Organizing Architectures: Coloniality

Modern architecture and the built environment have been organized by networks of colonial power. To explore the regimes of this organization, this lecture series suggests shifting attention from colonialism to coloniality. Colonialism commonly denotes a historical system of territorial expansion, political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural hegemony, implemented by European powers from the 15th to the mid-20th century and characterized by military occupation, the imposition of foreign institutions, the extraction of resources, and the subjugation of local populations. In contrast, coloniality is a critical theoretical concept developed in the context of decolonial thought, particularly by scholars such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and María Lugones. It refers to the enduring patterns of power, knowledge, and subjectivity that outlast the formal end of colonial rule. Coloniality operates through the continued global dominance of Western epistemologies, the marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems, and the persistence of racial hierarchies and economic dependency in the postcolonial world. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power articulates how colonial forms of domination have become embedded within the project of modernity itself. The lecture series probes coloniality as an analytical framework to understand modernist architecture and urban planning in various geographical contexts. It asks: How are these persistent knowledge systems, hierarchies, and dependencies still organizing architectures? In which architectural institutions, networks, and discourses does the coloniality of power survive or even thrive? Which spatial practices, processes, or techniques may oppose these tendencies? The lecture series invites critical, interdisciplinary, and situated inquiries into the ways in which coloniality continues to shape architectural thought and practice.

The lectures will be in English.

Members of the Architektenkammer Hessen (AKH) can earn 2 credits points for participating for each lecture.

17.06.2026, 7 p.m.
“Monumentality, Coloniality, and the Rewriting of Public Space”
Lecture by Mechtild Widrich [School of the Art Institute of Chicago]
Location: Goethe-University Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Seminarhaus 2.105

24.06.2026, 7 p.m.
“The People’s Workbook, 1981: Development Geometries of an Anti-Apartheid Homesteading Manual”
Lecture by Hannah le Roux [University of Sheffield]
Location: TU Darmstadt, Schloss, S3 I 13 10

08.07.2026, 7 p.m.
“Between Aesthetic Justice and the Right to Beauty: the Aesthetics of Self-built Settlements in Latin America”
Lecture by Jessica Pineda-Zumaran [Centro de Investigación en Teoría Urbana y Territorial URBES-LAB, Peru]
Location: TU Darmstadt, Schloss, S3 I 13 10

15.07.2026, 7 p.m.
“On Famine Codes, Relief Camps, and the Making of Rural Poverty”
Lecture by Ateya Khorakiwala [Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation]
Location: TU Darmstadt, Schloss, S3 I 13 10

More Info on the homepage of the DFG Training Group “Organizing Architectures”

https://organizingarchitectures.org/