Author: Cruz Garcia
Co-Author: Nathalie Frankowski
Published: Blacksburg: Loudreaders Publishers, 2020

 

Simultaneously a working tool, a historically situated manifesto, a pedagogical guideline, and a speculative treatise on the future of pedagogy, this Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education exclaims that because other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary, other models of architectural education are not only possible but imperative.

Divided in three parts, this manual engages with the concept of schooling in relationship to architecture without reducing what architecture is, has been, or could be, and instead, dissects the many fronts architecture operates, influences, affects, regulates, contains, delimits, excludes, protects, consolidates, and oppresses. The first part of the manual, Before School discusses some of the problems regarding the legitimation of particularly problematic and inaccessible forms of architectural education. A series of Anti-Liberation Paywall Diagrams contrast class and racial segregation with tuition fees, estimated total costs, and endowments of some of the perceived elite architectural institutions in the United States. Through these graphics, a critical imagination may be able to reflect on the relationship between universities, not only as centers of intellectual and cultural capital, but as settler-colonial tools of land occupation, gentrification, and racial oppression. During School presents an annotated version of the Anti-Racist Spiral of Architecture Education. The Anti-Racist spiral is a diagram that questions structural forms of knowledge while proposing emancipating epistemologies, platforms, methods, strategies, and voices. Through the creation of an open spiral forms of education, histories, theories, and media are intersected through the centers of anti-racism, anti-ableism, transfeminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and ecological justice in order to imagine other forms of architectural pedagogy. In the third part of the manual, After School introduces Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto. The Anti-Racist Manifesto delves into the how architecture has been and continues to be central to the construction of race and the perpetuation of anti-Black racism.

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