Reassembling the Past: An Open Intersectional Archive
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5821/jida.2025.13650Keywords:
architectural archives, intersectionality, critical history, collective housing, curatorshipAbstract
The course Housing Studies, aimed at master's students in architecture, articulates a critical pedagogy that interrogates the non-neutrality of the architectural discipline in shaping social relations and modes of life. Focusing on the analysis of twentieth-century collective housing projects, the course combines archival research and curatorial practice as tools for critical design. Through the engagement with historical documents and the construction of a collective exhibition, students reinterpret the past from an intersectional perspective that renders visible bodies and communities traditionally excluded from dominant narratives. This approach enables them to question spatial norms that reproduce inequalities of class, gender, race, age, or mobility, and to formulate new projective narratives. By interweaving historical analysis, graphic representation, and cultural production, the final exhibition becomes an act of design that dissolves the boundaries between classroom, archive, and society, fostering ethically engaged forms of architectural knowledge and practice.
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