IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

Since the emergence of the field in the eighteenth century, architectural history has been taught in art history departments and professional schools of architecture (Payne, 1999). Currently, undergraduate teaching of architectural history primarily focuses on Western canonical examples and models, often overlooking non-canonical works of architecture and restricting comprehensive education (Putra, 2025). While research in architectural history has expanded beyond the canonical doctrines of Western architecture, architectural history education practices regularly position non-Western architecture as derivative and “other,” thereby causing the field to bifurcate, reflecting the colonial and Cold War divisions (Osayimwese, 2021, 2024). Despite the expanding scholarly focus on colonial power dynamics and knowledge production in architectural historiography over recent decades, these developments have yet to substantially influence the pedagogy of architectural history. This disconnect serves to highlight and perpetuate the gap between research and teaching (Bozdogan, 1999; Loo, 2017). This paper aims to address this problematic by fullfiling two primary objectives: first, it outlines the current trends in teaching architecture history in Western European universities and the tools most often utilised (e.g., historiographical, visual, and material analysis, and different interdisciplinary tools), and explores the connections between ideology, curriculum, and the agency of instructors/researchers; second, it delineates an application of initiatives already present in research to advance the decolonisation project in the teaching of architectural history. Methodologically, this paper examines architectural history programs at Western European universities, critically assessing their curricula in relation to the project of decolonial thought in academia and in education.