At the end of the world: museums

Imagining architecture, institutions, and our societies “at the end of the World,” proposes to follow Denise Ferreira da Silva at the end of this World, and urges a collective effort to dismantle systemic inequalities, racism, and colonial legacies. This epistemological shift from Eurocentrism, embraces alternative ways of conceiving, designing, and experiencing. It rejects linear Europe-centered history and calls for solidarity in dismantling oppressive systems, reevaluating our relationship with nature amidst environmental collapse.

We‘ll scrutinize Museums as institutions complicit in colonization, prompting redesigns for non-colonial relations with their collections. This prompts questions on the museum‘s purpose, the urgency of repatriation/rematriation, and envisioning culture beyond its exploitative forms. Our focus on sustainability and heritage in institutional and architectural practices imagines a future where museums shift their focus away from object acquisitions and possession. This perspective inspires positive, innovative solutions as we address pivotal questions in our journey.

This semester, we will address sustainability and heritage within institutional and architectural practices. Through research and design, we will navigate and propose provisional and situated answers to the following problematics: How can we denaturalize the uneven access to objects and knowledge? How do we deal with these objects and their violent histories if they are not rematriated/repatriated, and which traces to keep of them when they are restituted? What spaces, uses, needs, and practices emerge from these politics, ethics and reparations? How do we think of spaces for restitution, repair, and what is beyond repair? The return of ill-acquired objects will eventually be inevitable as evident from the current turmoil surrounding the question. Imagining what it would mean allows us to be armed with positive solutions for something new and engaging rather than allowing fear to maintain us on the wrong side of history. As we imagine a world several years in the future where Museums no longer own these objects in their collections, it begs the question: What are the futurities of museums at the End of the World?

The End of Youth

The youthful optimism ushered in through the industrial revolution, facilitating the advent of a modernist architecture that explored an incredible freedom of form and space, culminating in a contemporary architecture of sometimes exhilarating form. Overtime, buildings have detached themselves from any concerns related to climate, geography, nature, and human conditions, to become more about technical possibilities focused constant invention sometimes to the detriment of the buildings’ use or usefulness.

Architecture has often been an agent of that isolation and degradation through the typologies we design. They are easily complicit in reinforcing class segregations, cultural segregations, or even generational segregations. In a time of environmental collapse, economic fragility and rapidly aging societies, we are becoming more and more vulnerable, yet we live painfully separate and segregated lives from each other. We no longer have the built infrastructure to live together, even though we clearly need one another, as was made painfully evident by the COVID global pandemic. In short, the dismissal of the realities inherent to the context of buildings might be incompatible with a healthier, more responsible and more connected future.

This studio will ponder the place of architecture in this time of crisis and fragilities. The focus will be on a neighborhood of Zürich where students will immerse themselves in the local environment, social and economic context of the project through in-depth research. The course will unfold as a process that will help and encourage participants to imagine typologies that are multi-layered solutions in response to a predominant social vulnerability.