TAVARES, Paulo
Des-Habitat

Des-Habitat by Paulo Tavares is a powerful exploration of how modernist aesthetics and colonial histories intersect. Originally published in 2019 on the occasion of the international research initiative and traveling exhibition Bauhaus Imaginista, this book-length essay examines the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s influential 1950s magazine Habitat, which juxtaposed modern art and architecture with Indigenous and popular crafts. Through his writing and a series of design strategies like re-appropriation, collage, and displacement, Tavares reveals how Habitat’s modern visual language obscured the colonial contexts from which these materials were sourced. Des-Habitat invites readers to critically engage with questions of oppression, complicity, and decolonization in architecture and design.

[publishers’ note]

Published by K. Verlag, 2023
Artists' Books / Anthropology / Ecology / Postcolonial Studies / Architecture / Documents