The Canadian Centre for Architecture is launching a collaborative and multidisciplinary research project on architecture?s complex developments in sub-Saharan African countries after independence. The architecture practice and discipline, along with academic institutions, archives, libraries, and museums, have been integral to what Valentin-Yves Mudimbe calls ?the invention of Africa? by the West. This project therefore asks, first, how to understand architecture?s historical role in decolonization, neocolonialism, globalization, and their manifestations across the continent, at local and regional scales; and, second, how this understanding can challenge established methods and disciplinary conventions of architectural and urban studies. ?Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture? seeks to contextualize such seemingly paradoxical relations as those among building and unbuilding, formal and informal, appropriated and expropriated, and modern and traditional. The project aims to question, and eventually shift, perspectives shaped by North/South knowledge divides. Photograph of National Printing Press, Nouakchott, Mauritania, ca. 1971. Slide from Kiran Mukerji Collection, CCA. ARCH280728
This research initiative is catalyzed in part by the recent arrival at the CCA of three important archival collections related to architecture, urbanism, and territoriality in Africa: those of Dutch planner Coen Beeker, German architect Georg Lippsmeier, and Kiran Mukerji, an ...