Publication

  • Radical Pedagogies
    Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister
    Editors
    MIT Press, 2022
  • GRANTEE
    Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris & Anna-Maria Meister
    GRANT YEAR
    2019

Cesare Colombo, Giancarlo de Carlo debates with Gianemilio Simonetti as protesting students take over the Milan Triennale, May 1968, Italy. Courtesy of Cesare Colombo.

Radical Pedagogies is a collaborative history project that explores a series of pedagogical experiments that played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. As a challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the postwar field of architecture. They are radical in the literal meaning stemming from the Latin radix (root), as they question the basis of architecture. These new modes of teaching shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. They operated as small endeavors, sometimes on the fringes of institutions, but had long-lasting impact. Authored by a group of prominent scholars, researchers, and protagonists from around the world, the case studies collected in this volume render visible a broad array of discursive genealogies and a density of global interconnections. The book provides insight into of the ways in which these experiments in design pedagogy have decisively shaped the way architecture is taught to this day.

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and a 2018–19 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality, and media. Her books include Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), Domesticity at War (MIT Press, 2007), The Century of the Bed (Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 2015), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg Press, 2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X (Actar, 2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012) and Radical Pedagogies (2014). In 2016 she was co-curator of the third Istanbul Design Biennial. Her latest book is X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller, 2019).

Ignacio G. Galán is an architect and historian whose work focuses on the relationship between architecture, politics, and media, with a particular focus on nationalism, colonialism, and diverse forms of population transience. He is term assistant professor at Barnard and Columbia Colleges and has previously taught at Columbia GSAPP and PennDesign. His research has been featured in different publications and has resulted in the installation Cinecittà Occupata at the Venice Biennale in 2014. The designs of his firm have been awarded in international competitions and are part of the collection of the Pompidou Center. He was chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, After Belonging, and cocurated the exhibition Radical Pedagogies. Galán studied at ETSA Madrid and obtained his MArch, with Distinction, at Harvard and his PhD at Princeton. He has been a Fulbright Grantee and a Fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome.

Evangelos Kotsioris is a New York-based architectural historian, educator, and architect whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture with science, technology, and media. His doctoral research at Princeton School of Architecture has been awarded the Carter Manny Citation for Special Recognition by the Graham Foundation. Currently, he is a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was the 2017–18 Emerging Curator at CCA Montreal, where he organized the exhibition Lab Cult (2018) and was cocurator of the exhibition Radical Pedagogies. Kotsioris has been a traveling fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and a fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, the Boston Architectural Center, and The Cooper Union. His writing has appeared in Perspecta, New Geographies, The Architectural Review, Volume, Manifest, Conditions, On Site, and elsewhere.

Anna-Maria Meister is a historian and theorist working in the intersection of architecture's histories and the histories of science and technology. Her work focuses on the production and dissemination of norms and normed objects as social desires in German modern architecture. Meister received a joint PhD degree in the history and theory of architecture and the Council of the Humanities from Princeton University and holds degrees in architecture from Columbia University and the TU Munich. She was a fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, and her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD, Society of Architectural Historians, and Columbia University, among others. Her work has been published in various articles and book chapters and was featured at the Lisbon Triennale 2013 and the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.