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.

Introduction Repair, Reworld: The Many Ways of Saying ‘No’ Chapter 2 Prologue: Drawing an Argument for Refusal Chapter 3 Centring Civilisation: Now and After the Apocalypse Chapter 4 Digital Doubles: The Major Agency of Minor Bits Chapter 5 Expanding Bodies: Pedagogical Models for Pluralistic Spatialities Chapter 6 Shebeen Operations: Navigating Deviance Chapter 7 Earth Versus FIFA: Resisting Globalisation on the Open Pitch Chapter 8 A Cottage to Breathe In: Refusing Museums, Making Homes Chapter 9 A Space of Problems: The Child-Cities of Columbus Chapter 10 Reclaiming Their Future: Riotous Resistance and Indigenous Creativity in South America's Highest Metropolis Chapter 11 The Eruv as Legal Fiction: Changing Rules in the Public Realm Chapter 12 From Altars to Alterity: Offerings and Inheritances for Queer Vietnamese Kin Chapter 13 101 Ways to Refuse a Wall Chapter 14 Meanwhile Bodies: Architecture Without Property Chapter 15 To Not Refuse Our Ravaged World Chapter 16 From Another Perspective – Balking in the Balkans: Lebbeus Woods – Zagreb Free Zone Revisited Contributors About Architectural Design