Class Talk
A Conversation with Zaid Kashef Alghata
March 2023
About two years ago, Zaid Kashef Alghata, a Bahraini-Iraqi designer and educator working in the United States, told me that, in his opinion, 2020 marked a turning point in architectural education. The events that unfolded in 2020—the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police—heightened and illuminated stark social and economic divisions in the U.S. and beyond, creating ripples across educational institutions. This interview serves as a way to check in and have a conversation about the state of architectural education. I spoke with Kashef Alghata about the politics of research funding, the value of extra-institutional teaching and mentoring, and more.
Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): Broadly speaking, what has been your recent experience of architecture’s educational landscape?
Zaid Kashef Alghata (ZKA): I am happy to see that institutions are increasingly asking questions like: What minority voices have been ignored? What kind of knowledge is missing? Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between institutional efforts to elevate the voices and discourse of underrepresented communities and the economic reality that underpins these efforts: All across the United States, the humanities are seeing a decline in enrollment while STEM degrees are on the rise. Architecture uncomfortably straddles these two realms, and its internal funding qualms might be representative of that discomfort.
What I’m seeing on the ground is that there are plenty of funding opportunities for minority-focused projects in architecture, but most of them amount to very small grants—between $500 and $3,000 on average. Underenrollment complicates that further. Students at architecture schools are sidelining courses that don’t provide job-ready skills—and this often includes courses with a minority focus. This is difficult to come to terms with as an educator, but it isn't our students’ fault; it’s the context they're living in—a bleak economic outlook coupled with the ever-increasing cost of living and debt.
SLC: Right—and that has a deep effect on how you direct your research…
ZKA: When you want to teach issues that haven't been widely discussed, you're required to first do the difficult research—pinning down primary sources, recording, measuring, archiving, all things which require time and funds not readily available. It's not the same as teaching a class on Palladio—there are many publications and countless courses have been taught on the topic.
SLC: Despite those difficulties, you’ve been teaching courses on understudied topics. I would be interested in hearing how you’ve approached that and what insights have emerged from the experience.
ZKA: Last semester, I taught a class on Braddock, a town nine miles out of Pittsburgh, where one of the earliest Bessemer steel plants opened in the U.S. in 1873. Braddock used to be prosperous, but the pollution from the plant led to white flight, while segregation and redlining restricted the Black community’s mobility. At the plant, there was what I think was called the "dead man's job," which encompassed jobs that directly and negatively affected the worker's health. These jobs were disproportionately given to Black workers, aggravating an already inequitable situation. Today, Braddock’s social infrastructure is practically nonexistent; it faces food insecurity and high poverty rates, among other issues.
Our seminar asked students to put together short films that engaged underrepresented histories of Braddock. (Visualizing things that they found problematic about these histories was a way to induce conversations.) One of my students confronted an institution they are a part of, which has historically left out Black voices. The soundtrack they created used a mix of popular Black musicians and a documentary on rappers in Braddock, titled “Braddocc Mon Valley.” The school’s retention and archiving regulations meant that they were able to embed the perspective of local artists within the institutional archive.
How do you utilize existing structures to infiltrate institutions and foster necessary conversations? It's not easy to navigate these complex and layered landscapes. I think there is always a balancing act between the logistical part of the job, and the content explored. The question is how far can you really go?
SLC: Before coming back to teach in the U.S., you did some workshops and courses in Bahrain?
ZKA: Yes, at the University of Bahrain and King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia. Several others took place in classroom spaces I rented out. In that sense, the workshops weren’t really part of any curriculum and were completely independent.
Kashef Alghata during desk crits with his workshop students at a café in Bahrain, July 2018.
