Building Stories:
On Voices, Methods and Audiences in the Architectural Humanities
In her contribution to the 2018 anthology After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research, Helena Mattsson writes: ‘If methods create worlds, then the question becomes, which worlds shall we create?’ A question that I would like to add to this question, which I will address in this presentation, is: Which formats provide access to these worlds and for whom?
Tid: Ti 2024-12-10 kl 17.30 - 19.00
Plats: A123
The growing awareness of the strong correlation that exists between how we know and what we know is driving an increasing number of feminist scholars, including scholars in the architectural humanities, to explore emergent (writing) methodologies. Such endeavours are also motivated by the growing awareness that replicating established traditions of knowledge production serve only to reproduce the same knowledges and structures of power. In this presentation, I will focus on the possibilities afforded by other forms of thinking-in-making and explore their capacity to create ways to know and imagine a world beyond (what Audre Lorde has called) ‘the master’s house’. I will first discuss emergent (writing) methodologies by feminist scholars in the built environment and then reflect on work that I have undertaken with TU Delft students in a course called ‘Building Stories’.
[1] Helena Mattsson, ‘A Critical Historiography, Again: Sounds From a Mute History’, in Hélène Frichot, Gunnar Sandin, and Bettina Schwalm, eds. After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research (New York/Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2018), 27-37 (32).