Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida

Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida

The publication Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Bilda questions the “pursuit of comfort” in “tropical architecture,” which le Roux describes as a mutation of “transnational modernisms.” In the essay, le Roux “tak[es] up the call by Michelle Murphy to push beyond the understanding of techno-scientific praxis, no matter what 'positive feelings' it engenders, to embrace 'discomfort, critique and non-innocence' as generative categories. This essay extends disquiet with comfort as an authoritative category, especially in its application in the global South. It unsettles the obscured racial content of a science that developed as an instrument of colonial and neocolonial expansion through its divisiveness, and notes the ongoing use of its values in philanthropic architecture projects. It suggests that this field, predominantly based in the global North, fails to balance the geographic act of including the global South in their sites of study with understandings of situated and temporally diverse lifeways. It concludes with Fanon’s uncomfortable and extreme reaction to this form of comfort through his practice of revolutionary care, as a way to break open this subject’s ambivalent envelope - in both its concrete and disciplinary forms - in order to restore connections between science and humanity in their fullest potentials.”

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