The Africa Section: Foreign Aid Drawings in the Development Decades, presentation by Hannah Le Roux, Neighbors Vol. 5 by THEMA, HITAM, TPOD
Event details
| Date | 19.03.2025 |
| Hour | 12:30 › 14:00 |
| Speaker | Hannah le Roux is an architect, educator and theorist. Her work revisits the modernist project in architecture, and considers how its transformation through the agency of Africa presents a conceptual model for contemporary design. Her curation of exhibitions in Johannesburg, Venice, Brussels and Rotterdam engaged with the spatialities of diaspora coffee ceremonies and the soccer culture of earth fields through design research, and designed alterations to modernist buildings and public spaces in Johannesburg. From 2022-2023 she was Guest Professor at the gta, ETH Zurich and a Senior Fellow at Collegium Helveticum. In 2017 she was selected as a Canadian Centre for Architecture / Mellon research fellow on Architecture and the Environment, and as a Fulbright Principal Candidate for an African Research Scholarship. She was the Area Editor for Africa for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture, 1960-2015. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
In designing human and non-human environments in the majority world from the late 1950s onwards - the beginning of the era of post-colonial independence - architects used sections operatively to augment and delink from colonialism's power to plan. Famously, “tropical" architects introduced the ventilated and shaded section as the site of their mobile expertise. Materially, they also considered new genres of roofing while altering its relationship to the availability of raw materials. Representation in these cases is political, precisely because of the section's potential to delink technology from place and its insidious impacts while narrating progress. The Africa Section is this trope, but I coined the term to also suggest an imaginary bureaucratic office within which Western interests reposition themselves through architectural views.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- THEMA + HITAM + TPOD
Contact
- akshar.gajjar@epfl.ch