Luo Xiaowei (1925–2020) is one of the most important scholars who introduced Western architecture to China. She was the first to offer a course on the history of modern foreign architecture in China and wrote several books on this topic, many of which have become standard textbooks for Chinese architecture students. One of the most […]
‘Unsere Bauten waren unsere Kinder (Our buildings were our children),’ Maria Schwarz once said to Annette Krapp, the author of this book. Maria Schwarz’s wish of having a child was not realized. She dedicated instead all her love and passion to the common works of her and her husband Rudolf Schwarz. From concept to details, […]
Ana Lydia Vega narrates through fictional short stories a post-colonial imagination of racialized, oppressed, and mythological subjectivity in the Caribbean. The importance of Encancaranublado to the architectural imaginary lies, among many things, in the capacity to render real and fictional phenomena to address the complex ideological, political, and cultural forces shaping life in the Caribbean, and thus, […]
Angela Davis provides with Women, Race & Class a deep, intersectional critique of feminism, tracing black women’s struggle from slavery to birth control and reproductive rights, to their relationship to suffrage and emancipation movements. Davis’s take is fundamental to articulate a holistic reading of feminism outside of wealthy and white women’s voices, and it sets […]
Angela Davis joined the online series Abolition for the People with an argument to dismantle the industrial carceral, and police system. Against the conservative stance of ‘reform’, Davis states that ‘racism is essentially systemic and structural rather than individual and attitudinal’ as repeatedly asserted by health care advocates and anti-police and anti-prison activists over many decades, […]
C. Riley Snorton borrows the title from Yasiin Bey’s eponymous album to explore the central role that the racialization of the black subject plays in transness and transness plays in the construction of blackness. Rather than reading race as a secondary order of difference, which would presume that race is principally a biologized form (and […]
Through historical and anecdotical accounts bell hooks outlines the possibility of ending racism, and understanding education as a tool for questioning and challenging interpersonal relationships, power dynamics, and ideology.
bell hooks writes about what does it mean to have truly inclusive learning spaces, experiences, and interactions that go beyond what has been institutionally accepted through racial binaries and monocultural expectations.
A fundamental text to understand ‘identity politics’ that focuses on the black women’s oppression because ‘most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out’ from the black women’s identity, something that in the case of black women is a ‘particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at […]
Decolonization is not a Metaphor questions decolonization discourses without action, settler-moves to innocence, and problematizes how the ‘decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people’, can be entangled in ‘resettlement, reoccupation, and re-inhabitation that further settler colonialism.’ As decolonization can only start by relinquishing the occupied land, the authors argue that the metaphorization […]
A collection of Hito Steyerl’s text, The Wretched of the Screen mixes humour and rigorous research critical takes on media, art, politics, cultural capital, and the infrastructures and relationships that build and maintain them.
Exploring the process of indigenization of the tribal-African in the Americas, Sylvia Wynter provides a reading of the many ways that Yoruba, Ga, Ashanti, lbo, etc. were converted into a ‘homogenous commodity, into a unit of labour power collectively labelled’ and bound to the creation of the ‘plantation system.’ Wynter argues that it is in […]
The fifth chapter of Scenes of Subjection, ‘Fashioning obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Fetters of Slavery’, offers reading to understanding the afterlife of slavery, not as legacy but through the mechanisms that operate today. As contemporary anti-racist feminist movements in colonized territories employ subversive interruptions to coloniality and work through decolonial praxis, it becomes imperative […]
For Adrienne Marie Brown Emergent Strategy is ‘how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other.’ Inspired by Octavia Butler’s ‘all that you touch, you change and all that you touch, changes you back’, Emergent Strategy has been central to the imaginaries of many working for change, including […]
Ilze Wolff surveys the biopolitics and white supremacist infrastructures and superstructures of a textile factory building during the years of apartheid in Cape Town. In the form of decolonial radiography, the book dissects and scrutinizes everything, from racist factory legislation to architectural features of racial and gender segregation, to machines that reinvented time through cyclical […]
Using the indigenous groups of the Andes region as the focal point, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui proposes that indigenous ‘were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers’ with their own commitment to modernity. Against what she calls the ‘cultural postmodernism, imposed by the elites and reproduced by the state in a fragmented and subordinate way’, […]
By creating a Potential History, Azoulay questions the imperialist construction of time, space, and politics through objects and experiences of struggles around the world, from the original peoples in the Americas to the Congo under King Leopold II. Leopold Lambert loudread Potential History on the seventh session of Loudreaders.
Salas Rivera reexamines in this bilingual book theories of value in Marxist economics and suggests that just as labour is usually the ‘third thing that gives value’, there are also other tertiaries between ‘colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.’ Salas Rivera introduces The Tertiary
Through biographical anecdotes and historical connections, Leah Penniman takes us through an imaginary tour of land reclamation, reparations that go from the settler-colonial occupation of the land, through models of feminist resistance like Combahee River Colony, to today’s strategies to relate to the land as black people. The editors of Deem Journal introduce Farming While Black […]
In opposition to article four of the French law of 2005 that states that colonialism in the North of Africa has a ‘positive role’ Samia Henni ‘dissects the effects of’ counterrevolutionary architecture in the ‘transforming of Algerian territory’ and exposes its intrinsic relationship with ‘military manoeuvres, political ideologies, and colonial doctrines.’ Leopold Lambert loudreads Architecture […]
Butler renders despair, selfishness, and decay in a world of exacerbated inequalities and asymmetrical accumulation of wealth. It is difficult to tell if this is climate apocalypse is somewhere in the future, or something many people have to live through now. Traumnovelle loudreads Parable of the Sower on the first session of Loudreaders, as the COVID […]
Presented in a writing workshop for the production of a Post-Colonial publication, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild explores a world post-earth where humans are domesticated and controlled by other species in order to carry their reproductive labor. Although Butler claimed that the story is about ‘love’, it impossible to overlook its parallels with colonization, white supremacy, and […]
In Learning to Become an Extremophile, Ailo Ribas borrows a term coined by NASA to propose a form of existence based on the adaptation to extreme environments. In the face of constant and extreme threats, the (trans) extremophile redefines survival, learns to move across and between spaces, environments, and relationships.
Silvia Federici’s 1975 text Wages Against Housework places care and domestic labour within the framework of capitalism, sexism, and servitude.
An integral part of the workshops offered in Loudreaders Trade School consists of the elaboration of Post-Colonial postcards that consist on the subversion of the violent landscapes of the Hudson River School of painting and their alliance to Manifest Destiny and settler-occupation of indigenous land.
One of Puerto Rico’s leading feminist collectives examines how racial states operate, focusing on the colony of Puerto Rico. In this six-point manifesto la colectiva reaffirms, together with the Black feminists who have gone before them – ‘that the liberation of Black women will be the end of all oppression, the end of the racial […]
Loudreader Luisa Capetillo writes about politics, anarchism, solidarity, mutual aid, free love, philosophy, poverty, class, and emancipation in this bilingual compendium.
Part of the reading lists of Loudreader and fiction author Luis Othoniel Rosa, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed presents an interplanetary political fiction about class struggle, anarchism, labour, and power.
In the third session of Loudreaers Trade School, Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller presented their research on the urban simulations of military fronts on the border between the US and Mexico. Fronts: Military Urbanism & the Developing World dissects the potemkinesque simulation of racialized spaces and subjects while setting a dangerous blueprint for architectures of imperialist warfare, […]
Madrid-based collective VenidaDevenida introduces Paul B. Preciado’s text on subversive urban cartographies, the post-porn work of Annie Sprinke, and the need to distance from hegemonic and institutional readings of gayness through the eyes of white men in the seventh session of Loudreaders. Building on Preciado’s text, VenidaDevenia proposes architectural interventions that subvert heteronormative readings and […]
Sayak Valencia reads the border between Mexico and the US in Tijuana as a case study of the relationship between hyperviolence and law, militarization and the commodification of death, geopolitical borders, and the ‘post colonies,’ norm and exception, the state of war and states of security and freedom. Gore Capitalism is a critical gospel for […]
Federici explores the relationship between primitive accumulation, gender, and race by drawing from the myths that created and hunted witches in Europe and through the Shakespearean character of Caliban. Federici intersects Marx through the evolution of early capitalism in relation to the exploitation of the body of women and workers.
A post-hurricane manifesto, Salas Rivera’s While They Sleep: Under the Bed is Another Country constructs a critique of necropolitics, necrocapitalism, coloniality, oppression, and other imaginaries. The main text in English addresses the US empire and its necropolitical implications on its colonial subjects, while the footnotes, in Spanish, propose answers as coming from its colony in Puerto Rico.
In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero traces the Cuban beginnings and describes the evolution of the loudreaders and the role of iconic figures like the Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories across the Caribbean and US as they were able to establish networks of subversive solidarity that promoted emancipatory practices. Among the […]
In the last chapter of her book, Donna Haraway tells the fabulated story of the ‘communities of compost’ and tracks their evolution over five generations. In these communities, the ‘children of compost’ recrafted the conditions of living and dying to enable flourishing in the present and in times to come. Their work is international kin […]
Traumnovelle co-founder Léone Drapeaud questions patriarchal assumptions about utopias and the city via means of science fiction and feminist utopias that ‘redefine both women’s relationship to motherhood and their relationship to work, hence redefining the city.’
From texts on free love to utopias where workers rob banks and live happily ever after in the countryside, Love and Anarchy is a compendium of texts by Luisa Capetillo, the Puerto Rican anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, and utopian author. Capetillo joined the practice of loudreading in the tobacco factories and added her utopian and feminist imaginaries […]
For Silvia Federici and Paul B. Preciado, the body is the centre around which capitalism, class, exploitation, and politics turn. Federici rethinks the origins and development of capitalism and a long history of models of resistance from a feminist viewpoint, while Preciado proposes to look at links between community and immunity, health and class, and […]
This performance was conducted within the context of Studio A. Caruso ‘Making Plans for Living Together’ at ETH Zurich in the spring semester of 2021.
This provocative article written for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a serious high-quality Swiss newspaper for which Stahl was features section editor at the time, is a critical response to the exhibition ‘Frau Architekt’ held at the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt. Stahl’s response won her the Michael Althen Prize for Criticism a year later, and provides an […]
Two novels, very much intertwined, where architecture and landscape are central to the thematic content and are used to develop the character of each protagonist.
Dolores Hayden was my professor in graduate school, this book was read in one of her seminars that centered on gender in architectural and urban design. Her work provided me with a new and deeper understanding of the history of modern housing in America and the central role women played in its development.
This novel describes architecture and space very vividly. Architecture here serves as metaphors or to emphasize moments of action in the story, rooms or spaces sometime take on human qualities to reinforce the protagonist’s state of being.
Hito’s writing is so enjoyable and this has become a seminal text for how to consider images for many, including myself.
These two texts outline some of the most important aspects of my thinking as an architect; on the interconnectivity of elements of design and the information embedded in them, and the role of media (as in the plural of mediums) in affecting change. Keller was my teacher in Architecture School and I found this way […]
Writing in her late-twenties, Angela Davis’ autobiography documents her childhood, education, activism, resulting imprisonment, and trial. Using her lived experience, Davis makes a case for the abolition of prisons, offering a critical perspective on the larger systems surrounding this architectural typology and provides insight on how we as individuals can become engaged to minimize oppression […]
There is an urgent need for perspectives in architecture that come from the ground up and this book demonstrates the invaluable and deep insights that authors who share a cultural context with their subjects can offer architectural discourse. Within these pages Shanti Jayewardene does the intellectual work of unpacking the inimitable Geoffrey Bawa’s legacy in […]
Originally penned in 1975 and held from publication for fear of a ‘hostile reception’, this article is an honest and important record of architect Denise Scott Brown’s encounters with misogyny as a professional. Even today, despite the progress made by multiple waves of feminism and the more recent #MeToo movement, women still have a distance […]
This book was important when I was much younger and introduced me to the notion of gentrification, which I was not aware of at all beforehand.
This one is not precisely about architecture but on biopolitics, or coming from there and the body somehow in society, which seems in a way spatial to me.