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 an 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, simply. See below, for more about my Research, Teaching, and Aesthetics.

Research

My research explores the ways in which African Technicities, as a suite of culturally embodied dwelling practices, informs sensorial, hodological, and ultimately epistemological relationships within natural and built environments in sub-Saharan Africa and across the diaspora. This work situates new frames for comprehending how architecture, post-phenomenology, and African epistemologies relate to Black lived experience. As such, the interpolation of these analyses with contemporary and customary African dwelling practices helps to elucidate the complex set of spatial relations that constitute embodied expression in natural and built environments of Africa and the diaspora.

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 effective legislation of subject and object in an aesthetic composition. Consequently, my research generally explores the constitution of subjectivity through affective productions and aesthetic logics, either imported or indigenous, in architectural, design, and spatial environments.

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 organization interface with embodied relations to natural and built environments.

In addition to my scholarly development of issues of technicity, embodiment, and culture in natural and built environments, I maintain an artistic practice that encompasses audiovisual analog instrumentation, film-based photography, and modular synthesis. I perform and explore interference signals and their figural chromatic aberrations in correspondence with mechanical and analog transport systems to modulate the expressive character of the medium. I'm currently working on a series of analog (video8, Hi8, VHS, modular synthesis) portraits of contemporary and historical African and diasporic figures oscillating at the margins of architectural, spatial, and mobilities discourse.

Teaching

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.

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.