Since the fall of European empires, the metanarratives of modernity in architecture and its assumed progressive, liberal value systems have been profoundly questioned by post and de-colonial critiques. Today, modernity and modernism, once (within specific geopolitical contexts) standing for progress, enlightenment and emancipation, are also associated with practices of exploitation, extraction and oppression. Whereas Jürgen Habermas would insist (1980) on the incompleteness and unfinished character of the modern project, scholars have now demonstrated that colonialism was and still is a constitutive condition of modern democratic formations. Canonical histories of modern architecture played an important role in naturalising the modern project, transforming the European tradition into a model for global dissemination. In these histories, spatial practices around the world are measured against the buildings and ideas of European or North American architects and planners. When recognised, non-dominant practices are often relegated to the role of curiosities for academic examination or display in the ethnographic museum, leading to processes of othering, exoticisation, and exclusion.
This issue of Architecture and Culture seeks to explore the entanglements between modernity, coloniality and architecture in the context of the construction of open societies and global production systems. It does so by locating the question of modernity and coloniality in architecture within architectural archives and institutional memory. Coloniality, a concept introduced by Aníbal Quijano in 1992, brings to light the enduring presence of colonial structures within contemporary societies in the form of racialised, gendered and epistemic hierarchies embedded in our social orders and systems of knowledge. As classic sites of fact-finding and the production of historical evidence, architectural archives have systematically failed to acknowledge other histories, producing hierarchies between insiders and outsiders, excluding other epistemologies, and diminishing the breadth of world cultures. In this special issue, while remaining attentive to the archive’s resistance to change – material, bureaucratic, and disciplinary – we seek to rethink the archive as something relational and performative, dynamic and alive. We aim to question the ways we work with archives and the objects and documents they contain. We wish to underscore the underused potentialities of archives to bring out a spectrum of knowledges and experiences, to connect one archive with another, one practice with many more, one voice with a multitude of voices. To work with the tensions presented by the archive, we propose three approaches:
First, it is crucial to stay with the problems of modernity and their inherent and inevitable messiness. As academics and scholars working from and within institutions, our daily practice is already implicated in the work of instituting and reconfirming the structures of knowledge and power we may wish to unsettle. This raises questions of method, limit, and responsibility. Where might spaces of transformation emerge and how can we create room for alternative imaginaries and practices? This issue seeks to activate the ambivalences of the archive as an index of power and its contested modernities, as a site where the instability of its claims becomes visible. We want to reflect on the conditions of possibility for action in the present, and on what can and should be done today to reorient the future of knowledge.
Second, an insistence on dismantling and re-assessing established histories. The increasing scrutiny of architectural archives and the expansion of that scrutiny to other forms of evidence sheds light on the often-neglected spatial dimensions of colonial processes of extraction, exchange, and accumulation. Such a practice of re-reading the discipline of architecture and its histories and theories from the perspective of colonialism remains necessary to sustain ongoing struggles for justice and emancipation. Paradoxically, it is only through such acts of de- and reconstruction that central claims of modernity – justice, equal rights, knowledge and how to use knowledge – can gain validity. We invite contributors to engage with the archive not as a neutral repository but as a site of power, affect, epistemic violence and, potentially, of repair.
Third, to pluralise history and theory beyond Western epistemologies, advocating for ways of thinking, knowing, and sensing that disrupt the established, disciplinary notions of academia. New approaches to archives through performance, fiction, drawing, sound, or the body, can help decentre the Western gaze in order to rewrite shared histories and construct new frameworks. We aim to resituate archives and institutional practices to rebalance discursive power, knowledge production and evidence validation. We therefore invite contributions that experiment with method as a critical practice to activate and construct otherwise. Accordingly, we are looking for contributions across diverse geographic contexts and disciplines that reflect on these questions through different media – papers, visual essays, drawings, ficto-critical pieces, sketches, and other modes of research.
(Inter)disciplinary questions developed by the papers might include (but are not limited to) the following:
What are the mechanisms through which architectural archives have sustained the logics of modernity and coloniality? How do colonial logics persist in the structuring and protection of spatial knowledge, and how might these be dismantled?
What does it mean to work with archival absences, with what is not there or has been rendered invisible, and how do these gaps speak to questions of coloniality? What modes of archival praxis allow for disobedient and situated histories to emerge, unsettling the authority of institutions?
How can architectural archives be reconfigured to recognise plural epistemologies, histories, and temporalities? What alliances are necessary to develop an archive-based, postcolonial architectural historiography?
What are the responsibilities of the architectural historian at this moment of epistemic contestation? How do we uncomfortably and critically inhabit the role of the institutional insider while resisting its terms?
Editor biographies:
Alejandro Campos is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Universitat Politècnica de València, specialising in postwar modern architecture and tracing connections between architectural discourse, material culture, and cultural identities. From 2021-2024, he worked as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at TU Delft, The Netherlands, where he developed the EU-funded research project “Multiculturalism in the work of Aldo and Hannie van Eyck”. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre within the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, where he is working on the research project “Moving Materials: Architecture, Extraction, and Colonial Railway Infrastructures in South Africa” with Meghan Ho-Tong.
Dirk van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Department of Architecture, TU Delft. He leads the group Architecture Archives of the Future and the research group Building Knowledge. He is also the co-founder and head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, a special research collaboration between the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, which holds the Dutch national archives for architecture and urban planning, and TU’s Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment. His expertise is in postwar modern architecture and planning and its related fields of architectural theory and history, cultural studies and discourse analysis. Key book publications include the edited collections Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (nai010, 2020), Jaap Bakema and the Open Society (Archis, 2018), and Architecture and the Welfare State (co-edited with Mark Swenarton and Tom Avermaete, Routledge, 2015).
Submission Instructions
Submissions can be academic research papers (maximum 7,000 words), visual essays, drawings, ficto-critical pieces, sketches or other illustrations.
Please select “Archival Ambivalences: Modernity, Coloniality, Architecture” when submitting your paper.
Publication is expected in mid-2027.