Architectures of Refusal

Guest-edited by Jill Stoner and Ozayr Saloojee

Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been increasing recognition of architecture’s systemic complicity in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, and privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issue reveals how designers, practitioners, scholars and architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture. The work is both literal and figural: taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, and challenging mythologies that include drawing-as-analogue, building-as object, architect-as-hero and nature-as-other.

Architecture has both potential and responsibility for political agency in the public realm. The contributions to this issue foreground emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world, demonstrating that refusal is no longer just absence and denial, but a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy and alliances across multiple disciplines.

Contributors: Piper Bernbaum, Carwil Bjork-James, Thiresh Govender, Lucia Jalón Oyarzun, Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, Cong Chi Nguyen, Quilian Riano, Hannah Le Roux, Alberto de Salvatierra, Cathy Smith, Chat Travieso, and Ilze Wolff.

Jill Stoner is currently Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada, and Professor Emerita of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1979) and a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from New College in Sarasota, Florida (1975). Her professional practice earned her architectural firm numerous design awards, including first-place honors in two international urban competitions, and two AIA awards for school renovations.

Stoner is recognized internationally for her contributions to architectural theory. She has lectured throughout the US and in Italy, Argentina, Denmark, the UK and Canada on spatial references and resonances in contemporary fiction and poetry, the concept of urban wilderness, global issues of space as an instrument of aggression, and the untapped potential of vacancy in the American post-recession landscape. Her first book, Poems for Architects (William Stout Publishers 2001) traces the spatial politics of the 20th century through an anthology of modern poems. Her second book, Toward a Minor Architecture (MIT Press 2012), proposes a more politicized agenda for architecture in the 21st century.