Julieta Alva The National Palace in Mexico City has served as the residence of the President of Mexico since 2018 and is located on the cities main square.[1] This is a historical site of importance, as it was the original location of the palace of the ruling class during the Aztec empire. Much of the […]
A city built around resource extraction and the dispossession of indigenous lands and culture The Hastings Mill Store was built in 1865 and is an important case study to examine how British colonists used land as an extractive resource to build industrial capital in BC. The colonial government systematically displaced and dispossessed the lands and […]
All the colors, creeds, breeds, and voices become Rangoon; Rangoon was born in Rangoon, Rangoon was raised in Rangoon, Rangoon stood on par with other cities around the world. Proud Rangoon, the son of an urban city: (From Dressmaker Rangoon by Maung Chaw Nwe and translated by Kenneth Wong, 2013)1 The growth of British control […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
A Brief History of Lawang Sewu Lawang Sewu is an old Dutch colonial building located in central Java island’s north coast city of Semarang in Indonesia and occupies a total space of 23m x 77m. . In Javanese language, one of the many languages in Indonesia, Lawang Sewu can be directly translated as “A Thousand […]
Introduction Perched on the North peninsula of Halifax, Nova Scotia is a replica of a vintage church, sitting in solitude, overlooking the bay. The park is deceptively serene, and betrays the violent reality of the landscape’s history. A century before, the site was not a park, but a thriving black community named Africville. Africville, established […]
Founded in 1819, the British colony of Singapore was established as an administrative and trade hub for the Malayan peninsula, intended both to cement a British presence in the region, and create a platform to compete with and contain Dutch influence in the lucrative region. Singapore’s original planning document, The Jackson Plan was drawn between […]