ABOUT
Project Archive Manifesto: Towards Non-Complacency
“Preconceptions of what counts as architecture and how architectural value is established through reinforcing aesthetic norms by focusing on western definitions of technical accomplishment and virtuosity. For example how nonwestern architecture is constrained to questions of the craft of the vernacular.”
- Adrian Lahoud, Rights of the Future Generations, GSAPP CCP
“...eighteenth-century white Europeans held ethnocentric and aesthetics prejudices about the new people encountered through colonial conquest and exploration.”
- Structural Racialism in Modern Architecture Theory, Race and Modern Architecture, Irene Cheng
“We have a bastard education system. It follows a European pedagogic system that is already backward itself.”
- Mohammed Chebba, Casablanca School Dialogues
Project Archive Collective supports the architectural archive over the canon.
The study of precedents is at the core of a canonized architectural education. However, the canon is outdated, and exclusionary in nature as it perpetuates Eurocentrism. Most importantly, this canon, dictated by Western institutions, has promoted a limited understanding of architecture and the social and political inequalities that underwrite it.
The Project Archive collective rejects this narcissistic paternalistic gaze of Global North.
By curating pedagogy and prescribing Eurocentric works, academic institutions have othered and marginalized sources of knowledge from the Global South. This information is sustained by disseminating western canonical works (theory, precedents, etc) through various institutionally sanctioned media. Within these authorized documents, Global South communities are labeled as “living and not thriving”[Adrian Lahoud, Rights of Future Generations, GSAPP]. They are portrayed as technologically challenged, and culturally deficient. Their mode of existence is marked as in civil, unrefined, and underdeveloped.
We reject the myth of starchitects who are often credited as sole authors of works.
This starchitect culture endorses the myth of a single-author narrative and fails to acknowledge architecture as a collaborative effort. We are challenging this institutional power structure. Through crowdsourcing, we actively engage with decentralizing research methods. The pedagogy also discredits other modes of architecture by privileging a capitalist lens that is perpetuated by the institution in which it operates. This, in turn, fails to recognize extensive knowledge systems within self-sustaining communities.
We embrace the archive as this generation’s method of course correction.
We are invested in the construction of the future of the discipline as a continuously evolving body of knowledge. The Project Archive represents this generation’s opportunity for course correction. It offers us the chance to choreograph our own path. It empowers future designers and enlarges our disciplines' imagination. We embrace the multi-authored narrative. We engage in the intelligence of pop culture. We opt for inclusion rather than exclusion. Join our collective. Help us crowdsource a different future for architecture. Be the change!
Archive: An ever-growing collection of projects within architectural practice preserved as interrelated sets. All works despite their varied characteristics are of value within this inexhaustible collection.
- Rachel Buchanan: Could it be that the archive is as unpredictable and fluid as the history that emanates from it? .... Therefore, ‘rewriting and rewriting history’ is an important part of decolonization.
Canon: An outdated Global North invention that reinforces a hegemonic colonial understanding of architecture. Precedents within this exclusionary curatorial collection promote singular truths about the practice of architecture.
- - Rethinking the Canon, Michael Camille, Zeynep Çelik, John Onians, Adrian Rifkin, and Christopher B. Steiner:
...the canon originally referred to the sacred authority of eternally reinterpretable scripture. Art- historical canons, as constituted by a set of predetermined, isolated images of "great works" reproduced in books or in a series of more complex institutional replicas such as the plaster casts at the Musee des Monuments francais, are thus, like writing, supplemental and secondary.
“Whereas the canon is constructed out of the always already known prejudged, and expected,... Striped of contingency the canonized object is supposed to transcend space and time and stand autonomous. The canonical object is usually purely visual level and, in its superficial visibility, the somatic richness” - - Blake and the Apocalypse of the Canon, Nelson Hilton: "The formation of a canon serves to safeguard a tradition," and "canon formation in literature must always proceed to a selection of classics"
Architectural Pedagogy: A perspective and mode of teaching that is expected to comply with a hegemonic colonial and canonical understanding of architecture.
- [Adam Crownover & Joseph R. Jones: P edagogy imagined as sanctuary enables us to recognize illusions and false promises, drawing our gaze away from the forces of shallowness and disembodiment and towards awareness of senses, existential experiences and meanings, and to what is actually before us: This world. This student. This life.
Precedent: Architecture references that are extensively and deferentially studied in architectural practice. The canon curates a selection of references through which the hegemonic value of the discipline is elevated and perpetuated. Whereas the archive considers all works of architecture to be appropriate guides for reference.
Syllabus: A course description, written by the instructor, that aligns with the ethos of an institution. It outlines learning outcomes and precedents provided by an instructor within the department. This tool often complies with a colonial hegemonic understanding of architecture by promoting canonical works as references.
the book

events and exhibitions
CREDITS
Advisors , Emanuel Admassu, Jess Myers, Mindy Seu, Namita Dharia
Contributing writers:
Alison Sherpa, Ara Anderson, Cherry Yang, Deji Eclarin, Derek Russell, Leslie Ponce-Diaz, Yasmine, El Alaoui El Abdallaoui, Zaara Arsiwala
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