In Search of Anti-Hate Architectural Practices

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Yutaka Sho:

Date: 13th Feb 2025

Time: 18:00 – 20:00

Venue: SDE4 Level 5, Forum

Registration: https://bit.ly/nusdoa_YS
2 BOA-SIA CPD Points

In Search of Anti-Hate Architectural Practices

In his 1994 article, Pritzker Prize laureate Riken Yamamoto described post-World War II Japanese residential architecture as violence against women. With its rigidly gendered spaces, mass-produced units left the only possible family structure as nuclear family, effectively trapping women at home. For most people, it may take practice to notice violence and hate produced in familiar spaces. Perhaps especially for architectural professionals who could be seduced by form, structure or theory, it may be difficult to imagine experiences of underrepresented end-users. In this lecture, Sho first recognizes architectural cases and its spatial techniques that force some groups of people into a minority status.

By referring to the work of nonprofit design firm General Architecture Collaborative (GAC) in Rwanda that she co-founded, Sho then shares stories of successes and failures about the process of establishing an architectural practice that aimed to resist such architectural violence. GAC works in the global South where wealthy funders from the global North provide resources to build structures for the benefit of low-income peoples in what could be called the global development industry. Rural farmers who cannot access the industry’s resources self-build their homes only to have them eliminated, because their architecture does not embody ideal aesthetics of development.

In this industry, architectural aesthetics has become a tool of spatial violence. The lecture considers how designers may collaborate with self-builders to build more durably and in new aesthetics, so that they may claim their rightful share in development.

Yutaka Sho is a partner of nonprofit architecture firm General Architecture Collaborative (GAC). Since 2008, GAC has been working in Rwanda with underrepresented communities to build sustainable and aesthetically engaging spaces while using the construction sites and time for end-user training. Sho’s scholarly research focuses on the roles of architecture in the global development industry and in post-conflict reconciliation processes.

Sho is also a professor of architecture at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. In her design and research courses, Sho teaches how ambitions, politics, and ecologies are entangled across the globe.