Yazmín M. Crespo-Claudio (Architecture) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. With the support of this fellowship, she further developed the seminar ARCH 403, “Spatial Theories from/with the Caribbean,” bringing the work of Caribbean scholars and writers into conversation with community-based and collective spatial practices.
Describe the ARCH 403 seminar and what you hope students will gain from the course.
What happens when we think about architectural theory from the Caribbean rather than simply about it?
ARCH 403: Spatial Theories from/with the Caribbean begins from the premise that the Caribbean has always produced theory, even when architectural history has not recognized it as such. The seminar approaches the Caribbean not as a peripheral geography or a collection of case studies, but as an archipelagic ground from which to think about space, relation, belonging, survival, and ways of living and building otherwise.
Students engage Caribbean thinkers, writers, artists, and collective and community-based spatial practices to explore how histories of colonialism, plantation economies, migration, racial capitalism, and environmental precarity have produced distinct ways of understanding space. Thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Suzanne Césaire, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Marta Aponte allow us to consider concepts including relation, opacity, repetition, camouflage, and the archipelago not simply as metaphors but as ways of thinking spatially in relation to particular historical and political conditions.
The from/with in the course title is important. It signals a refusal to simply extract concepts from the Caribbean and transport them elsewhere. Instead, I want students to ask what it means to think with a place, its histories, its intellectual traditions, and the people and communities who produce knowledge there. My hope is that students leave the seminar able to recognize that theory does not come only from canonical texts or established centers of knowledge. Theory can also emerge through lived experience, cultural production, collective practices, and ways of navigating conditions that demand constant negotiation and invention.
Ultimately, the course is not about adding the Caribbean to an existing architectural canon. It asks what happens to the canon—and to architecture itself—when we shift the ground from which we think.
How did the Summer Faculty Fellowship support the development of the course?
The Summer Faculty Fellowship gave me the opportunity to develop ARCH 403 not simply as a new seminar, but as part of a larger question that has been emerging across my research, teaching, and practice: How might we teach architecture otherwise?
The fellowship allowed me to deepen the theoretical structure of the course and to bring together questions I had been exploring across different parts of my work: counter-narratives, archipelagic thinking, colonial infrastructures, relational and collective spatial practices, and the possibilities and limits of working from within the university. I used this period to rethink the organization of the seminar, develop its readings and assignments, and consider how its pedagogical structure could embody the questions the course itself raises.
This process has led me increasingly toward what I describe as archipelagic pedagogies: ways of teaching and producing knowledge that privilege relation over isolation, resist extractive forms of engagement, and understand knowledge as situated, collective, and produced across multiple sites. In that sense, the fellowship supported more than the development of a syllabus. It gave me space to bring research, practice, and pedagogy into closer conversation and to think about the classroom itself as a site where new forms of architectural knowledge might be produced.
Spatial Theories from/with the Caribbean, therefore, asks students—and asks me as an educator—to consider the Caribbean not as an addition to architectural theory, but as a place from which architectural theory can be rethought.
Taller Creando Sin Encargos and Natacha Quintero. “Play, Placemaking, and Participation” in Huerto Comunitario, Vivero y Bosque Urbano de Capetillo, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.
ARCH 499: Community-based sustainable design in Puerto Rico. Codesign and build of Estación Colectiva with Casa Pueblo, Adjuntas.