The Tools at our Disposal: Architectural Pedagogy in the Face of Calamity

Abstract

By highlighting a series of formative junctures of Mirna Pedalo’s trajectory as an architectural practitioner, researcher, and scholar, this paper explores what methodological framework, tools, and models used in spatial practice and architectural pedagogy can assist us in generating a milieu founded on  principles of social, spatial, and environmental justice. The threat of climate breakdown, further aggravated by the proliferation of violence and conflicts across the globe, has created an urgency to (re)think how architecture and related disciplines are taught and practiced. With a particular focus on her role as an Architecture and Design Studio Tutor at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art in London, UK and one of the core members of the Architects for Gaza collective, Pedalo aims to posit architectural pedagogy as a form of practice in itself. Such practice, when enacted in accordance with the above-mentioned principles, can equip the current and future generation of architects with forms of knowledge that can help resist and reshape the power-relations which have disenfranchised and oppressed certain populations and other-than-human forms of life.