Prior
to springbreak, Associate Professor Theodore Sawruk and Graduate MArch student
Timothy Applebee presented peer-reviewed papers at the 106th
American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Annual Meeting in Denver
Colorado. The conference theme engaged
“The Ethical Imperative” in architecture and these two papers address issues
related to diversity in architectural education and the imposition of orthogonal
mapping systems as a means of colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. Professor Sawruk presented “An Assessment of the Academic Supports Provided to
African American Female Students in Undergraduate, Pre-professional
Architecture Programs,”
while Applebee & Sawruk presented “Colonial
and Anti-Colonial Design Methodologies: The Instrumentalization of Grids in the
Public Interest. While in Denver, they
visited various landmark buildings including the Denver Public Library designed
by Michael Graves, and the Denver Museum of Art, design by Daniel
Libeskind.
Conference
Overview:
In
its material, cultural, and economic effects, architecture poses essential and
unavoidable ethical quandaries and challenges. In its performative capacity to
express ideology, architecture is inexorably entangled in questions of power
and legitimation. As part of an interconnected global economic infrastructure
that consumes natural resources at an alarming rate, architecture raises new
and pressing questions with which educators, practitioners, and students must
engage. Given that there is an
infinitely ethical dimension to every aspect of architecture, the 106th ACSA
Annual Meeting will seek to solicit wide reflection on the ethical challenges
of architecture in a world in flux. Architecture
as practice and as discipline and pedagogy struggles to solve problems and to
advance culture. Within this struggle, the discipline faces an ambiguity of
values and agenda. The relationship between these two purposes, problem solving
and cultural advancement, often exists as a rift, a great chasm filled with
nuanced dilemmas related to ethics and power.
Abstracts:
An Assessment of the Academic Supports Provided to African
American Female Students in Undergraduate, Pre-professional Architecture
Programs
by Theodore Sawruk
Even with the
increased number of minority graduates from architecture programs, African
American females still make up less than 0.4 % of all licensed architects in the
United States. While, increasing
diversity within the field of architecture continues to be a priority for both
the academy and the profession, one can ask whether current architecture
programs are doing enough to help women of color successfully engage and
complete undergraduate, pre-professional curriculums. This qualitative,
single-case study explored how, if at all, three African American female
students were able to engage their undergraduate, pre-professional architecture
curriculum. It represents scholarly discourse related to the professoriate and the scholarship of teaching and
learning. This investigation examined the characteristics of
undergraduate architectural programs, from the perspective of their academic
curriculum, faculty teaching methodologies, and the design studio (classroom)
environment. The intention of this pilot study is to shed light on the
educational practices that currently exist within architecture programs and
determine how, if at all, they mitigate or extend the barriers that
traditionally limit the success of women of color in architectural education.
Colonial and Counter-Colonial Design Methodologies: The
Instrumentalization of Grids in the Public Interest
by Timothy Applebee and Theodore Sawruk
In
2016 the Canadian landscape architect, Pierre Bélanger, unveiled “Extraction,”
a site-specific intervention at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Bélanger’s
installation drew attention to the grid as it was used by the British Empire to
assert sovereignty over the full expanse of British North America (Canada) by
implementing the Dominion Land Survey (1871-1930). For Bélanger’s “Extraction,”
this sovereign act, specifically the act of placing a surveyor’s monument to
demarcate dominion, became a means to highlight 800 years of geological and
human exploitation by the Crown. When used as a means of spatial organization,
the grid supported the imposition of political and economic agendas by
Colonial Europeans on the indigenous landscape and its inhabitants. Theories of
architectural and spatial design methodology (per Manfredo Tafuri and
Rosalind Krauss) contextualize the instrumentality of grids in our review of
recent urban, architectural, and geo-spatial works by Pierre Bélanger,
Alessandro Rosanelli, Jennifer Bauer and Kelly Rose. The paper concludes with
an appraisal of the advance of geo-spatial grid mapping and its countervalent
potential for design professionals.
