Bio

Hi, I'm Alan Dunyo Avorgbedor. I'm an American architectural historian, critical theorist, artist & analog texturizer of Ghanian and Jamaican descent. I’m also attorney admitted to practice law in Washington D.C. I’m currently an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. I hold a B.A. in English Literature from The Ohio State University and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. I briefly attended the Knowlton School of Architecture as a M.Arch candidate before transitioning to an Individualized Doctoral program at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, where I successfully defended my dissertation “African Technicity and Architectures of Being” (December 2021). During my Ph.D, I was awarded and completed a Doctoral Residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal as part of their 2018 Doctoral Residency program. I write, film, record, and compose poetry. See below, for more about my Research, Teaching, and Aesthetics.

Research

My research has generally been trained on the legibility of tectonic and/or compositional systems as they relate to aesthetic expression. I have been specifically interested in architectural frameworks and modes of figuration that complicate the affective legislation of subject and object in an aesthetic composition. Consequently, my research generally explores the constitution of subjectivity through affective productions and aesthetic legacies, either imported or indigenous, in architectural, design, and planning environments.

Currently, my research interrogates some of the philosophical, legal, architectural, and aesthetic norms that guide and at the same time complicate the mobilities of postcolonial urban development in sub-Saharan Africa. To the extent that my research explores architecture and its relationship to pragmatic, aesthetic, and social mobilities, I am engaged in critical and philosophical readings regarding the mediation and mobility of the body in commodity driven spaces and narratives. I seek to develop an understanding of architecture as a kind of socio-technical complexity that at once defines and normalizes access to "architecture" but also affords interstitial movements and negotiations through the margins of informality and culturally specific mediations of performance and tradition. Ultimately, I’m interested in the ways that these modes of social organisation interface with embodied relations to natural and built environments.

McGill University
Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture

ARCH 201 COMMUNICATION, BEHAVIOUR AND ARCHITECTURE
U1 Design Studio

I’ve served as both co-instructor and studio coordinator for this foundational first-year design studio. We guide students through an exploration of how geometric elements and formal systems can inspire architectural space. The course develops students' design judgment and communication skills through formal, technical, and aesthetic exercises addressing light, scale, space, form, and color in an environment. My pedagogical contribution brings a cultural dimension to architectural worldbuilding that expands the conventional studio canon. By introducing diverse aesthetic frameworks, cultural sensibilities, and alternative spatial logics, I help students recognize and engage with traditionally marginalized forms of architectural expression. This approach deliberately disrupts normative design hierarchies while enriching students' conceptual vocabulary. My teaching emphasizes iterative design processes and critical reflection, encouraging students to position their work within complex and sometimes contradictory contexts. The studio cultivates worldbuilding as a conceptual framework for architectural programming, helping students consider behavioral, atmospheric, environmental, and political dimensions of design while remaining attentive to the cultural specificities that shape spatial experience.

ARCH 355: ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 4 — Africa. Architecture. Modernity.

This course serves as a critical introduction to the complexities and possibilities of African architectural expression and its relationship to the project of modern architecture via tropical modernism. I've designed the course to focus student attention on a selection of sub-Saharan African aesthetic norms and sensibilities to develop an understanding of how conventional notions of architecture and modernity are mediated, challenged, or displaced in African or diasporic contexts. Significantly, the course embraces discourses from African architects, artists, writers, thinkers, and curators, to engage the dynamics of an African aesthetic and to provide a deeper cultural framework from which to complicate notions of Africa, Architecture, and Modernity. The course is organized around readings, class discussions, presentations and peer-review that develop critical tools to analyze and address the sociocultural, political, economic, and aesthetic imaginaries that position or nuance an African relationship to architecture and modernity.

ARCH 543: SELECTED TOPICS IN GLOBAL ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

This graduate seminar builds upon themes introduced in ARCH 355, offering an advanced exploration of more global discourses on architectural expressivity and their epistemological frameworks. The course delves deeper into theoretical constructs of embodiment, technicity, and aesthetic expression across diverse contexts, examining how these frameworks challenge conventional architectural historiography. Students engage with primary texts from philosophers, architects, and cultural theorists to develop nuanced understandings of how diverse knowledge systems inform spatial practices. Through intensive reading discussions, independent research projects, and critical writing, the seminar cultivates sophisticated methodological approaches to architectural history that acknowledge plural epistemologies and decolonial possibilities. The course particularly emphasizes the tensions between tradition and modernity, sacred and secular formalisms, technicities of the hyperlocal and how these manifest in contemporary architectural discourse and practice.

Aesthetics

Graduate Supervision:

M.Arch Thesis Advising (2023-present)

I advise students in McGill's professional M.Arch program on their final-year thesis projects. This mentorship involves guiding students through rigorous research methodologies, conceptual development, and architectural propositions that engage with contemporary critical discourse. Recent advisory work includes projects investigating chromophobia in architectural whiteness, diasporic reflections in suburban spaces, and decolonial approaches to material practices. My advising emphasizes the development of clear assessment criteria that foster both creative exploration and scholarly rigor, helping students position their work within broader architectural, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

PhD Supervision (2023-present)

I currently supervise doctoral research examining intersections between Black cultural expressivity and spatial practices, embodied knowledge systems, and decolonial methodologies. This supervisory role involves mentoring researchers through complex theoretical frameworks while developing robust and critical methodological approaches.

Program Leadership:

Studio Coordination

I have coordinated the first-year undergraduate studio (U1) at McGill's School of Architecture, overseeing pedagogical consistency across multiple sections while fostering collaborative teaching environments. Beginning Winter 2026, I will coordinate the second-year studio program (U2), further developing curricular integration between foundational design principles with more experimental architectural investigations.

I experiment with analog media to compose abstract and poetic audiovisual engagements. Sonically, I compose a blend of acoustic and electronic noise as DUNYO. I’m also a film photographer and have exhibited at Z Arts Space in Montreal. I capture quotidian phenomena using film or analog media and generally meditate upon the function of the transport mechanism in extended audiovisual work.

If the medium complicates the affective legislation of subject and object in an aesthetic composition, I’m usually there. Consequently, these interests also figure into my academic research in critical ways, particularly within African and diasporic contexts.

Much of what I do in the arts space is a vehicle for ephemera. Selections of my writing, film photography, and experiments in music/sound can be found on this website.