design.

architecting friendship: a spatial commemoration
of Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/
Malcolm X

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Based on Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra’s research first presented in “Beyond In/Visibility,”

Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim offer a spatial commemoration and multi-temporal analysis of the radical friendship between Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama1 and Black Nationalist leader El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). Moving between family photographs and axonometric drawings this multimedia conversation offers a mediated re-membering of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki World Peace Study reception that took place in the Kochiyama home on 6 June 1964. Adam and Zakiyyah’s drawings use spatial memory and mapping as a method to represent how Black-Asian solidarity and co-conspiratorship were architected in the lives of two friends.

reclaiming african heritage for the post-covid era

‘Reclaiming African Heritage for the Post-COVID Era’ is a pilot study that offers a prototype for producing data-driven projects that do not merely reproduce colonial ideologies implicit in social scientific methods. Rather, this study is an opportunity to unsettle normative ways of conducting research so that evaluations of the global impact of COVID on African cultural heritage sectors can acknowledge the inherent structural inequalities that exist in the very disciplines and professions that purport to produce value-neutral knowledge about African people and places. One of the key challenges in designing this type of survey lies in determining how ‘cultural heritage’ is defined, socially constructed, and practically reinforced. What is cultural heritage and how is it defined as a profession in the job market throughout multiple African contexts?

rogue roots: home

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Unit 14 is a design-research unit based at the University of Johannesburg’s flagship architecture program - the Graduate School of Architecture. Rogue Roots, within the framework of the unit, investigates the origins, practices and spatial consequences of contemporary and emergent trade roots affecting South Africa. 

after images: ponte archive