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Professor of architecture Fernando Lara joined the faculty at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design this past fall, after teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. Over the last 20 years, Lara has written four books and numerous articles on theorizing spaces of the Americas with an emphasis on the dissemination of design ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Lara describes his interest in the ways that the creation of abstraction in architecture aligned with the colonialist expansion of European cultures, and the lessons that can be applied from this history to architectural education today. A core part of Laras research has focused on looking at structures beyond buildings designed by famed architects.

I analyzed the phenomena of how the middle class in Brazil took the vocabulary of famous buildings by elite architects and applied it to their homes, he says. These houses, which were being designed by contractors and even construction workers, were imitating modern architecture.

Lara has written about the role of abstraction in architecture, linking it to history of colonialist expansion of European influence throughout the world.

After a decade as a Latin Americanist, I started working more and more with decolonial theories, a body of scholarship that mostly comes from Latin America, with contributions from Africa and South Asia. An important tenet of decolonial theory scholarship is that modernization and colonization are one and the sameone does not exist without the other. Architecture scholarship has celebrated modernization, while trying to avoid the issues of colonization, Lara explains.

Looking at architectures role in all this, I see that abstraction is a tool for controlling spaces far away in space or in time. As architects, we manipulate spaces that will be built by somebody else in the future. We also use abstraction as a tool to control spaces far away geographically. Spatial abstraction is a process of distancing. We take a distance from the object, using tools and techniques to separate ourselves from the object, so that they can be manipulated. Historically, abstraction relates to the systematization of the design process in the 16th century, paralleling the European occupation of the Americas. With spatial abstraction, London could control New England, or Madrid could control Mexico. Architecture as we know it is integral to that process.