When: 15 March 2021, 17:00
Where: Live on Zoom, meeting ID: 950 3697 6644, passcode: 216444, link.
Topic: Discourses Talk #2 Professor Ola Uduku and Dr Huda Tayob Architecture, Diversity, Pedagogy
The question panel: Professor Igea Troiani, Professor Katharine Willis and students
Speaker: Professor Ola Uduku
Title: Looking Backwards to plan forwards: Engaging with past histories to prepare for future challenges in Architectural Education and Research
Manchester School of Architecture is one of the largest and oldest schools of Architecture in the UK. Despite it having had a strong historic international cohort of students, MSA’s pedagogy and research model has remained predominantly framed within the traditional ‘Western’ educational studio and history canon model, with a sprinkling of research analysis and methods elective courses run by staff with specific research interests. The Praxxis studio-atelier, however has worked for more than half a decade on exploring and addressing issues of equity in studio practice. During the BLM protests last year, a number of Praxxis students formed a BLM Architecture group that challenged the MSA staff and questioned the lack of official response to the demands of the movement. This set off a chain of events which has resulted in the production an MSA student BLM booklet and staff-developed MSA Code of Practice. Furthermore, the BLM events of the summer have led to an ongoing and open discussion about who we are, what we do and how we interact with our local and international worlds.
This exploratory talk seeks to examine how the ‘now’ can be viewed from interrogating the school’s history and connections, through various contexts related to place, identities and engagements which have influenced staff, students and visitors to the school, taking into account MSA’s joint heritage. It concludes by considering what a future architectural education, particularly with respect to MSA might become, as the world emerges from the Covid epidemic and deals with issues of Climate, and future critical events which may have global consequences to our future lives.
Speaker: Dr Huda Tayob
Talk title: Methods, Fields, and Archives
This talk reflects on the Architectural History and Theory course I developed and ran for the past 2 years (2019 – 2020) at the GSA in Johannesburg titled “Methods, Fields and Archives”. The course is structured to create a series of generous spaces for a plurality of voices, contested views and dialogic encounters as a way of both talking through and working through architectural institutional imaginaries for and from our context. In discussing a range of student work, the course points towards a practice of making room for slow scholarship and critical thought. This talk discusses the coursework along with challenges to this approach.
A recording of the event can be viewed below: