How to Cite: Mejía Hernández, Jorge. "Independence or Xenophobia? Architecture and the Paradoxes of Decolonization". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 46-53. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.06
How to Cite: Mejía Hernández, Jorge. "Independence or Xenophobia? Architecture and the Paradoxes of Decolonization". Dearq no. 36 (2023): 46-53. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq36.2023.06
Jorge Mejía Hernández
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Received: June 23, 2022 | Accepted: February 1, 2023
The act of decolonizing can have quite different meanings, depending on the definition of the term colony used. In architecture, so-called decolonial studies suggest an opening towards new forms of knowledge. On the other hand, those who practice said studies often fall into different forms of determinism, which end up hindering that potential. Having identified notable contradictions in their formulation, in this article we suggest empirical, epistemological and methodological alternatives to decolonial studies, coming from two recent approaches, to architecture that could solve several problematic aspects observed in the decolonizing project.
Keywords: determinism, architectural historiography, structure and agency, epistemology, postmodernism, critical theory.
In the English language, the word colony has several meanings. Among them, two common definitions refer, on the one hand, to a group of people who, coming from one territory, settle in another (e.g., the Galician colony of Maracaibo); and on the other, to a territory dominated or managed by a foreign power (e.g., Ramstein air base, in Germany) (Random House 2022). Based on these two definitions, rejecting or disbanding a colony can be understood in several ways. Depending on the definition we use, decolonizing can be an act of independence or an expression of xenophobia.
In their most popular version, so-called decolonial studies are a distinct approach to colonialism intended to apply postcolonial theory through different disciplines.1 In other words, while postcolonial theory (where they originate) is usually limited to studying the cultural, political and economic legacy of European colonialism and imperialism; said studies attempt to practice that theory in order to reveal and subvert the hierarchies of power that structure each discipline, seen as instruments of control and exploitation of colonized subjects (Hutcheon 1991, 171).2
This fundamental difference also implies a shift from the Marxist roots that are common to the theory developed by Fanon, Said and Bhabha; to the adoption of a critical approach based on the ideas of Marcuse, Foucault, and, more recently, on those of Butler and Bell, among others (Bonner 2011).3 Finally, it entails a movement from an eminently modern theory, which still recognizes the possibility of attaining an objective knowledge of reality, and sees human beings in both individual and universal terms; to a postmodernist practice that rejects objective knowledge and replaces individuals with powerful and privileged (or exploited, oppressed and marginalized) collectives, defined on the basis of ambiguous and complicated identities (Delgado and Stefancic 2012).
The following fragment, formulated from another branch of critical studies (known as fat studies) illustrates the above:
Although we do not wholly reject the scientific method as means of creating knowledge about the world, a critical orientation rejects the notion that it is even possible to produce knowledge that is objective, value-free, and untouched by human bias. A critical orientation similarly rejects the idea that any one way of creating knowledge about the world is superior to another or is even sufficient. […] As such, [these “studies”] draw on post-structuralism and feminist science (two other windows) that hold that there is not one truth that can be generated about any single thing, that multiple truths are possible depending on who is asking and for what purpose, and that knowledge is not apolitical even if it is considered positivist (i.e., value neutral or unbiased). (Coveney and Booth 2019, 18)4
Studying architecture from this perspective has notable advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages, perhaps the most obvious one is the possibility of broadening the perspective of what we can know, and the means we can use to know it. The postmodernist rejection of so-called metanarratives —understood as general, univocal, and usually incontrovertible explanations of reality— would allow us to explore, evaluate, and discover architecture in creative or unexpected ways. By revealing and removing some of the obstacles that undermine the architect's individual will, decolonization would certainly be a form of independence.
Paradoxically, by making all forms of knowledge relative and adopting a cynical stance (meaning, one that is fundamentally distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic), decolonial studies often end up entangled in their own metanarrative, imposed as “urgent” and justified from an alleged “disciplinary consensus.”5 It takes a deterministic and reductive vision of reality to believe, for instance, that we can speak of one generic Latin American architecture, subjected to a “traditional canon”; or that those who produce it, limit themselves to imitating foreign models.
According to the historian Mardges Bacon (2015), a rigorous study of historical evidence shows that, rather than power imbalances or unidirectional influences, all architecture (even that produced by the so-called “great Euro-American masters”) is an entanglement of many different precedents. Specifically, Bacon recalls how some of the technological and aesthetic investigations carried out by Le Corbusier in his celebrated Unités d'Habitation stem from analyses of the Tennessee Valley Hoover Dam carried out by some of his collaborators.6 Her findings resonate with those of Ricardo Daza (2015), who suggests that the elemental configuration seen in those same Unités elaborates on typical morphologies from southeastern Europe, observed by the architect in the early stages of his formative process.
The belief that one can explain all architecture produced in Latin America as the result of a one-way influence coming from the North Atlantic, which is furthermore used to control and exploit local architects, leaves many questions unsolved. Based on such hypotheses, how should we understand Tomás Maldonado's, Diana Agrest's and Mario Gandelsonas's, or —more recently— Marcos Novak's, Alberto Pérez Gómez's, Hernán Díaz Alonso's and Arturo Escobar's influence on international architectural discourse? How to explain César Pelli's commercial success, Tatiana Bilbao's and Antonio Ochoa Piccardo's buildings in France and China, or global interest in Pezo von Ellrichshausen's, Gustavo Utrabo's, Alejandro Aravena's and Solano Benítez's architecture? How should we evaluate Lina Bo Bardi's designs, so clearly inscribed in Afro-Brazilian culture, or the powerful effects of Dogon, Maghrebi, and Mesoamerican architectures in the work of Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis Josic Woods and Jorn Utzon? How should we understand the role of traditional and modern Japanese architectures in the buildings of Obregón y Valenzuela and Bruno Taut? Finally, is it not relevant that Gottfried Semper's enormous theoretical edifice is founded on the analysis of a Trinitarian cabin?7
On a larger scale, Latin American cities do not seem to fit most explanations offered by decolonial studies either, as they intertwine original geographical traces, architectural remnants from the first settlers, scholastic visions, Roman schemes, Mudéjar architectures, socialist plans, capitalist speculation, and informal developments, among many other layers. A city like Quito, for example, incorporates so many different colonial architectures (Inca, Spanish of Celtic, Visigothic, Roman and Umayyad origins, Baroque, Neoclassical, modernist European and North American international or corporate styles) that it would be practically impossible to trace in which direction any influence flows, or to distinguish to whom one could assign the roles of oppressor and oppressed in such context. Carlos Martínez's efforts to build bridges between modernist rationalism (in its French and German versions, mostly) and Spanish colonial architectures in Colombia; or Francisco Ramírez's attempts to explain architectural eclecticism and its effects in our recent past; simply confirm the enormous limitations decolonial studies encounter whenever they try to explain key aspects of our architecture (Arango and Martínez 1951; Ramírez Potes, Gutiérrez Paz and Uribe Arboleda 2000).
In the face of such glaring anomalies, we can focus on two features of decolonial studies that seem especially problematic —their historicism and their reductive character— in order to suggest theoretical and methodological alternatives with greater explanatory power, more robust definitions and evaluation criteria, and better justifications for the direction in which we should conduct our work.
Even if so-called decolonial studies suggest the possibility of broadening the spectrum of what we can know (and the ways in which we could know it), it is also clear that their potential is usually hampered by their historicism, understood as the belief that history is governed by incontrovertible explanations (e.g., Latin American architecture is the result of an imposed, unidirectional canon), before which individuals lie powerless (Popper [1957] 2002a). In other words, decolonial studies appear to take for granted that our societies and the individuals who integrate them (in this case, Latin American architects) have been historically without agency (Doucert and Cupers 2009) —with our ideas and actions being predetermined by structures and systems that exist beyond (or despite) ourselves—.
As we have seen, as soon as one recognizes different architects' individual achievements such generalizations fall under their own weight. Aware of the need to account for individuals' agency as much as for the structure that articulates it in the construction of any historical account, Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmermann (2000) have developed cross history. Beyond comparative methods where differences and similarities between equivalent entities are confronted in order to reveal common issues and problems; and beyond transfer studies, which write history as a series of influences passed from one human group to another; cross history studies the interdependencies that exist between different parts of the world:
[…] like entangled, shared or connected histories (from) a cross-border perspective. These approaches have in common that they shift the analysis from comparative methods centred on territorial entities, or any other predefined units, to the relationships that flow through and the interactions that constitute them, as well as moving away from approaches solely focused on state relationships. Dedicated to the study of intersecting processes in various settings, Histoire croisée is driven by an empirical, methodological and epistemological shift that involves redefining the object of research. (Zimmermann 2020, 7)
According to Zimmermann, cross history allows us to compare, but also to analyze and evaluate the way in which two or more objects of study interact. The difference with decolonial studies is conspicuous, especially at the empirical (i.e., the way we select our objects of study) and epistemological (i.e., the way we obtain knowledge about them) levels.
While decolonial studies impose a predetermined, incontrovertible structure (i.e., each and every social reality must be understood as a power imbalance), cross history chooses its subject matters piecemeal, in order to reveal distinct complexities in the issues each researcher is genuinely interested in. On the other hand, while decolonial studies make knowledge and moral virtue inseparable by imposing their interpretation of justice as telos of their epistemology, cross history does not presume any moral imperatives. Therefore, we can say that cross history is an open approach to the growth of knowledge, where the subject matter's distinct characteristics, the approach selected to address them and —a crucial feature— the researcher's individual character intersect. Rather than one-way influences, crossed history understands that:
[…] when societies are in contact with each other, even through loose ties such as those created by virtual networks, then objects and practices are not only interrelated but modify each other as an effect of that relationship. This is often the case in science an innovation, where disciplines and paradigms develop and change through the process of mutual exchange; it is also true for cultural activities such as literature, music and the fine arts as well as in practical areas such as advertising, marketing, technology, trade and even social policy. (Zimmermann 2020, 7)
Transfer historiographies and comparative methods, states Zimmermann (2020, 7 and 8), are often ill equipped to grasp the many forms of contact that take place between diverse individuals and societies, as well as the different interactions and transformations they bring about.8 To study peculiar forms of contact, cross history focuses on processes of interpenetration and intertwining between individuals and societies, and tries to understand the complexity of a composite, plural and shifting reality by developing the instruments required to address the fundamental question of change (Zimmermann 2020, 8).
Cross history's relational, interactive, and process-minded nature allows us to focus on the ways in which the local and the global co-produce each other, and on the many levels at which various individuals and groups interact, especially in terms of space and time. From this perspective, we no longer understand space and time as external factors that affect the objects we study, but rather as intrinsic dimensions that are essential to our analysis (Zimmermann 2020, 8 and 9). Thus, cross history implies a break with a logic of pre-existing or predetermined scales, usually associated with nations, cultures, and important dates. It also implies a rejection of dichotomous reasoning (e.g., center and margin, oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized), to focus instead on interconnections between different and inextricable aspects of reality (and on the way in which they constitute each other).
Perhaps this is where we can find cross history's most significant contribution to overcome decolonial studies' deep-seated historicism. By approaching history from a structural perspective, we are forced to understand reality in abstract and general terms; as systemic, prevalent, and long-lasting macro-processes. In many ways, it is this particular approach to history that allows decolonial studies to address intricate realities with simplistic explanations, as we have seen. It is owing to their structural vision that decolonial studies usually appeal to induction and periodization as preferred methods.
If, on the contrary, we approach history from the realm of agency, our understanding will be limited to the “micro” scales of reality, to short-term descriptions of specific situations and to the concrete effects of one or more human beings' singular actions.9 Ethnography's current popularity as a research method suggests a strong interest in a historiography of agency among architects. It is paradoxical, though, that that agency is not understood in eminently individual, but rather in collective terms.
Faced with this dilemma, cross history offers us a syncretic alternative to address structure and agency jointly by understanding reality at different scales. Cross history is also intended to address the different temporalities that define any subject matter, zeroes in on the configuration of reality rather than on its context or situation, and makes remarkable efforts to study objects in their conceptual and tangible dimensions simultaneously. An approach of this nature is not limited to studying objects or actions as if they were two different things, but rather flows from one category to the other, and in many cases studies the ways in which they interact. (Zimmermann 2020, 11).
Adding to their historicist approach, another palpable weakness of decolonial studies lies in their reductive nature. Architecture is a polytechnic discipline, which relates to the world as much as to human activities on very different levels (Motta and Pizzigoni 2008). Faced with this complexity, said studies seldom elucidate in which concrete aspects of the built environment and the disciplines that produce it is that we should carry out the alleged decolonization. Is this perhaps a stylistic, technological, or functional matter, or are we dealing with a purely ideological campaign?10 Even less clear is whether those hierarchies of power that currently structure our discipline (and which decolonial studies invite us to reveal and subvert) operate at the empirical, epistemological, or methodological level of the architect's work. While cross history offers us alternatives to overcome decolonial studies' historicism in empirical and epistemological terms, my research has allowed me to develop the methodology of transactional analyses, which confronts determinism in architectural historiography and theory in broad terms (Mejía Hernández 2018).
By seeing architecture as a distinct form of knowledge that is obtained heuristically by individuals who compete and collaborate with each another, transactional analyses also syncretize structure (in this case, those fields in which architects compete and collaborate with each other) and agency (their freedom to choose with whom they compete or collaborate), and thus avoid historicist or reductive explanations. Like cross history, transactional analyses also focus on the interrelationships, interconnections and interpenetrations —or transactions— that can be established between two or more architectures (Mejía Hernández 2023).
Unlike critical studies and their postmodern roots, transactional analyses recognize that an objective knowledge of reality is possible (Popper [1972] 1981). Such objective knowledge remains axiomatically falsifiable, meaning that it does not refer to a conclusive or incontrovertible truth (Popper [1959] 2002b). Rather, truth-finding depends on processes of negotiation and elementary agreements that allow us to evaluate different assumptions and decide which of them seems most convincing and least riddled with anomalies at any given moment. In other words, rather than a final truth, we rely on conjectures with evident explanatory power, which are also able to withstand severe criticism, as our best guess so far regarding a particular matter. The processes we use to generate, develop, and falsify our partial truths rely on individuals' agency, and on the agreements those individuals come up with in order to structure the way in which discussion and criticism are carried out. Far from the radical relativism and the supposed collective identities critical theory and decolonial studies are founded upon, transactional analyses understand human knowledge as the fruit of individual character and effort, inscribed within a tolerant social framework.
On these theoretical grounds, transactional analyses presume that all architecture is a form of polytechnic knowledge. This knowledge is produced, developed, and applied in four specific heuristics. Regardless of its condition, every building is the result of decisions made on the basis of trial and error in morphological (implantation, form and configuration), technological (materials, construction processes and technologies), utilitarian (activity, use, performance and purpose), and communicative (meanings and representation) terms. Each architect, on the other hand, is seen as an independent thinker, capable of making decisions freely. Inscribed within these fields of disciplinary activity, every architect's decisions inevitably enter in constant friction with those made by others. Returning to a previous example, we can imagine Le Corbusier experimenting within the field of aesthetics together with the architects behind Hoover Dam, or carrying out investigations on architectural configuration with the builders of the Ema charterhouse; but we can also see him exploring other matters against the choices made by many other architects. It is important to note how, from the perspective of transactional analyses, the many different architectures that intervene in the definition of any project knit themselves into a knowledge network, rather than into a power structure.11
Based on these simple premises, we can evaluate two or more architectures from different times and places without having to hierarchize them, but rather by recognizing in each of them specific methodological aspects through which architectural knowledge grows. We are also able to attribute individual agency to every architect, whose decisions are ultimately what makes sense of the whole methodology. For instance, we can establish a series of transactions between three recognized architectures, whose authors actually collaborated at different points of their careers. The project for the Venice hospital, the Free University in Berlin and the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Cultural Center in Bogotá are part of a universal investigation that intends to configure buildings by clustering smaller elements. Although all three projects collaborate in this morphological exploration, their purpose, their performance, and the technological repertoire used by each architect to develop his own mat (“Mat-Building” 2011) are very different —we could even say that they contradict each other—.
Here we can see how the main advantage of decolonization —its most interesting ambition— is entirely fulfilled. In effect, we can stop seeing Rogelio Salmona and Shadrach Woods as passive recipients, influenced by a professional of greater importance or hierarchy. But this does not mean that we should understand their emancipation as a matter of collective identity, or as part of an architectural revolution in which an existing power structure can only be superseded by another —as decolonial studies often claim—.
In order to learn from the many exchanges that can be identified between these three architectures, we certainly don't have to “unlearn” absolutely anything, and we don't need to “reorganize knowledge” in an unprecedented way either. On the contrary, many (and very different) architects could benefit from a careful study of the entangled transactions that can be established between Venetian streets and squares, Muslim Kasbahs, and pre-Columbian platforms, reinterpreted for very different contexts, and leading to fabulous results in three architectures that reveal their singular beauty to us, especially when we analyze them as one.
As we have seen, the vision of architecture promoted by transactional analyses and the cross history developed by Werner and Zimmermann (2006) does not overlook the different power dynamics that structure the social life of people. It does, however, make it possible to understand the past, present and future of architecture without the reductive determinism that characterizes decolonial studies. Cross history recognizes a productive, unavoidable tension between structure and agency, and thus invites the historian to formulate better explanations than those offered by comparative methods and transfer models, which are usually dichotomous. Through transactional analyses, on the other hand, I have tried to define a concrete purpose for that agency, highlighting the architect's intellectual independence as the sine qua non for the growth of architectural knowledge. By defining architecture as a form of knowledge, the evaluation of interrelationships between two or more buildings is not only possible, but essential.
It was Paul Feyerabend (1968) who suggested that proliferation is the fundamental condition for the growth and development of knowledge. In this sense, the diversity promoted by so-called decolonial studies is no doubt important. Unfortunately, we see how, in many cases, this diversity is understood in partial, superficial, or paradoxical terms; like when it is limited to a few physical or behavioral traits said to identify whole communities, rather than as the diverse viewpoints different individuals may have on the same subject.
We can conclude that it is certainly possible —even desirable— to decolonize architecture, in the sense of fostering each and every architect's intellectual independence. Aiming for that independence, the educator's task should be to make future architects aware of their responsibility as generators of new and better knowledge in order to satisfy the architectural needs of societies in permanent transformation; but also to show them the fundamental role that doubt, error, practice, criticism, and tolerance play in the production of that knowledge. Based on such minimum agreements we could train versatile architects, who see viewpoint diversity as an essential condition for the production and practice of disciplinary knowledge required by the society they serve. On the contrary, from a deterministic and reductive understanding of reality, the decolonization of architecture promoted by decolonial studies could appear as an invitation —from dogmatism— to despise, reject, or unlearn what others can teach us, just because they are different, or come from elsewhere.12
1 We speak of a “popular version,” given the deliberate ambiguity with which these “studies” and their concomitant theories are formulated. The use of abstruse terminology and ethereal categories offer their users apparent argumentative advantages, which can also be understood as operational disadvantages. On the other hand, the fact that the term “decolonial” remains Anglicized in other languages (e.g., the Spanish “estudios decoloniales”) is revealing.
2 It is important to note the almost exclusively Eurocentric focus of this theory, which generally overlooks colonialisms and imperialisms originating in other regions (e.g., Nahuatl, Inca, Ottoman, Arab, Japanese, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Chinese, Soviet, etc.).
3 Although the so-called critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and the different variants of what we now call philosophical postmodernism, reject Marxism as a metanarrative, their methods often adopt fundamental precepts of Marxist thought, including the idea (formulated in Marx's Theses on Feuerbach) that the object of philosophy is not to seek the truth, but to promote change.
4 So-called fat studies argue that medical recommendations about the harmful effects of obesity are a form of oppression. In brackets I have replaced Critical Dietetics with “these ‘studies'” in the quoted text.
5 “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So, my position, leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.” (Foucault, 1983).
6 The dam was part of the large development plan carried out by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created by the Roosevelt administration in 1933 as part of the New Deal. In the Colombian context (for which this article was written), the military government led by Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953 – 57) used the TVA as model for a number of “regional autonomous corporations” (Corporaciones Autónomas Regionales), such as the CVC, which carried out regional development plans in the departments of Cauca, Valle del Cauca, and Caldas.
7 Faced with this last anomaly, the ad hoc argument known as cultural appropriation is especially striking. According to this argument, any cultural influence in the opposite direction (that is, from the group that is taken for marginalized or oppressed towards the powerful group) is reprehensible. Thus, Marcuse's (1965) repressive tolerance –a moralistic justification of double standards– is applied.
8 The notion of contact zone, developed in Footprint 26, is taken from Pratt (1991, 30-40).
9 Despite its radical relativism, which seems to contradict the structural approach we attribute it, decolonization never recognizes individual agency. At most it recognizes the agency of minority marginalized groups, based on supposed “collective identities” rather than on the individual character of their members.
10 The prevalence of this position in cultural institutions, including media, the arts and academia, suggests that, in effect, we are dealing primarily with an ideological issue.
11 The art of Mark Lombardi manages to capture this idea with singular beauty, drawing real or imagined interrelationships between people and institutions at critical moments in recent history, in the form of constellations or networks (https://www.moma.org/artists/ 22980, accessed 06/15/2022).
12 “DOGMA. We will thus call any conviction that has become, for whoever maintains or suffers it, a reference to their own identity” (Zuleta, 2001 – author's translation). One might wonder to what extent the prevalence of identity politics, based on supposed collective identities, promote new forms of dogmatism.