Dicken Castro (1922–2016)

Despite a tension between vernacular interests and modernist aspirations, Castro’s legacy highlights the potential of guadua as a versatile building material

Photographs of Silos: On the Contingency of a Modern Photographic Canon

This article re-examines the dissemination of the photographs and their subsequent reproduction of the now-canonical grain elevators and published in the early 20th century. For example, Walter Gropius used them as illustrations for his article in the 1913 Werkbund yearbook, while Le Corbusier included them in Vers une architecture. While the idea of a canon made up of buildings is widely accepted within architecture discourse, this article identifies and stresses the role of photographic canons as a means of further challenging these constructions. The article focuses on the moment when the reproductions of these photographs became canonical and on the mechanisms that such a construct implied. The photo reproductions were objects of trade and exchange, mobilised in relation to photographic media and different platforms for dissemination. On the one hand, this informed their reading as architectural and thus singular objects; on the other, the different materialisations of photo reproductions testify to their nature as commodities and objects of trade, and therefore to the consolidation of their canonical status

Embodying Difference. An Initial Dialogue

One of the points that ‘Anti-Racism at SSoA: A Call to Action’ calls for is the ‘diversification and contextualisation of the teaching of architectural history’ under the section of ‘equalising and diversifying the curriculum in all aspects’. Throughout the academic year 2020-21, as Humanities and Environment and Technology Leaders, we had regular conversations to reflect, as well as to think how, from our positions, we responded to this call. Our presentation at a recent ACAN Tutor’s Workshop was the platform where we publicly reflected on these initial discussions and suggested steps towards addressing some of the questions from the call in the Humanities and the Environment and Technology modules at the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. However, sometimes our conversations went beyond the call, but also sometimes we found ourselves struggling. Sometimes our thoughts took us to different places and experiences, sometimes we ended up having conversations with some of the voices that have influenced our thinking. Most importantly, these conversations brought to the fore, once again, complexities and entanglements, lacks and gaps, legacies and hierarchies that we needed to recognise, acknowledge and embody, to have this conversation to then be able to embody and work towards anti-racism. This piece reflects one initial conversation between the two of us. Whilst we didn’t wish to be named, the dialogue follows the fonts in the paragraphs. Moreover, some of the voices that have inspired and shaped our thinking and practice are also included, in red or quotations

Il discorso rurale

Ruralities proposes a reconceptualization of the rural, meaning by this term a 'place of crisis' within our design and planning practices. This reconceptualization is presented through a discourse articulated on two points: Rural as a 'constitutive outside' of the urban and as a 'political mode', as a place where specific forms of power are manifested. Rural spaces are inhabited, produced, owned and cared for by a variety of subjects, by humans and non-humans as well as by a variety of ethnicities, cultures, social groups. In this sense we are against a common imagery where the rural is seen as a place populated by alleged traditional societies. This is an image that implicitly works as a device of racial, social and economic domination. In the same way, we question the Marxian approach to the 'agrarian question' conceived only as a predominantly economic problem, highlighting its racial and ethnic aspects. The goal is to define a different 'rural discourse' able to pay attention to the diversity of rural bodies and to delineate better analysis and design strategies

Il discorso rurale

Ruralities proposes a reconceptualization of the rural, meaning by this term a 'place of crisis' within our design and planning practices. This reconceptualization is presented through a discourse articulated on two points: Rural as a 'constitutive outside' of the urban and as a 'political mode', as a place where specific forms of power are manifested. Rural spaces are inhabited, produced, owned and cared for by a variety of subjects, by humans and non-humans as well as by a variety of ethnicities, cultures, social groups. In this sense we are against a common imagery where the rural is seen as a place populated by alleged traditional societies. This is an image that implicitly works as a device of racial, social and economic domination. In the same way, we question the Marxian approach to the 'agrarian question' conceived only as a predominantly economic problem, highlighting its racial and ethnic aspects. The goal is to define a different 'rural discourse' able to pay attention to the diversity of rural bodies and to delineate better analysis and design strategies

With the rainforest in one's head, and the hand in one's heart (Con la selva en la cabeza y la mano en el corazón)

In this essay, Josefina Klinger Zúñiga, Afro Colombian socio-environmental leader, shares the story of the Migration Festival in Nuquí, Colombian Pacific. It is a proposal on how to interrogate violence through the eyes of a non-violence project

Editorial: Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture

field: Issue 8 Embodying an Anti-Racist Architecture responds to two appeals. The first is a demand. In September 2020 our students at the Sheffield School of Architecture, University of Sheffield published the ‘Anti-Racism at SSoA: A Call to Action’, a document condemning the ways in which the school and university institution are complicit in systemic racism in architecture, and demanding ‘immediate action and concrete change’. The second appeal is less explicit. In 2007 Renata Tyszczuk and Doina Petrescu launched the inaugural issue of field: a new journal intended to create an open forum for the practice and research of architecture. The first issue was appropriately dedicated to exploring indeterminacy, recognising the difficulty of defining the contours of architectural practice and research. As the name of the publication suggests, the journal emerges from the conviction that research into spatial practices involves, by necessity, ‘interlocking yet distributed fields of knowledge’

Unsettled Subjects/Unsettling Landscapes: Confronting Questions of Architecture in C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins

We begin by acknowledging all those who live in present danger to their lives, their livelihoods and their loved ones: surviving and resisting the exploitation, subordination and marginalisation exacted by that system of racialised practices, structures and knowledges that we know of as colonialism. We acknowledge them in solidarity and recognise their struggle, offering as they do not just resistance but histories and practices of life. We will continue to seek counter-hegemonic socialist, feminist and decolonial knowledges, practices and affects in our work with one another as grounded beings in and of this only Earth