Natalia Escobar Castrillon
Natalia Escobar Castrillón is a licensed architect and a professor of Architecture and Social Justice. She holds a PhD in Architecture and a Master in Design from Harvard University, as well as a Masters in Architecture from the University of Seville. Prior to Carleton, Escobar Castrillón taught graduate courses and advised master students at Harvard University, Boston University, Chile Catholic University, and São Paulo University. Prof. Escobar Castrillón’s research and teaching work addresses questions of spatial justice, social equity, collective identity, displacement, and representation in the built environment. Her publications unpack the complexities of contested buildings and sites worldwide, and discuss the role of design and narrative-making in supporting or silencing social groups. She has taught courses on these topics pursuing engagement practices with local communities.
She has been awarded grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education (TALENTIA), the Jorge Paulo Lemann Foundation, the David Rockefeller Foundation, the Harvard Asia Center, and the São Paulo Academic Research Foundation (FAPESP), among others, which allow her to pursue fieldwork in Europe, Latin America, and Asia where she studied the intersection of architecture with questions of power, gender, race, and social class through the work of architects Lu Wengyu and Wang Shu, and Lina Bo. More recently, Prof. Escobar was awarded a Carleton University International Research Seed Grant to produce visualizations of oppression and resilience of migrant populations in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank. This work been accepted for publication in the upcoming Routledge book Critical Companion to Race and Architecture.
Prof. Escobar Castrillón is also the founder of the architectural journal Oblique that received the AIA NY Center for Architecture Publications Award and aims to revise hegemonic design practices and discourses. She was also the invited editor of editions ARQ and of Materia Arquitectura issue 11 and recently published her reflections on Lina Bo’s alternative notion of modernity at N. Escobar, “Anthropophagic Phenomenology: Encounters at Lina Bo’s SESC Pompeia Cultural and Leisure Center,” in The New Urban Condition: Architecture and the City in the 21st Century, Eds. Tom Avermaete, Leandro Medrano, Luiz Recamán, New York: Routledge, 2021.
Sessions in which Natalia Escobar Castrillon participates
Thursday 26 May, 2022
“Migrations are made, they don’t just happen. There are conditions which cause them” (Saskia Sassen)Although urban populations are becoming increasingly diverse, the built environment is not designed to accommodate these differences. Rather, throughout the 20th century in the Western world, the standard subject that has guided design has been the experiences of white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male populations. In contrast, Statistics Canada estimates that nearly one-third of Canad...
Sessions in which Natalia Escobar Castrillon attends
Thursday 26 May, 2022
“Migrations are made, they don’t just happen. There are conditions which cause them” (Saskia Sassen)Although urban populations are becoming increasingly diverse, the built environment is not designed to accommodate these differences. Rather, throughout the 20th century in the Western world, the standard subject that has guided design has been the experiences of white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male populations. In contrast, Statistics Canada estimates that nearly one-third of Canad...
The cultural landscapes of migration are an inextricable part of Canada’s urban, social and national identity. However, recent debates about immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and the visibility of cultural symbolisms raise controversial, often polarized public opinions. Policies of migration have accentuated divisive interpretations and legitimized isolation among multiple cultural communities, instead of promoting dialogue. This session...
New approaches to conventional architectural histories have sought to create a different historical field, expanding its geographical and cultural boundaries, and introducing new conceptual tools to replace the traditional survey of leading examples—the canonical works, one of the features (though by no means the only one) which has allowed to build and study a continuous history of architecture. One goal is to incorporate other areas and groups that have not been part of the main developm...
Home is a deceptively simple term connecting a vast network of people, places, objects, and emotions. As people move from place to place, home manifests through inhabitations of built form. These spatial identities are records of movement which reinforce the importance of home as an architectural research site to learn about diverse diasporas in a rapidly globalizing world.This research explores a process for understanding diasporic spatial identity through how people remember, inha...
The study of cities purely as discrete objects—that begin and end in a bounded condition—is becoming increasingly obsolete. As Clare Lyster describes in her book, Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities (2016), questions of the urban must now contend with a vast landscape of connected systems of exchange. Cities—no longer contained to their historical, political or territorial boundaries— are becoming increasingly enmeshed in a planetary-scale theater of material flo...
Displacement, describing a sense of uprootedness, is seemingly irreconcilable with the grounding quality of domestic space. However, the practice of housework and homemaking allows forcibly displaced people to reconstruct home elsewhere. While historical feminist movements in the West have advocated for a radical socialization of housework in an effort to value its labour and extend its visibility to the public realm, these views fail to address the importance of homemaking as private plac...
Food offers a means of examining spatial stories of migration. As a set of heritage activities, the preparation, storage, and consumption of food offer multisensorial and evocative ways of exploring cultural identity and a sense of belonging, particularly for members of diasporic communities. Immigrants and their descendants often have to modify traditional recipes and make do with different domestic technologies and spatial configurations. They become everyday designers, active agents in ...
I discuss a narrative “zine”, Home Smart Home, which I created in 2021 as a commission for UKAI Projects and the Goethe-Institut Toronto as part of the Goethe-Institut’s Algorithmic Culture project. The zine consists of a series of observations sited within my family’s suburban home in Scarborough, Ontario, in a neighbourhood made up primarily of first- and second-generation South Asian and Southeast Asian immigrants. The goal of the commissioning institution was to seek what Neta B...
Architecture has the agency to either perpetuate social exclusion or initiate a social change that can offset the continuing forms of hostile architecture in Canadian public spaces. Designing public spaces must intentionally reflect the needs of the whole community, including marginalized people who are often kept on the periphery of an architect's visualization of a public building. As a person who is a Syrian refugee and formerly held a precarious immigration status as an asylum seeker, ...
Nestled between Johnson Peak, best known as the location of Hope Slide, and Mount Potter, is the former site of the largest Japanese Canadian internment camp – Tashme. Bound by steep and treacherous mountains and days-long treks to anywhere by foot. A single highway - The Crowsnest - cuts through the valley, built by the incarcerated labour. Today, this site is a sleepy leisure retreat ironically named the Sunshine Valley, BC, populated with DIY structures by those who willfully leav...
This abstract is in anticipation of a long research journey I will soon embark upon: a sub-Arctic circumpolar oral history project to speak with various Indigenous elders around the world. For this presentation, I want to focus on methods of finding architectural space in the stories of the Haida, the Gwich’in, and the Inuit in the sub-Arctic coastal regions of Canada. Here, time, frost, and colonial oppression have inevitably vetted out stellar models of living sustai...
Roger D'Astous is one of the most important Canadian architects of the 20th century. A student of Frank Lloyd Wright, he worked all his life to establish a northern architecture. This rebellious and flamboyant artist was a superstar of the sixties, then fell into disgrace before being reborn in the twilight of the century. Author of two Montreal icons, the Château Champlain Hotel and the Olympic Village for the 1976 Games, his residences are sensual works of art and his churches are strang...
Saturday 28 May, 2022
“Felt experiences” have become key components of our understanding of the world in the digital age, which could explain the increase in research on the diversity of the ambiences experienced in built environments. These approaches, which sometimes give privileged access to worldviews or lead to design modes that are more attentive to the experience of users, shed new light on previ...
Queerness and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer histories are a part of architectural and historical production. Yet, these perspectives do not enjoy the same prominence as heterocentric narratives. This session aims to interrogate all aspects of gender and sexual identity related to the Canadian built environment. It seeks to scrutinize the successes and failures of architecture, architectural history, and heritage in accommodatin...
Since the 19th century, citizens grouped within different types of associations, from the learned society to the friends of heritage, have been interested in local history and, by extension, in the traces of these on the territory. This citizen contribution is expressed in many ways. First of all, while such historical society groupings have a venerable past, their proliferation and their commitment to defend the archives, to s...
This paper proposes a critical appreciation of Canadian architecture as an expression of a distinctly complex and evolving relationship among people and place. This endeavour is certainly not new to architectural history, yet is more prescient these days given some of the challenges facing our fractured and contested collective legacies at a time when nationalism as a concept is being challenged to demonstrate its relevancy to many societies.If this paper has done its job, it will h...
Ramps and curb cuts often first come to mind when one thinks about how the built environment is designed for people with disabilities. Accessible designs, however, need to account for individuals that may not be restricted in terms of mobility but live with other impairments such as blindness or neurological and cognitive conditions. Ideally, an architectural design will allow all users to feel as though they are included and not judged. This s...
While the relationship between architecture and community are intrinsically intertwined, the built form of “community spaces” is not easily defined by any specific style, design, or building typology. Though there are many purpose-built community buildings across Canada, including community and recreation centres, performance venues, and town halls, many community spaces often evolve organically and informally from the community itself in a div...