Since the establishment of academic architecture, history has played an important part in educating architects. Despite many challenges, including its omission from the modernist curriculum of the early twentieth century, history remains an essential venue for introducing the novice students to what matters in the discipline. Although since the mid-nineteenth century, the exclusively European content of this narrative (often appropriating Egypt and Mesopotamia as European pre-classical) has expanded to include traditions from across the world, the mainstream surveys of world architecture still focus on the so-called “West” not only as the main component of the core narrative but also as a master narrative through which the “other” is defined, ranked, and excluded from the main chronicle.
At least since the 1980s, postcolonial theories have challenged the Eurocentric narratives, methods, and concepts of architectural history, resulting in a proliferation of new content for understudied regions and subjects.1 More recent attempts to decolonize the history of architecture (or write an anti-colonial history)2 have unsettled the conventional narratives of architectural movements and sought alternative approaches. The ongoing reassessment and reformulation of the discipline is diverse and divergent.3 To mention a few trends, some scholars dismantle the histories that construct a Western originality and its influence elsewhere. For instance, Fernando Luiz Lara (2020) challenges the myth that the Renaissance originated with the discovery of ancient Europe and then extended to other places, replacing the Eurocentric notion of America’s “discovery” with a narrative where the encounter with indigenous people played a significant role in developing the paradigm of Renaissance architecture. Others have questioned the history of modern architecture as an originally Western phenomenon with influences and derivatives elsewhere and experimented with narratives of multiple modernities, or global histories which acknowledge the contributions from the periphery as an important component of architectural movements.4 Some scholars have suggested alternative orders for global survey histories, for instance, using the ancient Americas rather than Mesopotamia as the point of departure (Hernandez 2022).
Architecture historians have called for reassessments of the discipline’s foundational nomenclature, concepts, and methods, which were developed under colonialism. Among them, the dichotomy that the notion of “non-Western” imposes was one of the first to be challenged (Dufrene 1994). As Dell Upton (2009) reminds us, the duality imposed by this notion has been historically used to render a large portion of the world insignificant.5 While some historians have pointed to the category of “Western” as part of the imperial discourse and called for its pluralization (Petersen 2015), others have stressed the dependency of the modern West as a notion on its fabricated others.6
Similarly, critics have problematized the units of styles, traditions, cultures, and regions in the conventional narratives of world architecture (Graham 1995). Some historians have called for rethinking the methodology by replacing universalist narratives with histories based on the concepts in native practices.7 Other have complicated the concept of architectural tradition through the lens of agency, exploring the politics of selection and omission (AlSayyad 2017). Another approach argues for replacing chronological order with thematic arrangement and shifting the focus from the stylistic and visual to the practical aspects of architecture (Upton 2020; 2022).8
Pedagogical Response
Following the scholarship, some changes have appeared in the teaching of architectural history. To mention a few examples, some institutions have experimented with replacing “the survey,” which is typically Eurocentric, with a multi-survey model with different foci (Kerin and Lepage 2016). Others have called for a thematic course and for shifting the center from style to the context or grounding architectural history in environmental humanities (Karmon 2022). To go beyond the binary opposition of west and the rest, instructors have emphasized the circulation of architectural ideas as translation (Akcan 2018) or focused on contact and conflict (Bender 2018). Others have called for global micro-histories as a storytelling from below that position invisible actors in the larger scheme of themes (Morshed 2022). Experiments have been made where a place is explored through multiple layers of narrative, casting it in different networks based on conditions like mass housing (Nitzan-Shiftan 2021).
Despite many individual innovative approaches, however, the Eurocentric narrative continues to dominate architectural history survey courses: in the classroom, the pressure to cover a global scope often leads to a rather superficial expansion of the content on the “global South” or “non-Western” traditions, effectively perpetuating a binary hierarchy.9 Although some new surveys have attempted more inclusive accounts of global architecture, often the course format maintains a linear, developmental narrative. When the addition of traditions from the periphery is immured in this framework, it can at best disguise the established Eurocentric hierarchies and at worst reinforce them.
The problem is grimmer in smaller fields like interior design, where the growing scholarship with rich contextualized histories is primarily focused on Western traditions. While in architecture, a few initiatives like The Global Architecture Historian Teaching Collaboration (GAHTC)[10] offer high-quality teaching materials for those who wish to expand the scope of their courses, interior design’s nascent anti-colonial efforts are mainly limited to circulating lists of reading material. Thus, in the absence of well-researched sources on other subjects, instructors fall back on outdated research. When contrasted to the thicker descriptions of the Western traditions, students often take the thin generalizing descriptions of the other parts of the world as a sign of the absence of important practices elsewhere.[11]
While the search for better formats for teaching history from a global perspective must continue, it is equally important to problematize the foundational concepts and methods of the conventional model. This article presents an ongoing experiment with some strategies to challenge students’ preconceived ideas and problematize the foundational concepts. I specifically focus on two interconnected sets of assignments from my course History of Interior Architecture I. The term project, which tasks students with composing a narrative for a region or building type of their choice, uses a set of question-based assignments to underline the instrumentality of historiography and situate Eurocentrism within the larger context of implicit bias. In the final take-home essay, students make visualizations of their ideal model and analyze its implications of hierarchy.
In the effort to reimagine architectural history classes, digital tools can play a significant role. The recent development of digital tools not only supports extending the content of the course by increasing accessibility through online lectures or AR and VR presentations, but also has opened up opportunities for new pedagogical models to unsettle commonplace knowledge.[12] More specifically, they have the potential to challenge the Eurocentric structure of the survey course. For instance, using a digital platform as the starting point, instructors can replace the sequential order of the book’s fixed structure with a network where buildings and sites relate through various webs of connections, and thus eschew some implications of the traditional developmental structure.[13]
This article discusses some strategies for engaging students in questioning the Eurocentric structure of conventional architectural history, taking advantage of the methods and materials I developed to examine the structure of survey textbooks (Kive 2022). Different interactive visualizations in Tableau[14] help students explore the content of the assigned textbooks. In addition, these visualizations help more effectively analyze the structure of the book which determines the line(s) of narrative, the distribution of coverage and relational position of different regions, and the relative temporal and geographical scale of units.
Questioning
In discussing the challenges of incorporating social justice concerns into architectural history, Adnan Morshed (2022, 88) argues that “over-theorizing victimhood and injustice” risks removing the agency of people and essentializing them as marginal. Instead, he suggests the use of micro-narratives to reposition exclusionary practices into broader cultural patterns. Similarly, one may argue, when Eurocentrism is discussed in isolation from other implicit biases, it effectively recapitulates a category of non-Western and immediately victimizes what falls under it and reduces the larger cultural problem to the question of inclusion and justice for a few. My course takes this perspective. To reduce the victimizing effect of an isolated criticism, the class project situates the structure of knowledge that constructs and privileges a “Western” worldview in relation to other concepts and ideas as well as the broader disciplinary framework within which they function. For instance, the still-popular differentiation between vernacular and formal/monumental architecture often overlays, and thus perpetuates, the dichotomy of non-Western and Western.
Pedagogically, too, a question-posing model better serves this approach. As Paulo Freire (1970) has famously argued, the “banking” model of education, which focuses on the “act of depositing,” perpetuates compliance with the established order.[15] In other words, critical thinking is an important component of an anti-colonial education. The need for it has only increased with the dominance of digital mass media. Like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism, which used systems of reference to perpetuate the existing presumptions (Said 1978), so too contemporary pop media’s uncritical replication gives its content an unexamined sense of reality. Thus, as Claire Farago (2017) reminds us, we must educate students to recognize how advertisers, politicians, and the news media manipulate their consumers with visual rhetoric. Developing the habit of examining and reformulating preconceived questions is especially important for design discipline. As the creators of the built environment where human activities take place, designers can simply perpetuate the existing cultural norms or actively challenge them.
The class takes an overall question-posing approach to different presumptions and concepts of architectural history and repositions Eurocentric bias within this larger matrix. We start with a discussion on a famous quote from Martin Heidegger’s 1935 essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” According to the philosopher, “What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose.” As he continues, “yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder” (Heidegger 2002, 24). By taking inspiration from this call for uncovering the strange in the familiar, students are charged with rethinking the seemingly natural in their ordinary surrounding environment and examining some dominant cultural biases that shapes our commonplace knowledge about architecture.
Mixing criticism with historical examples, students are encouraged to explore architecture from different perspectives, and discuss the cultural context in which one perception dominates. The subjects are intended to avoid, and indirectly challenge, the perceived dichotomy between Western and non-Western cultures. For instance, following a lecture on seventeenth-century tea rooms in Japan, students become curious to learn about the role of touch, smell, hearing, and kinesthetic senses in other traditions. We then use this question to examine contemporary, “familiar” architecture. The discussion raises questions about ocularcentrism—the dominance of vision. This, in turn, leads to broader conversations on architecture here and now, with some students noting the absence of such considerations not only in the practice of design but also in the educational system. Others extend the question to subjects like the surveillance society and the role of architecture plays in it.
Term Project
The course project extends the question-posing exercise to reexamine the architectural history accounts. The project tasks students with composing a narrative for a place (city, country, or region) of their choice. Working in groups of four, students read parallel topics from different textbooks, discuss their findings, and work on composing a single narrative. A series of assignments, readings, and discussions guide students to more complex ideas and engage them with the messiness of history. Along with synthesizing and organizing the information from their sources, students are asked to note the questions that are not answered and find questions that are not asked. This enquiry draws attention to issues in the present architecture. In addition, by noting the absence of such discussions in the survey books, students become more critical of the information they receive as factual, objective truth.
Students begin with general readings to familiarize themselves with the subject. While all the members of the group focus on the same place (e.g. Indian peninsula), every student is required to use a different textbook, resulting in diverse readings, which often go beyond the authors’ differing perspective and engage with the issues of scale and scope of inquiry. For instance, one textbook may include a chapter on a general discussion of “Indian and Chinese Interiors,” while another book has multiple chapters on different periods of Chinese architecture. One may entirely focus on religious spaces, while another highlights tea rooms and other secular rituals.
Students find readings from two sets of popular survey textbooks. The first set includes four conventional surveys of interior architecture: Architecture and Interior Design: An Integrated History to the Present (Harwood, May, and Sherman 2012); History of Interior Design (Ireland 2018); A History of Interior Design (Pile 2014); and History of Furniture: A Global View (Hinchman 2009). These books use a conventional structure which covers non-Western traditions in a few chapters, resulting in generalizing views of one tradition without differentiating different time periods. The other set of textbooks with more global content includes A Global History of Architecture (Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash 2006); World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History (Ingersoll 2013); and Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (Fraser 2020). As students discover, these books incorporate more chapters on non-Western traditions. As each section covers shorter periods of time, they often avoid generalizations like “the Indian Temple” and better discuss the diversity of practices in each period.
The course web page provides students with several interactive graphs to navigate the contents of these books. (The graphs are made in Tableau—a data analysis application with a free version.) As an example, Figures 1 and 2 show the geographical coverage of the book chapters in History of Furniture: A Global View (Hinchman 2009). In this table, rows show chapters and sections of the book and columns show different regions covered in each chapter. One can collapse the table for a larger overview (1) or expand it for more detailed data (2). Alternatively, selecting a chapter or section can highlight the regions covered in them (Figure 3), or vice versa. By hovering over each dot, additional practical information (e.g., page number) pops up.
As most students are not familiar with the content covered in a typical survey of interior design and architecture, this information is crucial for them to easily identify their potential sources for the project, as many chapter titles like “architecture in the colonies” do not bear geographical labels. Besides facilitating their research process, these graphs engage students with the content of the book, often immediately drawing their attention to the uneven coverage of different regions. They also familiarize students with the differing structure and contents of the books, supporting the future discussion on bias in architectural history.
In the following group activity, students discuss and compare their readings to define the scope of their project and identify missing information. While often the group exchange of readings initially focuses on affirmation of their individual findings, prompts given throughout the group discussion direct students to recognize their varying foci, speculate about their underlying presumptions, and consider the ramifications of each approach. While at a theoretical level, many students believe in the subjective and relative nature of representation, by examining the textbooks’ diverse approaches to the same topic, they gain a better appreciation of its complexities.
After narrowing down the project, each group divides the work among team members. To do so, students must discuss the organization of their collective paper, for instance, examining chronological or typological orders. After another set of individual readings, the group discusses new findings, reflects on the previous questions, and outlines a new structure for the overall narrative. This process of negotiating and revising the structure repeats a few times, allowing for the addition of new layers, for instance, common themes.
In this step, too, students’ search is guided by different interactive graphs that provide alternative views into the contents of the same books. While the first phase mainly relied on the tables of geographical coverage of book chapters, as the project progresses and students need to pay attention to time periods and chronological sequence, other graphs become more helpful. The tables of contents are represented through different graph formats. For instance, Figure 4 presents the table of contents for Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (Fraser 2020) through a timeline where bars show the time span covered in each chapter and colors indicate different regions, and feature pop-up information. By selecting specific regions, students can highlight the correlating bars to see the temporal range of the book’s coverage of a specific place.
Alternatively, they can use another graph (Figure 5) where the same data is organized by region. While helping students find their “missing” material, these graphs also draw attention to the disproportionate representation of different regions in the book’s narrative. The two graphs used in conjunction highlight different forms of disparity. For instance, Figure 4 shows the longer time spans cramped in chapters on non-Western architecture compared to their European counterparts, while Figure 4’s regional arrangement provides a clear view on regions whose histories are only partially covered.
The project’s regional focus works in tandem with discussions and assigned readings that help students understand methods and analyze the problems in historical narratives. For instance, “Concepts of Vernacular Architecture” (Brown and Maudlin 2012) provides terminology and concepts to discuss some issues in the conventional focus of architectural history on monuments, while criticizing the problems in the concept of “vernacular.” Working in their group, students apply the article’s structure to their diverse project reading and research. Similar activities push students to discuss, evaluate, and revise their collective narrative through their individual theses.
Throughout the process, students revise the structure of the paper, focusing on sequence and parallelism and avoiding redundancy. Often starting with chronology as a common organizing principle, students soon face incongruence, unevenness, and disparity in their material. By keeping the focus of the project open, each attempt at creating a coherent account relies on omitting some parts, skewing others, and facing new missing subjects. These “failed” attempts to complete these seemingly simple processes of crafting one coherent narrative create an opportunity to discuss the reductive, subjective, and biased nature of historical inquiry. The final papers are not pieces of art. However, the goal of this project is the process, not the product. As students learn a few habits of analyzing the built environment, they also acquire firsthand experience with the complexity of writing history as well as with the practices of simplification, delineation, exclusion, omission, and disguise involved in creating a seemingly coherent narrative. Thus, returning to the questioning practice, students reflect on the “familiar” task of outlining their term papers and examine it as a sociopolitical matter.
Although the term paper outlined above does not directly engage students in producing a digital humanities project, the digital tools are indispensable for handling the scope of the enquiries. In an earlier version of this course without visualizations, it became clear that most of students’ time and energy was taken up finding books and reading through their table of contents only to lose track of the question at hand. The interactive charts and tables in the new iteration of the course helped students easily navigate through the otherwise daunting process of finding relevant material in these sources. In addition, visualizations engaged students in recognizing disparities within the structure of the books in ways mere theoretical discussions had not. By familiarizing students with the divergent structures and contents of the popular surveys of architecture and interior design, the digital tools also set the stage for discussing the bias in architectural historiography as a mode of representation.
The Structure of History
In a conventional history of world architecture, while the stage for the triumphal entrance of the Greek style is often set by chapter(s) on Egypt and Mesopotamia, other non-Western styles like Chinese appear as isolated interruptions to the main narrative. These narratives often reduce non-Western styles into still stereotypes, a feature partially created through the book’s structure, which defines the scale of what each individual chapter includes and how it relates to the other chapters.
As Figure 6 illustrates, a typical component of this model is the uneven scales of chapter coverage for different traditions. For instance, Renaissance and Baroque styles are often aptly separated into distinct stages, while the entire material culture of China is compressed and pared down to a single chapter, leaving little room to properly discuss diverse traditions and their changes through time. The resulting implication of stillness is often intensified by a sense of past-ness, as non-Western styles are often placed in the early chapters, while the discussion of modern architecture is dominated by Western examples.
In addition, this structure maintains a linear chronological trajectory of Western styles as the core narrative, offering no potential for creating parallel histories in other regions. This binary hierarchy is intensified through the placement of “non-Western” styles in the overall order of the book. Typically jammed in the early chapters, these traditions are often juxtaposed with earlier periods of European architecture and thus equated with the past of Europe.
As mentioned before, besides the more conventional textbooks, students also explore a set of three books with a more global content and a very different structure. These books abandon the simple Eurocentric linear narrative and replace it with timecuts. Each section then includes a diverse set of places, thus both adding the global content and disturbing the flow of the Eurocentric trajectory. As sections on different regions cover relatively similar periods of time, they illuminate an explicit dichotomy (Figure 7). Although many features of the conventional model are preserved in the time-cut paradigm, the difference between them is notable enough on the graphs to provoke a discussion on the implications of the way knowledge is structured.[16]
To problematize the seemingly neutral structures of the survey, another activity focuses on creating an inclusive narrative of world architecture. At the beginning of the class, I ask students to create an “ideal schedule” for their three sequences of the history of interior architecture to include 40 to 60 lecture topics. There is no geographical and temporal limit, although a global scope is encouraged. Students are expected to create this schedule primarily through exploring the digital visualizations of the textbooks which they will use for the project. At the end of the term, a final assignment returns students to their proposed ideal schedule to explore some of its subconscious biases, informed now by a lecture on the Eurocentric structure of the architectural survey, their practices in outlining the group project, and their more critical approach to the project's visualizations.
The original proposed schedule is submitted on a Microsoft Excel template, which includes fields like title, place, and temporal scope. The final assessment uses this form in a pre-made template in Tableau to create two graphs that allow them to analyze their ideal schedule from the lens of Eurocentrism (Figure 8). One visualization depicts the main regions covered in the proposed lectures, and the other captures their temporal span. As they are set in order, students can discuss the purported progress or lack thereof for different regions. Although this exercise introduces students to some digital humanities tools and methods, the Tableau template provides preset visualizations (worksheets) to minimize students’ potential struggle with the tool.[17] The experience of creating appealing visualizations with only a few steps can also serve as a strategy against the reality effect of fancy graphs.
At the beginning, students are asked to discuss their rationale for what they included in their ideal schedule and to explain the difficulty they faced in the process. As these schedules are created after the existing survey textbooks, they reflect many of the books’ issues. The point is not as much to expose the bias in students’ preconceptions, but to bring attention to the absence of such considerations and how seemingly neutral knowledge is rooted in pre-existing biases. The activity also provides an opportunity to discuss issues like universalism behind this neutral framework.
Conclusion
As a mode of representation, the survey defines architecture, delimiting its scope and establishing its major concerns and core values. At the same time, by postulating a correlation between architecture and culture, the survey organizes the world through its architecture, often establishing a core progressivist West against its “others.” Given the role of the survey in shaping the novice students’ approach to architecture and interior design, it is crucial to challenge its Eurocentrism.
The activities outlined in this article are aimed at developing students’ awareness of the biased nature of the seemingly objective narratives and the ramifications of the survey’s structure. However, as architectural history is deeply rooted in Eurocentric concepts and methods, even anti-colonial gestures cannot easily escape the established paradigm. For instance, in designing the set of exercises presented here, I eventually had to settle on using these books’ regional categories, which are themselves products of Eurocentric perspectives. Using fixed units of space (regions and countries) as the neutral framework of studying architectural phenomena postulates isolated developments in architecture only to feed presumptions like the very dominant idea that modern architecture was developed in the West independently from other regions and later expanded to them.
Similarly, imposing the modern nation-state on the earlier era solidifies rigid units and renders the fluid exchange of ideas as the interaction among otherwise isolated cultures. While these graphs only reflect what exists in the books, they risk naturalizing such categories and notions. Although discussions can address these issues, the alternative complex histories resist simple visualization and thus do not receive equal attention. While avoiding digital tools in the contemporary academic model seems fruitless, perhaps an entirely different paradigm is needed to upset the prominence of the visual and dethrone simplifying abstractions. In the absence of such a paradigm, working through interventions, such as the assignments described above, can at least challenge the naturalization of the existing models.
Acknowledgment
The creation of the database used for the visualizations was supported by the Arthur W. and Carol G. Hawn Endowment.
