (Stanek, “When Decolonization Was Not a Metaphor” p. 29).

9Radical Pedagogies is a double book. On the one hand, it presents a series of entries on well-known names that further explore their legacy in relation to pedagogy and thereby further substantiate the existing canon. When it comes to architecture pedagogy in the Global South, however, it is hard to speak of an already existing canon and the book serves more as a first, tentative inventory of these historical experiences. When read along these lines, the overall framing of the book on “radicality” loses some of its interpretative and binding force. If radical pedagogies stand out as experimental teaching practices that challenge the normative thinking of mainstream education, one wonders what that entails in contexts where architecture programs were only recently introduced and often in a context of a society-wide impact of decolonization, of drastic modernization, of ideological shifts and regime changes. In other words, the book’s framing invites one to reflect on pedagogy and its transformative powers, and to wonder, for instance, how the history of non-radical architecture pedagogy in post-independence Nairobi would look like?

10For these types of discussions, the historiography on the subject first needs to expand, and it is mostly in this regard, for disclosing so many historical cases in one single volume, even though the entries are inevitably short, that Radical Pedagogies is a milestone book. With the recent publication of another big book, The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (2023, edited by Harriet Harriss, Ashraf M. Salama, and Ane Gonzalez Lara), we appear to be at a turning point for the historiography of the field and are seeing the histories of architectural education in the Global South increasingly put under historical scrutiny whilst building up a common frame of reference that allows for more in-depth analysis, nuance, and reading against the grain.