The Library is Open 11: The Architecture of Migration

For the 11th installment of The Library is Open, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Barnard College) will discuss her book Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2024). Anooradha’s talk will be followed by a response from Nora Akawi (Cooper Union) and Mabel Wilson(GSAPP, AAADS).

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.

Learn more about Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, ecologies, iconography, visual rhetoric, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is the author of Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books), and her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier. Siddiqi is editor or co-editor of the special issues “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” (Aggregate, Canadian Centre for Architecture, ABE: Architecture Beyond Europe), “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge” (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East), and “Spatial Violence” (Architectural Theory Review). She is a co-director of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Insurgent Domesticities and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP. Hosted in a central location in Avery Hall, the LiO series honors GSAPP’s historical connection to Avery Library, the world’s largest Architecture library.

Columbia University campus access is restricted to Columbia affiliates (with a valid CUID) and to pre-approved guests. To attend an event at GSAPP, please register through the link below at least two business days in advance of the event to request campus access and bring your ID. Learn more about the current Columbia campus access.

Register here to attend the Library is Open 11.