HISTORICISM IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN BANGLADESH

Abstract

Even in today’s postcolonial conditions, architectural education in Bangladesh remains profoundly influenced by the western pedagogic framework introduced originally by Texas A&M University in 1961. Especially the history part of the undergraduate architectural curricula suffers heavily from a lack of contextual orientation as western scholarship heavily dominate the classroom lectures. It is against this backdrop; this paper aims to investigate the problems underlying the history/heritage (theory) stream of courses from the architectural curricula in Bangladesh. In order to comprehend the problems, the concept of historicism has been used, which provides a framework to assess historicism in terms of contextuality, continuity and positionality. Using this framework, a review of history/ heritage courses of 12 architectural schools in Bangladesh has been conducted. It is found that modern western scholarly contents for history education are often inadequate for students’ understanding of their own context (both past and present). It is also argued that there is a lack of continuity due to the segmentation of historical architectural evidences in geographic and temporal terms. Additionally, the uncritical delivery of scholarly materials in the history classroom is further exacerbated by the overwhelming occurrence of western authors’ narratives on architectural events, theories or examples on, about or being in the nations of the west. Four propositions, including the need for being critical to the contents and processes of the western scholarship, and the need for incorporation of more locally produced reference materials (published by local authors) alongside the western ones have been put up.