Current Teaching

The Color Line
ETH Zürich Spring 2022

This course begins with the premise that architecture’s “color,” or its not-quite-so-whiteness, is difficult to see.

Thinking through the color line as it was quite often literalized through built architectures, the course acknowledges the ways in which the discipline and profession has historically contributed to the racialization of space by building segregated geographies.

The lectures, however, focus on projects and ideas by tracing subjects who cut across “lines”, resisted and countered these spaces presumed to have rigid boundaries by imagining, building, defining and galvanizing alternative lifeworlds.

Pressure Points: The Subjects of Race and Feminism
ETH Zürich Autumn 2021

This course examines the built environment through a set of lenses developed in Black studies, Critical Race Theory, feminist techno-science theory, Black queer and trans studies. In asking questions around exclusion and belonging in the contemporary study of spaces, the course explores how constructs around race and gender have created interlocking forms of oppression that permeate the culture practice and discipline of architecture.

The course asks what role imagination can serve in the practice and discipline of architecture—an imagination which pressures the field to contend with the past and nurture a radical practice of imagination where it might unhinge itself from systems of oppression in the immediate present.

The course will alert students to the problematics of white Western modernity’s use of race and gender to create certain categories of populations: the vulnerable, dispossessed, and disenfranchised as an entry point to discuss alternative narratives around difference. The course will question such frames as way to apply pressure points on the accepted histories of architecture and the built environment.

Space is the Place: Architecture and Afrofuturism
ETH Zürich Autumn 2020

This seminar considers Afrofuturism through Paul Gilroy’s conceptual framework of the Black Atlantic. Both a cultural and geographic space, the Black Atlantic links diasporic traditions of the Black radical imagination from the West coast of Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas.

The course is an exercise in decolonial thinking that probes and challenges the parameters of architectural historical thought by blurring national boundaries in favor of streams of historical influence across scales and activities. Students are challenged to reorganize their atlas and assemble geographies of architectural thought that run counter to nation-state narratives.

Previous Teaching work

USC 444 – Great Houses of Los Angeles

In my elective course and Elective Course titled Great Houses of Los Angeles and Its Other Stories, I restructured course content that originally included the work of seven white male architects to include readings by Dolores Hayden, feminist performance historian Peggy Phelan, and projects such as 1972 project WomanHouse carried out by the CalArts Feminist Art Program. These texts are taught through the frame of architecture and expose students to the concept of Domestic architecture as it contained the female body.

Teaching the history of domestic architecture in Los Angeles is not only gendered, but inherently a history of segregation and exclusion. Thus, in studying built work in Los Angeles, the course integrates parallel histories of redlining and urban renewal.

USC 514b – Global History of Architecture II

Interactive study guide

I plan class according to the type of course I’m teaching. For my long three hour seminars, I structure class time with slide-based lectures, group activities, and small group discussions.

I have also used my media skills to provide students with for fact-based testing. I have built an online study-guide to help students memorize architectural projects discussed in class. The platform is available for both PCs and handheld devices and offers students an alternative medium to the traditional flash card method of learning.
Teaching Philosophy
Rebecca’s teaching looks to historical methodologies used in cultural history to teach students how to read a variety of objects—and the content that it bears—to expose how prosaic narratives and social movements can intervene in architecture’s history.
  • DIVERSE CONTENT
    My goals as a teacher include delivering cross-cultural content that helps students develop a relationship to historical knowledge. The content is delivered in a non-universal manner that integrates non-western and subaltern voices.
  • ENGAGED METHOD
    I ask students to think about their subjective position in relation to the course content. This includes offering students an open environment within the shelter of the classroom, where time for reflection, sharing and the exchange of ideas is supported.
  • EXPANDED OUTPUT
    My goals also include developing different ways that students can participate in class. Opportunities for students to practice participation in different capacities such as student-led, group discussions, drawings or observation notes are reinforced. Lastly, developing equitable testing has also been at the forefront of my instructional goals. I’ve worked to write assignments that are relatable to different learning styles, incorporating fact-based, slide identification alongside more thematic, concept-driven short answer questions.
Rebecca Choi - Teaching MethodologiesRebecca Choi - Watts Towers Tour (USC 444)