The publication of Radical Pedagogies, documenting a series of experiments with institutional transformation in the 1960s and ’70s, coincides with a current moment of reexamination and reflection. What began as a research seminar led by Beatriz Colomina at Princeton’s School of Architecture, has evolved into exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and now this weighty tome, which collects 113 accounts of innovative teaching techniques and organizational models implemented in architecture and design programs around the globe. These accounts are presented as a dossier, recording dates, protagonists, and the events that took place. Some entries, like the road-trip format of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas studio, are a part of the lore of architectural education. Other entries, from Nairobi, New Zealand, MIT, and the Szczecin University of Technology in Poland, are far less familiar, and expand our understanding of the global networks of architecture and design schools.

The creation of the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte in Cuba in 1965 marked a moment of revolutionary fervor with the construction of a brick-vaulted school that actively worked to dismantle the separation of students and builders. At the Catholic University in Valparaiso, Chile, students and faculty investigated surrealist techniques of automatic writing and poetic acts. They erected new structures to form what they called Ciudad Abierta, or Open City. Other pedagogical experiments dispensed with the geographic specificity of the physical school completely. The Polyark Bus, a converted double-decker vehicle for living and learning, launched a nomadic program in UK cities. The Black Workshop at Yale was founded in 1968 to support Black students and serve the broader New Haven community. It conducted fieldwork studios and developed methods of community design with the participation of notable Black architects like Max Bond Jr. and Donald Stull, raising social-justice issues as design concerns.