Every architecture school is powered by its researchers who actively shape architectural pedagogy, research, and history. From probing the ghosts of Cape Dutch architecture to developing a platform for African artists, Dr Huda Tayob uses the past as a tool to intervene in our current world. Huda works as a Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, and she has previously taught at universities in the UK and South Africa, including the Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Cape Town. We connected with Huda to speak about her co-curated, open-access curriculum, Race, Space, and Architecture, and the digital exhibition, the Archive of Forgetfulness, which featured 22 artworks and six regionally curated projects from African artists.

Huda remaps borders and archives, multiple projects at a time. With her focus on migrant and subaltern architectures in Africa, she stays rooted to the continent. As a South African and descendant of migrants herself, Huda interrogates history from a position firmly based in her home country, but she is by no means limited to it.

You’ve previously mentioned that the digital exhibition, the Archive of Forgetfulness, is informed by practices of care. What does care in architectural research and pedagogy mean for you? 

There are many ways to think through practices of care. In this project, it is present in the way in which the project unfolded as a collaborative practice with many involved and as a way of thinking through archival care. The theorist Abdoumaliq Simone talks about ‘practices of peripheral care’, referring to practices amongst marginal groups at urban peripheries where people are living with very limited means, where there’s an ethics of relating to and caring for each other that’s part of daily life. This often involves multiple, small acts that are not always grand gestures and yet are central to making life liveable, often in very difficult contexts. I think that is just one way we see practices of care play out in many of the projects featured in the Archive of Forgetfulness.

Where else have you seen this dynamic? 

One of my projects focuses on Cape Dutch architecture, and when I started to look at the archives and early architectural histories written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I came across stories of ghostly figures who appear amongst these houses. These ghosts are often female slaves who were involved in domestic labour, caring for homes and owners. It is said that they are still heard up until the present in some of these homes. In archival sources there are references to a woman’s footsteps being heard up until the 1960s. Interestingly, in one of the sources there is a comment made that ‘if you care, you might hear’ these footsteps. There are stories of a woman in a garden with a Batavian brick oven, for example. This gives us a material trace to geographies, empire, and histories of slavery. But, as most of us know, even when you visit these sites in Cape Town there’s very little acknowledgment of this history, while the legacies of slavery are still very much present in terms of relations of power and labour at these sites.

Image by Sarah de Villiers

So how do we revisit those houses? How do we include the stories of people who cared for, maintained, and often constructed these buildings, who are not necessarily immediately present in archives or in mainstream versions of thinking about preservation and heritage?

It sounds like the ghostly figure is a really useful tool to approach spaces and research. It’s such an embodied kind of metaphor as well. Is there any resonance between this and your work on migrant architectures?

The figure of the migrant in classical urban literature, but also in a South African space, tests the limits of inherited ideas of the city. You could say that, in some ways, the ghostly figure is also similar. It’s a kind of revisitation of theories and spaces with this figure who speaks to the limits of architecture and, in the case of the ghosts specifically, the limits of history. The figure of the ghost disrupts time; she is a social figure.

Speaking about archives, your co-curated project, the Archive of Forgetfulness, draws on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem. Where do you see words and architecture being placed together, and what does it signal to us about transdisciplinary work?

Thinking with fiction and poetic texts has been an important way to think with other forms of storytelling, and to question how we narrate places and pasts. Mahmoud Darwish’s work is a really powerful text that draws out questions of memory and remembering. ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’, which was written in 1982 during the siege of Beirut, is a prose-length poem which moves from the everyday and mundane aroma and taste of coffee to the sirens and sounds of a city under siege. The poem is a reminder to think about how history is told. Darwish’s writing reminds us of the importance of thinking and working through multiple temporalities, moments, and the collisions of history and time. And to understand that the material worlds around us are not innocent in these moments.

The open-access curriculum, Race, Space, and Architecture, which you co-curate with Suzanne Hall and Thandi Loewenson, makes learning and knowledge more accessible. My sense is that it could filter out to people who are not students in a traditional sense, but want to be part of this active process of learning?

Race, Space, and Architecture was initially developed with Suzi Hall through a research project, and in 2020 we were joined by Thandi Loewenson. It has been a useful project to open up wider conversations on the relationship of race to architecture and urban space.

Images by Fred Swart

In South Africa we use racial terminology as part of our everyday language; it’s very commonplace in social life. Yet we often don’t step back to consider and question the implications of institutional or structural racism especially within architecture, both in industry and academic institutions. The open-access curriculum was a fruitful way to think through these questions. It’s, exactly as you say, about the boundaries around who’s studying and who’s not, but also how you access knowledge differently depending on where you’re based — institutionally and geographically.

Race is structural, but it is constantly being produced and reproduced, so it’s changeable. That’s quite significant. The curriculum is organised in six frames, each a transitive verb that draws attention to this fact: centralising, circulating, domesticating, extracting, immobilising, and incarcerating. The racialisation of space is not inevitable; it relies on this reproduction, with the implication that these structures can also be disrupted.

“The figure of the migrant, in classical urban literature, but also in a South African space, tests the limits of these ideas.”