Revista:
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE
ISSN:
2045-5895
Año:
2022
Vol.:
11
N°:
2
Págs.:
381 - 407
To the field of professional architecture in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, the deserts of Western Africa were a margin that was viewed as an exterior to the modern metropolis and as a realm of escapism. However, to the ethnographic practices that had developed since the late 1800s, the notion of a desert hinterland supposed a primordial land, reflected in forms of habitation. For architects Herman Haan (1914-96) and Aldo van Eyck (1918-99), the desert was a tense geography that moved between being outside and at home. Revisiting the diaries from Haan and van Eyck's journeys and their mediation of ethnographic methodologies alongside their engagement with modernist design, this article proposes that Haan's impressions connect two seemingly opposite contexts: the Dogon lands on the Niger River, and Rotterdam. I argue that, in the architectural and ethnographic amateurism of Haan, the modernist metropolis and its exteriors were not delimited, distinct realms, but were rather engaged in a fluctuating relationship reflective of the contemporary fascination with post-Eurocentric landscapes in the discipline of architecture. I assert that this process of immersion was in fact a process of internalization of spatial experience.
Revista:
JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE
ISSN:
1360-2365
Año:
2022
Vol.:
27
N°:
2-3
Págs.:
322 - 345
The post-colonial project of historical revision has recently precipitated - not without polemic - in the defacement of statues during the Black Lives Matter protests. Yet, despite the monumentality of the iconoclastic event, the discipline of architecture has only started to weigh up its own historical figures against the colonial background. This article proposes a revisit of Le Corbusier's journeys in French Algeria to critically unravel different forms of embedded colonialism. While acknowledging the claims by other authors of Le Corbusier's colonialist mindset as revealed in his journeys, the article uses the archival material and the texts published after the journeys to propose a different form of colonialism that has escaped post-colonial critiques. Le Corbusier was not predominantly projecting an orientalist view over the African country; rather, he was paradoxically learning from desert architecture in order to trace a project for the aggrandisement of France. Disillusioned by the colonial government that spurned his projects, Le Corbusier operated a shift in colonialism away from politics into poetics, and condensed it in Poesie sur Alger (1950). This form of colonialism does not operate through power-struggle and imposition, but rather through a subtler appropriation of a lyrical other.