New Architecture Writers explores inclusivity within architectural language and how to dismantle oppressive methods of communication. Language and architecture have a complicated relationship. Criticism, history, news and opinion in print, at events and online: all of these form our thoughts about buildings. This is not just a question of ideas, however, since discourse affects the production of architecture itself.
Staged at the Zaha Hadid Foundation on 13 July 2022, ‘Language Barriers’ explored the ideological and material factors shaping architectural discourse: the way we discuss buildings, the tools we use to do so, and the conditions under which such writing is produced. One of these factors, race, is the primary focus of the New Architecture Writers programme. ‘Language Barriers’ aimed to encompass a broader intersection of the different power dynamics at work in discourse about buildings, among them ability, class, gender, geography, and sexuality.
Who is heard and how do we listen? Who gets to write about architecture, and who reads this writing? Who has access to the technical, institutional and conceptual tools that are necessary to produce and consume it? Who pays for the labour of writing? And what can we do to change these structures?
‘Language Barriers’ was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.
‘Language Barriers’ was hosted at the Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF), a charitable organisation launched in 2022, to preserve and make publicly available the full range of Zaha Hadid’s extraordinary output, and more broadly to advance research, learning, and the enjoyment of related areas of modern architecture, art and design.
‘Language Barriers’ was the product of a series of working group conversations, chaired by Chloe Spiby Loh with participants Thomas Aquilina, Rosine Gibbs-Stevenson, Christopher Laing, Jessica Ryan-Ndegwa and Jordan Whitewood-Neal.
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