COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF ARCHITECTURE: pedagogies, practices, and participation in Latin America and El Caribe, 1970 - 2022.

Abstract

Pedagogical experiments played a pivotal role in shaping architectural discourse and practice across Latin America and the Caribbean during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “Counter-narratives of Architecture: Pedagogies, Practices, and Participation in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1970-2022” offers an architectural and cultural exploration of counter-narratives within architecture as a collective experience. It examines three pedagogical experiments in Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico: a Chilean school intertwining poetry and architectural thought, a Mexican school combining autogobierno and architectural writing, and a Puerto Rican collective blending co-design/build and archipelagic thinking. Through interdisciplinary analysis of objects, methods, media, and sites, the book sheds light on experiments like ludic games, travesías, poetic infrastructures, performance activism, and design-build, which have been insufficiently studied despite their valuable insights into teaching methodologies. How did these methodologies challenge traditional teaching and learning paradigms? What enduring relevance do they hold for contemporary artistic and pedagogical practices, and what is their legacy? By posing and addressing such inquiries, this research establishes links between architecture, education, and territory, synthesizing them through a concept termed the spatial imaginary. This concept encompasses not only the practical and technical aspects of architecture and art but also epistemological considerations and fundamentally altered perceptions of architectural and spatial encounters. In alignment with critical educational perspectives such as Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Ivan Illich's notion of deschooling (1971), this study explores counter-narratives within the postmodern landscape. These narratives manifest as curricula, poems, actions, site-specific installations, and travel narratives traversing the landscapes of America to shape transnational Latin American and Caribbean identities.

Counter-narratives leverage counter-discourses' cultural resources to empower students to challenge master narratives, creating room for alternative forms of personal and organizational “emergence and becoming” (Vaara et al., 1996). According to Foucault, it is through this “local, popular knowledge that criticism performs its work” (1980). These counter-narratives, as Lyotard (1984) explains, are typically "little stories" – the narratives of individuals and groups whose knowledge and histories have been omitted or overlooked in official narratives. Therefore, counter-narratives challenge not only grand narratives but also “official” and “hegemonic” narratives.

One research line focuses on decolonizing architectural education and practice by prioritizing pedagogical approaches from the ‘Global South,’ particularly the Caribbean, to cultivate emancipatory learning environments (Crespo, 2023). This initiative aims to challenge prevailing design pedagogy and practices by embracing perspectives from the Global South, grounded in theories like decolonial thinking, unlearning, ecologies of knowledge, and the pluriverse, as well as indigenous cosmovisions such as sentipensar and Pachamama, among others. Within this framework, the chapter titled con·fer: pensar la historia de la arquitectura desde El Caribe / to Think Architectural history from El Caribe delves into environmental histories and postcolonial disaster narratives through the lens of the Caribbean, highlighting the enduring impacts of colonialism and slavery on environmental landscapes. The chapter proposes the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) as a digital humanities project, offering cross-disciplinary lecture materials for teaching about/from/with El Caribe.

The architectural heritage of the Caribbean Antilles reflects the legacies of European colonization, the African diaspora, and migration patterns, revealing a complex tapestry of power dynamics, resistance, and cultural hybridity. By exploring the political, cultural, and social landscape of Puerto Rico, the chapter, presented as lectures, examines new material practices through the conceptual framework of archipelagic thinking (Glissant, 1997). Archipelagic thinking presents a counter-narrative of spatial equity, illustrating how archipelagos foster bonds of solidarity among diverse islands and societies, demonstrating how disparate entities can establish meaningful connections. Why focus on architecture’s environmental pedagogies and histories, and why Puerto Rico? By using Puerto Rico as an archipelago-experiment and island-laboratory, this approach advances interdisciplinary conversations across fields such as Architecture, Design, Urban Studies, Pedagogy, Latin American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, History, and Theory.