Recoding Architecture Pedagogy: Insurgency and Invention

by Nathaniel Coleman

Disabled by chasing curricular criteria (required for accreditation and professional registration), architecture schools are mostly compliance and reproduction machines serving the building industry. As a corrective, Recoding Architecture Insurgency and Invention asserts disciplinary knowledge over professional skills as the proper aim and focus of architecture education. The insurgent pedagogy introduced subverts architecture and its teaching’s capture by capitalism’s dominant modes of production and consumption to reveal unexpected tactics for enlarging possibilities.

Grounded in architecture histories and theories, philosophy, and anarchism’s emphasis on use and dissensus, combined with PUNK’s DIY ethos, design studio emphasis on technicity is upended to reveal the subversive aim of intensifying tensions between (doomed) desires for artistic autonomy and (intrinsic) burdens of use constituting architecture as a discipline, instead of seeking resolution, some neutral middle ground, or escape into banal practice or paper palaces.

By concentrating on what architecture education suppresses (tensions), disavows (its capture within the building industry), or affirms (commercial practice over disciplinary knowledge), Recoding Architecture Insurgency and Invention cracks open horizons of possibility by showing how intensifying agonistic relationships between the myriad binaries that characterize architecture and its teaching is generative, in ways conciliatory synthesis, cathartic resolution, and uncritical affirmation are not.

148 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2025