On view across Brown’s campus is an exhibit of student work from Professor Itohan Osayimwese’s Fall 2021 course, Architecture of the House Through Space and Time. A Campus of Houses, coordinated by graduate students Pamudu Tennakoon and Dandan Xu, and funded by the Brown Arts Initiative, is a series of 24” × 36” posters that present research on University buildings that were originally constructed as houses. 

Professor Osayimwese’s class studied houses throughout history in Mesopotamia, China, Japan, the Middle East, the African diaspora, India, Britain, Rhode Island, Germany, and France. Focusing on this one building type allowed the lecture course to simultaneously look past and at some of architectural history’s biases, and to ask the questions: What is architecture? Who determines what is included/excluded in this category? On what basis do they make these claims?

For their final projects, students conducted historical research and interior and exterior architectural analyses of several campus houses, including Giddings House, Prospect House, and the Urban Environmental Lab. Their work touches on the personal lives of previous house owners, architectural movements and styles, and past and present socioeconomic and racial hierarchies. 

Below are a selection of posters and images from the exhibit. For a full list of locations, please visit Events@Brown. The Department extends its gratitude to the Brown Arts Institute, for its gracious support, and congratulates Professor Osayimwese, Pamudu Tennakoon, and Dandan Xu for coordinating such a large-scale event amidst the complications of the COVID-19 pandemic.