DECOLONIZING ARCHITECTURE?

• Published in: ARQ (Santiago, Chile) Vol. 110; p. 15
• Main Author: Rozas-Krause, Valentina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Spanish
• Published: Santiago Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Estudios Urbano 01-04-2022
• Subjects: Architecture; Decolonization
• ISSN: 0716-0852; 0717-6996
• DOI: 10.4067/S0717-69962022000100014

What does decolonizing architecture mean? This issue is dedicated to this question. It is not a coincidence that we are asking this now. In the past years, architecture, understood broadly, seems to be in a process of decolonial reckoning. More and more historians, theorists, curators, publishers, and practitioners are thinking about the entanglement between colonial and neocolonial violence and the built environment. From heated debates about dismantling the Eurocentric architectural history survey to an increasing number of exhibitions dedicated to the topic, this issue of ARQ reveals how the ideas of decolonization have permeated architectural thinking and practice. The essays and projects of the following pages explore the association between settler colonialism and architecture, rewrite disciplinary origin stories, explore the entanglement between modernism and racism, reconstruct Indigenous ontologies and cosmologies as well as imagine a sustainable non-extractive relationship to nature. Skeptics might say decolonization is a trend; others might argue that it is being whitewashed, used benignly as a metaphor for inclusion. However, what if we are in the midst of a ‘decolonial turn’ in architecture, a transformation that will reshape the understanding of our discipline and its world-building effects in the futur