Editors Beatriz Colomina, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister will launch their long-awaited book Radical Pedagogies at CIVA. Together with contributors such as Hilde Heynen, Silvia Franceschini, Vanessa Grossman, Ivan Lopez Munuera, Dirk van Heuvel and Mark Wigley they will discuss the transformation of architectural education after World War II and its impact on today's challenges. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and, in some sense, define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture's status quo.
The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of “unlearning” under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for “every body,” including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture's role in the new century.
Speakers: Beatriz Colomina, Hilde Heynen, Vanessa Grossman, Silvia Franceschini, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Ivan Lopez Munuera, Dirk van Heuvel, Mark Wigley
Radical Pedagogies
Editors: Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister
MIT PRESS, May 2022
