Rehearsing Exits

'Practices and Pedagogies' is a public lecture series organised by Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design. The six talks aim to discuss models and forms of practice that intersect with architectural education - old, new, and emerging pedagogical agendas.

This talk is a reflection on the possibilities and contradictions of working in the current architecture education establishment with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial agendas for architectural practice. Drawing from past and ongoing pedagogical experiments, it considers the fissures that can be found in the circuit of architecture education (which includes schools, -iennials, etc.), and how those cuts can be inhabited and designed as collective learning experiences that escape, if temporarily, the logics of the colonial institution and the corporate university. It will consider how those are often appropriated, coopted, or simply remain in the blind spots of institutional memory. This presentation is seen as an opportunity to share and discuss experiences, tactics, successes, and failures, by going to the behind-the-scenes of the production of festivals, exhibitions, courses, and conversations that aim to exit the status-quo of architecture education.

interim projects is a recently launched interdisciplinary research and design studio that Nora Akawi and Eduardo Rega Calvo established to conduct their collaborations alongside their practice as full-time education workers. Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect, and an assistant professor at The Cooper Union’s School of Architecture. She focuses on ruination and bordering as the architectural projects of settler colonialism. Prior to joining The Cooper Union, Nora taught at Columbia GSAPP where she was the director of Studio-X Amman. Eduardo Rega Calvo is a Canarian architect, and full-time lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, where he is also a PennPraxis Senior Fellow. He is interested in architecture’s capacity to translate, operate in, and contribute to insurgent social and political movements. His research and pedagogical project Architectures of Refusal focuses on architecture and autonomous movements for solidarity economies and decolonial practices.

Image: Sarāb 2019. Photo by Mohamed Zakaria