Killian Doherty locates architectural knowledge and design practices within wider histories of and theories of knowledge, drawing from post-colonial, political history, ecology, anthropology, sociology, geography and critical theory readings, of the Global South. He has designed and realized community, social-housing, educational and landscape projects, with a focus on design as form of political ecological practice. These have been primarily for vulnerable and under-represented groups across East and West Africa.
His current PhD by Design research focuses on the dissonance between ‘Development’ re-settlement practices that negatively affect indigenous rights of access to livelihoods and ‘nature’ in post-genocide Rwanda. Through historical readings and extensive ‘anthropological’ field work his research reveals how discriminatory forms of colonial power-knowledge are transferred to and reproduced by Rwanda’s re-emerging built environment. Field-work as collaborative research method expands the architectural conventions of drawing, walking and propositional work, as conscious of non-western perspectives and concerns.
The role of environmental technologies intersect within his research, operating across a number of scales and practices that can be summarized as: a means towards energy and resource efficient construction technologies; a tool for the representation and visualization of environments as complex socio-ecological ‘systems’; and a tool that informs collaborative engagement with different actors situated within transforming urban and/or rural environments.
Non-western perspectives of environmental change also provide clues to new modes of ‘social’ practices, beyond the paradigm of the building. Killian has recently completed a 30-minute essay film, with Scottish film-maker Edward Lawrenson, documenting the spiritual and environmental costs of iron-ore mining in Northern Liberia, as examined through the lens of a new-town. This film operates as a social text to makes legible the violent logic of modernity, widening to the consumptive footprint of extractive economies and contemporary urbanization to clarify anthropogenic concerns. This film premiered at the Cinema Du Reel international film festival in Paris and was screened the Lithuania Pavilion as part of the Venice Architectural Biennale 2018.
