From July 1845 to September 1857, Henry David Thoreau lived in a small, self-built, single room cabin. It stood beside Walden Pond on the property of Ralph Waldo Emerson, just outside of Concord Massachusetts within the territory of the Pennacook Nation. The structure itself was extremely simple, occupying a ten by fifteen foot footprint with […]
A bitter-sweet investigation into the rich history & role that Rogers Sugar played in Vancouver’s development. The BC Sugar Refinery is a highly industrial building located just behind the railway tracks at the Port of Vancouver, and an easy building to quickly dismiss without giving it a second thought. A series of warehouse buildings and […]
The Paris Opera House was designed and completed by Charles Garnier between 1861 and 1875.[1] Dripping in opulence and grandeur, ‘Palais Garnier’ is the quintessential depiction of France’s Imperial Power acquired during the Second Empire rule; representing the growing bourgeoisie population, Napoleon III’s political ambitions both domestically and internationally, and a legacy of symbology which […]
The convoluted emergence of the federal center of American democracy and how it reflects the colonial roots of a nation The location and architecture for the U.S federal government did not always exist as it does today. The immediate image that is conjured up of the white, neoclassical portico and columns in front of a […]
An investigation into the Flatiron Building as an Icon of capitalism. As America grew in the late 1800s a new form of empire was emerging. The United States had vast amounts of resources, people and products. New York city was the capital of an economic empire. As capital accumulated in New York city it manifested […]
A Conflict of Dominion at the Slave Quarters Tuckahoe slave labour camp is located ten miles west of Richmond, Virginia and was first settled by the Randolph family in 1714 and was at one point the childhood home of Thomas Jefferson.1 Construction of the main house began soon after and ultimately underwent the addition of […]
Introduction The Caribbean is a region historically notable for its legacy of colonization and slave labour. As early as the 16th century enslaved Africans were shipped to islands in the West Indies to work on plantations owned and operated by Europeans. In particular, France claimed a substantial amount of territory for its monarchy, and took […]
Forming a portion of the St. Lawrence Market façade in Toronto, its first official city hall is part of a legacy of facadism in Toronto architecture, where buildings are preserved to meet the goal of heritage conservation of facades. As we seek a decolonized society, it is important to question the role our preserved architecture […]
Down one of the many paths of Rio de Janeiro’s botanical garden stands a grand neoclassical portal, the arched entrance, classical columns, frieze and pediment are all that remain of the Imperial Academy of Fine Art (figure 1). The plan of the Academy shows that it was once much larger (figure 2), after being built […]
In the late nineteenth century, Bombay transformed from a city of warehouses to become one of Britain’s finest imperial cities. As trade, wealth, and the population flourished, the colonial government embarked on the long-contemplated project of demolishing the old fort walls, to make room for the envisioned metropolis1. As Preeti Chopra discusses in her book, […]