Formulating a decentralized research process for the archive through crowdsourcing. We sourced our ethos by conversing with multiple members of the institution. We talked to faculty and students involved in the disciplines of architecture, social sciences, history, and graphic design. As a result, this project and its manifesto is a culmination of our mentor’s and contributors’ collective frustrations with the architectural canon and its representation.
Our goal as a collective is to acknowledge that architecture as a field is complicit and so is its pedagogy. It currently contributes to the erasure of varied architecture knowledge systems and delegitimizes them. Furthermore, at institutions with students from across the globe, it tricks them into believing that their own indigenous knowledge systems of architecture are not legitimate. So our goal as a collective is to work towards developing tools, and for now specifically a database, that bridges this gap in the current western canonical architecture education.
Project Archive Collective supports the architectural archive over the canon.
The study of precedents is at the core of a canonized architectural education. However, the canon is outdated, and exclusionary in nature as it perpetuates Eurocentrism. Most importantly, this canon, dictated by Western institutions, has promoted a limited understanding of architecture and the social and political inequalities that underwrite it.
The Project Archive collective rejects this narcissistic paternalistic gaze of Global North.
By curating pedagogy and prescribing Eurocentric works, academic institutions have othered and marginalized sources of knowledge from the Global South. This information is sustained by disseminating western canonical works (theory, precedents, etc) through various institutionally sanctioned media. Within these authorized documents, Global South communities are labeled as “living and not thriving”[Adrian Lahoud, Rights of Future Generations, GSAPP]. They are portrayed as technologically challenged, and culturally deficient. Their mode of existence is marked as uncivil, unrefined, and underdeveloped.
We reject the myth of starchitects who are often credited as sole authors of works.
This starchitect culture endorses the myth of a single-author narrative and fails to acknowledge architecture as a collaborative effort. We are challenging this institutional power structure. Through crowdsourcing, we actively engage with decentralizing research methods. The pedagogy also discredits other modes of architecture by privileging a capitalist lens that is perpetuated by the institution in which it operates. This, in turn, fails to recognize extensive knowledge systems within self-sustaining communities.
We embrace the archive as this generation’s method of course correction.
We are invested in the construction of the future of the discipline as a continuously evolving body of knowledge. The Project Archive represents this generation’s opportunity for course correction. It offers us the chance to choreograph our own path. It empowers future designers and enlarges our disciplines' imagination. We embrace the multi-authored narrative. We engage in the intelligence of pop culture. We opt for inclusion rather than exclusion.
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