Learning has long been at the core of philosophical inquiry. The birth of the nation state brought the attention of politicians, scientists, architects, historians, educators, designers, and administrators alike to questions of education. As past centuries have shown, when pedagogical ideals change, so too do their forms. From frontal teaching to rows of tables and chairs, roundtables, open-air schools, and the technology-driven dissolution of the schoolhouse, the architectures of education make ideologies tangible.
Schools are inherently ideological institutions. They are responsible for shaping one’s conception, understanding, and practice of what Louis Althusser called the “social whole.” And like other ideological apparatuses, the classroom, the book, and the school are intermediaries in a chain of social reproduction. Education has always been a factory of subjecthood. As such, it is a lens to reflect on what it is produced by, and speculate about what is produced.
Editors
Nick Axel
Bill Balaskas
Nikolaus Hirsch
Sofia Lemos
Carolina Rito
Architectures of Education is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a cross-publication with The Contemporary Journal. The project draws on a three-day public program at Nottingham Contemporary on November 7–9, 2019 which was supported by Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham.
Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and a researcher in machine learning, the philosophy of mathematics, black ontologies, and philosophies of being.
Gudskul (Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies) is a public learning space established in 2015 by three Jakarta-based art collectives: ruangrupa, Serrum, and Grafis Huru Hara (GHH).
Elain Harwood is an architectural historian with Historic England and a specialist in post-Second World War English architecture.
Tom Holert is a researcher, writer, and curator. He is the co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He’s currently organising the research and exhibition project Education Shock. Learning, Politics, and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (forthcoming September 2020).
Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. He is a co-founder of the Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), and together with Vikramāditya Prakash and Francis D.K. Ching, a co-author of the textbook A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006).
Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler are registered architects and educators, based in London. Their research and practice focus on the generation of sensitive and carefully composed projects, that engage with questions around the democracy of place or space and value the experience of the user. They practice, research and teach in parallel, having co-lead a design unit at Kingston School of Art’s Architecture Department since 2012.
Lesley Lokko is a UK-trained, Scottish-Ghanaian architect, academic and best-selling novelist. She is Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. She was formerly director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, a school she set up in 2015.
Sol Perez-Martinez is an architect, researcher, and curator. Her last building with her firm was a public school in the South of Chile, which encouraged her doctoral research at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Institute of Education about the interaction between architecture, education, and politics.
Irit Rogoff is a writer, educator, curator and organiser. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, a department she founded in 2002.
Santhosh S. is a cultural theorist based in New Delhi, India. He teaches at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi.
