This public roundtable discusses the purposes and intentions of the seminar (Anti/Post/De-)Colonial Practices cotaught by Mario Gooden, Samia Henni, Mpho Matsipa, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union. Each speaking from a specific archive, geography, and interest, the instructors expose architecture students to a critical rereading and rethinking of modern built environments and their histories and theories. Through anti/post/de-colonial practices, the four instructors and their students intend to depict the intrinsic relationships between modernity and violence, and scrutinize the possibilities for reversal of that violence through historical and theoretical analysis and understanding. 

Mario Gooden is Associate Professor of Practice at Columbia GSAPP and Principal at Huff + Gooden Architects. His work, writings and lectures frequently examine architecture and the translation of cultural landscapes defined by the parameters of technology, race, class gender and sexuality. Gooden directs the Global Africa Lab with Mabel O. Wilson. He graduated magna cum laude from Clemson University in 1987 with a B.S. in Design and received a Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1990 and is a recipient of the McKim Prize. Gooden is the recent author of Dark Space (Columbia U. Press, 2016). 

Samia Henni is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cornell University School of Architecture, Art and Planning. She received her Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction) from ETH Zurich. Her teaching and research interests include the history and theory of the built environments in relation to colonialism, displacements, gender, race, religions, and wars from the first European colonization to the present. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag, 2017) and the curator of Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017-2018), which has been exhibited in Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, and Prague.

Mpho Matsipa is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and Curator at Studio-X Johannesburg, an experimental public platform on architecture and the city. She received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Matsipa has curated several exhibitions, including the South Africa Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2008). She is also a researcher at the Wits City Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and an architect. Her research interests include globalization and urbanism in African cities, spatial justice, and culture, race and representation. She has written critical essays and reviews on public art, culture and space for Art South Africa, the Architectural Review and Thesis 11(forthcoming).

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is Assistant Professor at the Barnard College Department of Architecture. She specializes in histories of architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on African and South Asian questions. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art and Archaeology, and a Master of Architecture degree and is a practicing architect. She is interested in problems of historicity and archives, decoloniality, heritage politics, and feminist historiography. Professor Siddiqi is the author of The L!brary Book (Princeton Architectural Press) and co-editor of Spatial Violence (Routledge); her writing appears in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, The Journal of Architecture, The Journal of Humanity, Architectural Theory Review, Grey Room, e-flux Architecture, The Funambulist, Harvard Design Magazine, The Avery Review and the volume Things Don't Really Exist Until You Give Them A Name: Unpacking Urban Heritage.

This event is free and open to the public. 

View the full 2019 Spring Lectures and Events List.