ABOUT

This is a course conceptualized by a group of emerging scholars and staff members of this faculty concerned with the level of violence and academic censoring in relation to settler colonialism in Palestine.
Architecture is often seen as the practice of creating comfort, beauty, and functionality for people, a way of shaping spaces to improve lives. Many of us, when we first dreamed of becoming architects, envisioned designing a better world, places where communities could thrive.
But as with any discipline, us in architecture must pause to interrogate our own assumptions, including the notion that it is inherently a force for good. We have to understand how our profession is deeply intertwined with power, and power can be problematic, and we need to problematize it within our own discipline. Across different historical eras, architecture has served as a tool for materializing ideologies. One of them is colonialism which of course does not stand on its own, but it is intertwined with capitalism, imperialism, agendas of powerful states, empires and so on. So basically this course investigates architecture through the lenses of critical and postcolonial theory, while centering as a case study the ongoing settler colonialism project in Palestine.
This course arises from an urgent call for epistemic justice—which means justice in the right to know, to have access to a scholarship that has been historically silenced, marginalized, or excluded by conventional academic institutions and the western architectural canon.
This course works towards making space within academia to talk about colonialism in general and Palestinian scholarship in particular. It reflects a commitment to amplify knowledge that refuses to be silenced, to say it with Eduard Said, to give the Palestinians the right to narrate, therefore the right to own their own history of cultural richness, and of an unprecedented resistance to erasure and annihilation.

Content
And so this course will stand in three main pillars:

1) the past and the present

The course addresses the question of temporality, history and the present events of active settler colonialism, offering a comprehensive historical understanding of the conditions that shape and inform the ongoing situation in Gaza.

2) architecture and all the other everyday infrastructures and also nature

We will investigate how architecture has been utilized as a tool for control and domination over both land and people. By exploring a range of building typologies, – such as camps, checkpoints and water infrastructure, – we will analyze how architectural practices have been employed to assert colonial power, shape societal structures, and reinforce systemic inequalities.
At the same time, the course explores how architecture and the built environment can function as instruments for identity formation, the preservation of cultural heritage, or, conversely, the destruction of architecture as a tool to erase historical narratives, and in this course we would like to revisit other ways of relating to these destructed architectures, such as entire cities, landscapes, infrastructure, and even tented camps.

3) interdisciplinary multi-scalar investigation

We will explore how colonialism operates across multiple scales, from the overarching framework and scale of an apartheid state, to the scale of the city, to examining the creation of camps as a distinct colonial architectural product. And the investigation will extend to the more intimate scale of the house, reflecting on how individuals personalize and subjectivize their living spaces within these imposed colonial structures.