Join us for the next Architectural History and Theory Seminar Series of 25/26 by Killian Ó Dochartaigh.
This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.
Abstract
This lecture explores how Western architecture participated in the colonial enframing of Rwanda’s Virunga forests, treating land and life as a picture to be fixed, controlled, and consumed. Through four sites—the American Museum of Natural History’s gorilla dioramas, Twa forest dwellings, Dian Fossey’s fortified camp, and eco-tourism architectures at Volcanoes National Park—it reveals how architecture displaced Indigenous Twa communities while naturalising colonial visions of conservation. Rather than supporting sustainability or justice, these spatial forms sustain Rwanda’s performative post-war image. The paper argues that humanitarian design continues to reproduce land-ethnic conflict by obscuring its own ideological and material operations.
About Killian Ó Dochartaigh
Killian O’Dochartaigh is an architect and researcher whose work spans Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. Through Architectural Field Office, he explores how design intersects with social and ecological justice. He teaches at the University of Edinburgh and previously received the Frederick Bonnart Scholarship for his PhD at UCL.
Image: Karisoke Research Centre, 1969. Photo by Bob Campell. Reproduced by Archives of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
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