How to Cite: Lara, Fernando Luiz, Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral e Ingrid Quintana-Guerrero. "Shuffling the Canon: Towards a decolonized understanding of Architecture". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 4-8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.01
Shuffling the Canon: Towards a decolonized understanding of Architecture
In the following lines, and throughout this edition of Dearq, we propose to change the lenses used to understand architecture and shape the discipline's history while revising the disciplinary canon. This is comparable to the process undertaken at the start of a card game when cards are shuffled and distributed again.
Beyond a selection of consecrated works and authors, a canon represents the relationships between them. In addition to determining which authors and works deserve to be recognized, the canon also shapes an internal valuation system, differentiating the creators from the successors, as well as the masters from their disciples or followers. The systems of canonical relations are constructed around the power and ideologies that contribute to sustaining them. As illustrated (almost half a century ago) by Edward Said's explanation of Orientalism, “to say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact” (Said 1978, 39).
In architecture, there is a tacit consensus around a traditional Eurocentric canon based on the way in which the discipline's history has been narrated. Undoubtedly, the clearest and most widespread example is the first stance published in 1896 in a book by Sir Banister Fletcher and his father (also named Banister Fletcher), titled A History of Architecture on the comparative method for the Student, Craftsman, and Amateur. The 21st version of this book (2019) was edited by Murray Fraser and included critical introductions and analytical texts from many scholars, which added hundreds of pages to the already abundant original edition. The 1896's version was limited to the study of European architecture. However, following editions (after 1901) by Sir Banister Fletcher proposed a division between historical styles (for European architecture) and non-historical styles (for architectures from Asia, the Middle East, and Central America). In other words, according to these visions, only Western civilization would be historical.
Twenty-five years ago, Gülsüm Nalbantoğlu denounced this type of approach where both Western architecture and historical styles are “constructs constituted through the force of exclusion. They are terms that produce a constitutive outside as the condition of their existence” (Nalbantoğlu 1998, 8). From this type of reasoning, the first works of European architectural rationalism were “modern”, and their authors were the “masters” who spread these ideas throughout the world. This premise—dominant in architectural history written throughout the last century—implies assigning to these works and authors a centrality that cannot be understood outside of the British colonial system, which dominated half the globe throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence, understanding architectural works in the contemporary world (although colonialism might not be finished yet) implies not only assimilating the framework of changes in paradigms of thought, caused by the social, political, and economic events in recent decades. Perhaps one of the most relevant changes is women's incursion in public life. These works must be conceived as the product of a complex transregional and global network of connections, causes and consequences that far exceeds the European framework from which the canon interprets and explains them.
Canonical limitations are evident in Latin-American academic production by authors who have self-proclaimed as the heirs of Mediterranean civilizations and legitimate Westerners. Paradoxically, many other thinkers from northern Europe (Anglo-Saxons or Germanic) consider the Mediterranean world alien to the West. From their reasoning, those who write these lines (Brazilian, Argentine and Colombian) would be alien to the Western system of thought. This division continues to this day, although it has been nuanced. Therefore, it is of little use to study the “American Baroque” if it is just going to be understood as an Italian sequel. This would disdain or make invisible the notorious non-European components of the architecture built in the Americas during the colonial period, which included native people's knowledge and a monumental Mudejar presence.
During the decline of the previous century and the beginning of the present century, several authors—from Ángel Rama to Arturo Escobar—have emerged in the “south” of the continent (a conceptual “south” built from a self-styled global north) to explicitly question the NATO-centrism1 of contemporary intellectual production, which has theoretically shaped the prevailing canon (Lara 2018). In architecture, the Argentine critic and theorist Marina Waisman was a pioneer in highlighting the need for Latin Americans to develop our own instruments to understand and question our regional work and thought. In 1989, the magazine Summa published a text titled Las Corrientes Posmodernas vistas desde América Latina (Postmodern currents seen from Latin America) that synthesized her reflections. This text criticizes the appropriation of postmodernity “by dragging [...] as a consequence of the general advancement of the world” (Waisman 1989, 44), in a similar process to the formation of modern continental architecture. She also condemned the vacuous verbiage aroused by the superficial interpretations of postmodern thought in the Americas and derived from eclecticisms, anachronistic collages and epidermal folklorism (Corona 1989).
Waisman's generation of Latin American architecture historians advanced by including our region in the modern movement history, allowing it to be understood as a phenomenon beyond the North Atlantic region. This task, started by Waisman and her contemporaries, is far from complete if we consider that any valid effort to combat the exclusion denounced by Nalbantoğlu is insufficient when regional production is discussed and judged only based on NATO-centric concepts.
It is encouraging that, at least so far in the twenty-first century, there is a global collective awareness of the inadequacy of these narratives embodied in the notorious efforts to fill the gaps. For example, UC Berkeley has trained two generations of scholars dedicated to the study of our vernacular built environment as a holistic reality. However, its limitation lies in its American approach. On the North American East Coast, the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has expanded the geographical scope of architectural history and financially supported the creation of pedagogical material that discusses and promotes architecture history with a global perspective. However, both approaches, whether Berkeley's (vertical) or GAHTC's (horizontal) exerted a limited transformative power because they do not guide us on what we need to unlearn (Lara 2022).
This implies that, at the university level, architecture historians would have to teach the Western canon plus Muslim, Bantu, Iroquois, Mapuche or Hindu examples in a very short time (eight, fourteen or sixteen-week academic cycles or semesters, with one or two classes per week or approximately thirty sessions). It is imperative to cut something out, but to decide what to cut involves an awkward conversation about who to exclude: Adolf Loos? Viollet le Duc? Vicenzo Scamozzi? or Giacomo Vignola?
In the Southern Cone, one of the most notable attempts in art history to contest the canon was recently proposed by curators Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio. In 2016, they reorganized the main collection at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba)—renowned for its influential compendium of regional modern art—through new curatorial categories that animated the temporary exhibition Verboamérica. Following the wake of the famous 1934 drawing by Joaquín Torres García América Invertida (inverted America), Verboamérica alludes to Latin American verbs or useful actions to unlearn Eurocentrism. Thus, the curators reshuffled a collection that was previously organized under European categories, such as impressionism, cubism, abstractionism, and optical art.
Based on a detailed reading of Latin American history and geography, Giunta and Pérez Rubio proposed sections such as In the Beginning; Maps, Geopolitics and Power; Literate City, Violent City, Imagined City; Work, Crowd, and Resistance; Bodies, Affections and Emancipation and Indigenous America, black America. The result allowed assembling art pieces by authors that are not normally together, for example, León Ferrari next to Roberto Matta; Emiliano Di Cavalcanti next to David Alfaro Siqueiros; Mathias Goeritz next to Mira Schendel, or Wilfredo Lam next to Claudia Andújar. Each of them had previously occupied a place conditioned by European trends, so these alternative relationships were unprecedented. The main Malba collection returned to its Eurocentric organization after a few months, but Giunta and Pérez Rubio's provocation generated enough synapses and synergies to inspire decades of discussion.
The Verboamérica example allows us to compare the configuration of the canon—that is, the selection of pieces and the system of relationship between them—with certain actions typical of a card game. First, the deck suits are defined (kings, queens, or aces) similarly to groups of works and then the rules of the game are established to assign values and combinations for the player to win or lose. However, there is an instance in which this entire system of values is suspended, which is precisely when the deck is shuffled. At this moment, aces, kings and jacks become just cardboard rectangles of equal size and, therefore, of identical value against the transforming effect of the mixture. This action is carried out deliberately to guarantee equal opportunities for the various players. It generates, in the card set that each player receives, a series of unsuspected and inconceivable relationships within the framework of the hegemonic rules of the game. In addition to new relationships between works, making unpublished works visible enriches traditional relational orders and systems. In this way, new constellations are built. The ties that transversally and bidirectionally connect different architectures (canonical and non-canonical) within a scheme are more complex than the unidirectional north-south vision, but above all are fairer, more honest, and better adjusted to historical facts.
We must warn that if this combination is done under an additive scheme, in which the networks of relationships that sustain the current deck are not questioned (or shuffled), this set of cards does not generate a transformative effect. On the contrary, it acts as a reaffirmation of the system (Martínez Nespral 2019). Clear examples of this adverse phenomenon are the idea of critical regionalism, proposed by Frampton (1983), or the recent (and at last) awarding of Pritzker prizes to some architects outside the star system. In both cases, the “concession” made from the centers of power in favour of the “others” operates with the logic of the exception that exceeds the rule. This ratifies the traditional value scheme and supports a system built on the veiled idea that there is nothing of value outside the North Atlantic shores (Lara 2021). It is gatopardismo politics, where change is more apparent than real because everything stays the same.
We believe that the rules of the game for the architectural canon can and should be put on hold to evaluate other possible relationships between cases, as well as incorporate new pieces into that deck. This issue of Dearq points to this subversive action illustrated by the shuffling metaphor. As mentioned before, the metaphor is inspired by the exhibition Verboamérica, co-curated by Andrea Giunta who was interviewed by the authors (guest editors for this issue). In this interview, Giunta highlights the theoretical support that the exhibition provided for the decanted reflections in her publications Feminismo y arte latinoamericano (Feminism and Latin American art) (2018) and Contra el canon (Against the canon) (2020). These titles provide a new link in the chain of contestatory theses around decoloniality and cultural hybridization pioneered by Beatriz Sarlo and Néstor García Canclini.
Cultural hybridization is also addressed through sociological, anthropological, and historical tools in ¿The new mestiza? Arquitectura e identidad en la frontera (The new mestiza? Architecture and identity on the border). This article by Ivo Giroto reflects on the controversial production of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani and the possibilities of Alteña architecture as a political and cultural tool. Alternative card suits, from the Ecuadorian context, are included in a deck by Marco Salazar in his text Undeclared Colonial Types in Modern Architectural Ecuador. Here, the author questions how the hegemonic narratives of modernity have resorted to the notion of type as an instrument of colonization through analytical exercises of interior architecture by the emblematic Quito architects Sixto Durán Ballén and Diego Ponce Bueno (carried out at the Catholic University of Ecuador).
In contrast, the articles by Ruth Verde Zein and Jorge Mejía show a cautious approach to shuffling the canon. The first author questions readers about the possibility of continuing to appeal to the traditional deck of cards (the canonical Western architecture works) if their re-reading provokes the construction of non-canonical histories and nourishes a practice of decolonized architecture. Meanwhile, Mejía denounces the paradoxes implicit in a substantial portion of contemporary decolonial studies, which may incur deterministic vices (such as annulment) potentially leading architectural thinking towards xenophobia. He proposes an alternative concept of cross-history, coined by Bénédicte Zimmermann and Michael Werner.
Finally, in Minga 2020: A Historical, decolonizing contact zone in Contemporary Colombia, Marcela Torres Molano examines not just the historical-theoretical corpus of Latin American architecture, but the recent practices that no longer fit within the traditional architectural project categories (building, master plan, urban design). These propose previously unthinkable suits in the disciplinary deck. Here, the actions not of a group of professional architects but of an indigenous collective (within the framework of the social movement that shook Colombia in 2020) sparked spatial transformations through symbolic and transgressive acts. These actions provided new meanings to emblematic civic spaces which still featured elements that hold a colonial connotation. Similar actions—reproduced in recent years throughout the world by global social movements (Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and protests in Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia between 2019 and 2021)—and other architectural examples, are collected by our guest project curator, William García, who questions multiple de-colonialism contributing to the slow shuffling of the disciplinary canon.
In closing, regarding slow shuffling, we are aware that this new way of seeing things—including architecture—requires a gradual process. As highlighted by Kwame Appiah about cosmopolitanism, “when it comes to change, what moves people is often not an argument from a principle, not a long discussion about values, but just a gradually acquired new way of seeing things” (Appiah 2007, 72). The collection of texts and works presented in this issue of Dearq provide new inputs for our readers, putting the cards in their hands to decide how to shuffle them. We know that dealing cards again will take time but, with the contributions presented here, we open a new game.
bibliography
Appiah, Kwame. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. Nueva York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Corona, A. 1989. “Comentarios adicionales sobre el posmodernismo latinoamericano”. Summa, 261: 48-50.
Frampton, Kenneth. 1983. “Towards a critical regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance”. In Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on postmodern culture. Seattle: Bay Press.
Lara, Fernando Luiz. 2022. “What frameworks should we use to read the spatial history of the Americas?”, Editor introduction. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81(2): 134-136.
Lara, Fernando Luiz. 2021. “El otro del otro: Cómo las historias canónicas de la arquitectura borraron las Américas”. Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas. Mario J. Buschiazzo 51(1): 1-14.
Lara, Fernando Luiz. 2018. “Urbis Americana: Thoughts on our shared (and exclusionary) traditions”. Preface in Urban Latin America: Images, words, flows and the built environment, edited by Bianca Freire-Medeiros and Julia O'Donnel, New York: Routledge.
Martínez Nespral, Fernando. 2019. “¿Misteriosas? ¿Para quién? Hacia una decolonización de la enseñanza-aprendizaje de la historia de la arquitectura”. Arquitecturas del Sur 37(56): 70-83. https://doi.org/10.22320/07196466.2019.37.056.05.
Nalbantoğlu, Gülsüm. 1998. “Toward postcolonial openings: Re-reading Sir Banister Fletcher's 'history of architecture'”. Assemblage 35: 7-17.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Waisman, Marina. 1989. “Las corrientes posmodernas vistas desde América Latina”. Summa, 261: 44-47.
