Undisciplining Architectural Teaching through the Environmental Humanities
The EHL have been Undisciplining the Environmental Humanities since 2011. But what do we and others mean when we use the expression? Join us in this serie of seminars, as we meet to discuss this and to share experinces from our undisciplining practices arround the world. Pablo DeSoto - experimental architect, scholar and educator - is the first to present in the series this fall. Pablo will give us a talk on a way to undiscipline a discipline characterized by its human-exceptionalism and carbon burning externalities.
Time: Wed 2021-10-27 15.30
Location: https://www.kth.se/form/undisciplined2021
Language: English
Participating: Pablo DeSoto
About
In this session, I will present how the Environmental Humanities are introduced in architectural teaching as a way to undiscipline a discipline characterized by its human-exceptionalism and carbon burning externalities. Undisciplining Architectural teaching through the Environmental Humanities means syllabus that mobilize notions of geophysics, climate science, political ecology, indigenous cosmogonies, and feminist technoscience. It means briefs that encourage project-based transdisciplinar collaborations with geographers, biologists, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, visual & sound artists and environmental activists.
I will showcase concrete examples of introducing environmental humanities in my teaching at the Masters Program of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil, at the AA Visiting School Melbourne School of Design, and the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives at Matadero Madrid. Courses like “Architecture in the Anthropocene”, “Mapping the Commons”, “Future Climates: Cli-fi and Urbanism”, “Environmental Architecture”, “Multispecies Cities”, “Bio-cultural architecture” and “Urbs, Virus, Bits” offered the students an invitation to unlearn the disciplinary boundaries of architecture and engage in more-than-human reflections and environmental justice propositions.
Bio
Pablo DeSoto is an experimental architect, scholar and educator with long-term experience in working with diverse communities across geographical and disciplinary borders. His research uses fieldwork and critical epistemologies to produce spatial knowledge and investigate the urgent political and environmental conditions of our time. A co-founder of hackitectura.net , he is the editor of three books and coauthor of the Critical Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar. He has been awarded NTNU ARTEC AiR, LAB_Cyberspaces, UBA Elinor Ostrom, among others. He holds a Master's Degree in Architecture from the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm and a Ph.D. in Communication & Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Masters Program of Architecture at the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil. His website: pablodesoto.org/teaching