Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration

Last night, editors and contributors to Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration (a multiyear collaborative publication project between Aggregate, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Architecture Beyond Europe), gathered online and in person at the University of Toronto to reflect on the trajectory of the project and speak about a new collection of articles launched across the three platforms.

Project collaborators Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee introduced the event, followed by presentations from authors Armaghan Ziaee and Juan Du. (Du is the dean of the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design since last year, but her engagement with Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration dates back to her time at the University of Hong Kong.)

In the second half of the event, a panel format invited authors and editors to engage together and with the audience. Of the various media the project has engaged with over the years (exemplified by an audiovisual compilation of readings published in Aggregate), Iyer Siddiqi said, “it’s quite a thing […] to have a body of readers who all in solidarity somehow said that it’s important enough that we all need to gather around this project; it’s not just about [writing] the project but [also about reading] the project.”

Iyer Siddiqi pointed out a broad consensus regarding architectural history: that in the context of the academy, “it has been a colonial discipline, a […] masculinist discipline” and that “It hasn’t really been about writing about precarious people, precarious lives.” “I think that the authors have to be commended for in many cases finding these histories,” Iyer Siddiqi stressed.

(All articles produced for the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration project are available for free across the three open access publications,Aggregate, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Architecture Beyond Europe.)