Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and architectural theorist. She is currently a Senior Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, and has previously taught at the University of Manchester, University of Cape Town, the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, for which she was awarded a RIBA Commendation Award for research, with undergraduate and Masters degrees in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. She has been a Mellon Fellow on the Canadian Centre for Architecture project, Centring Africa (2020 – 2022), a Graham Foundation Grantee holder (2022; 2023) and received the Scott Opler Award for Emerging Scholars (2019). Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent and global south. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Race, Space & Architecture, and lead curator and project manager of the pan-African digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness. She is a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

Selected Projects

Opaque Architectures: Black Markets as Infrastructures of Care (2016 - 2024) draws on postcolonial, subaltern and black studies frameworks to study pan-African migrant markets in Cape Town, South Africa - along with their wider trans-national connections in Kenya, USA, and Dubai. This is a book project, that has built on PhD research, including extensive ethnographic research and ethnographic drawing. The work argues for a recognition of these mixed-use markets established by migrants and refugees as 'Black markets' drawing on the framework of Black Urbanism, as a means to recognise them as opaque architectures, sites of precarity within contexts of urban racialised violence, and peripheral care. These markets enable and support the movement and siting of people and goods, pointing to a minor and marginal urban ecology and economy, with seeds for alternate forms of urban practices. The entangled spatial network of these markets points to the importance of questioning established area studies boundaries and borders, with implications for theorising southern architectures.

Index of Edges (2023- ) draws on the vast global worlds of encounter along east African coastal cities to draw deep historical knowledge of living with and along seas. This project gathers sites, stories and approaches which collectively point to coastal pasts and futures through joyful, dangerous, abundant and difficult encounters. An index is not a map - rather than delineating boundaries it gathers people, repositions histories and draws out significance. In the Index of Edges, sites and stories of deep and near futures are drawn into adjacency. Tracing indexical points along the coast from the 1st C Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and 18th C Dalrymple’s Nautical charts, to contemporary coastal data and continued ways of living with watery intimacies, is an attempt to recognise the ebb and flow of edge conditions, despite violence and catastrophe. This index traces the accumulation of embodied detritus of layered pasts through an excess of specificities which collates stories of site and temporality, archival and present. This is work towards a relational, situated, and material axis where precarity and possibility meet at the shore; where global empires coincide with fishing villages; and where beyond danger, the coast is a site of joy and sustenance. Index of Edges is curated and designed by Huda Tayob for the Biennale Architettura 2023, within Dangerous Liaisons - curated by Lesley Naa Norle Lokko, The Laboratory of the Future.

Unconfessed Architectures (2016 - ) Slavery in the Cape Colony was officially the central form of social, cultural and economic organisation from 1658 – 1834, and vital to the production of many of the key architectural sites from this period. While slavery and associated forms of racialised forced labour are largely represented as mild in early architectural histories of southern Africa, if present at all, there are moments when tracings, slippages and holes in historical narratives point to stores of revolt, mutiny, and precarious yet peripheral care. ‘Unconfessed architectures’ asks for a close listening to the sound of ghostly slave footsteps already present within the architectural archive, as a site which speaks to the wider imbrication of coloniality and violence, as present and enduring within the materiality of these homes and by extension, architectural history as a discipline. Beyond this axis of land, architecture, mountain and water as a site of archival violence, the practice of ‘caring to listen’ also points the potential of an alternative archival imaginary and reading of both architecture and history.

Archive of Forgetfulness (2020- 2022) is a pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series which ran from September 2020 and December 2021, and remains live at archiveofforgetfulness.com. Lead curator Huda Tayob alongside the wider curatorial team including Bongani Kona, Ali Al-Adawy, Eric Ngangare, Jumoke Sanwo, Omnia Shawkat, Princess Mhlongo, Zoubida Mseffer.

Race, Space & Architecture (2018, 2020) Race, Space & Architecture is an open-access curriculum initially published in 2018, and launched as a website co-curated by Huda Tayob, Thandi Loewenson and Suzanne Hall in 2020, now archived here and with soundings on Spotify. Posters of the curriculum designed by Fred Swart can be downloaded here.

Archive of Forgetfulness Catalogue (2023) acts as a physical translation of the online platform archiveofforgetfulness.com . It raises wider questions around archives, memory and forgetfulness. The project includes the work of fifty-six artists, cultural producers, curators, creative thinkers and researchers from the African continent and diaspora, including Angola, Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, France, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, USA, the United Kingdom and Zanzibar. The catalogue speaks to the four parts of this larger project, namely an eight-part podcast series, twenty-two art works submitted in response to an open call, five essays and six regionally curated projects. As a collection of work centred on the African continent, the various contributors interrogate archival gestures, raise questions on personal and political histories that emerge via infrastructures of mobility, and suggest ways of living and remembering for alternative possible futures. In these works, archival labour and memory work are understood as deeply political, personal and speculative. Published by and available from Jacana.

Selected Publications

2025

Tayob H. & Ka Canham, H. 2025. “Ghostly Longings in the Charged Quiet of the Shoreline” Eflux Architecture (Insurgent Geologies, curated by Kathryn Yusoff, Owen Hopkins, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi), ed. Nick Axel et al. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/insurgent-geologies/667518/ghostly-longings-in-the-charged-quiet-of-the-shoreline/

Tayob, H. 2025 “Watery Archives, Aqueous Methods” Reclaiming Colonial Architecture, (Eds.Tania Sengupta and Stuart King), London: RIBA, p.46- 49.

2024

Tayob, H. & Hall, S. 2024 “The Partial Street: Gendering the Everyday Life of Global Precarity” Elgar International Handbook on Gender and Cities, (Eds. Linda Peake, Aninditta Datta, Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin), Edward Elgar Publishing: pg. 56 - 64.

Joan Ockman, David Theodore, Ana Miljački, David Gissen, Amber N. Wiley, Huda Tayob, Brett Milligan, Mireille Roddier, Nishiko, Jeremy Till, Nora Wendl, Alison B. Hirsch, “Field Notes on Repair: 2,” Places Journal, November 2024. Accessed 02 Dec 2024. https://placesjournal.org/article/field-notes-on-repair-2/

Tayob H, 2024. 'Fugitive Archives: 'Come Back Africa'. Architectural Review, CCA x AR Bookshelf.

Tayob, H. 2024. “Reparations as Reconstruction” In Repair, Architectural Review, February 2024, p.87 - 89.

Tayob, H. 2024. “Transnational Home Making in Somali Mall: Cape Town and Minneapolis” in The Urban Refugee: Space, Displacement and the new Urban Condition (eds. Bülent Batuman and Kıvanç Kılınç), pg. 159 - 180.

Tayob, H. 2024. 'Watery Archives' in Fieldnotes on Scarcity (eds. Tosin Oshinowo and Julie Cirelli), UK: Park Books, p. 62- 63.

2023

Tayob, H. 2023. 'Black Infrastructures' in Homeplace- A Love Letter (curated by Matri-archi(tecture): Afaina de Jong, Abde Batchati, Aisha Mugo, Margarida Waco), Exhibition Newspaper: Architektur Museum der TUM, December 2023 - March 2024 , p.09.

Tayob, H. 2023. Fugitive Archives. Canadian Centre for Architecture publication following Centring Africa project.

Tayob, H. 2023. ‘Archival Care’, Lo Squaderno Journal: Explorations in Space and Society July 2023, no.65, p.63- 67 [Available at: http://www.losquaderno.net/]

Tayob H. 2023, “X for Xenophobia” in Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste (Eds. Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, Michael Picard, Timothy Carroll, Jane Gilbert). UCL Press, pg. 90 – 92.

Tayob H. 2023. “Precarious Homes” Eflux Architecture (collaboration with Arc en rêve and Chicago Architecture Biennale), ed. Nick Axel et al. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/in-common/529710/precarious-homes/

Tayob H., Mejia Moreno, C., Tesoriero, T., and Bristow, T. (eds.). Architectures of the South (Guest edited issue), Ellipses... Journal of Creative Research, Issue 4: Johannesburg.

Tayob, H. 2023. “Race, Space & Architecture” in The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South, (eds. Ana Gonzalez Lara, Ashraf Salama and Harriet Harris), Routledge.

Tayob, H. 2023. “Opaque Infrastructures: Black Markets as Architectures of Care”, Public Culture, SI: “Other than the City”, Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937283

Tayob, H (editor). 2023. Archive of Forgetfulness (publication). Johannesburg, Jacana Press. Curatorial team: Bongani Kona, Ali Al-Adawy, Eric Ngangare, Jumoke Sanwo, Omnia Shawkat, Princess Mhlongo, Zoubida Mseffer

2022

Tayob, H. 2022. 'Unconfessed Achitectures' in Disembodied Territories, edited by Sara Salem and Menna Agha: https://disembodiedterritories.com/Unconfessed-Architectures

Tayob, H. 2022. “Chere Botha School in Cape Town” In Education, Architectural Review, September 2022: https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/chere-botha-school-in-cape-town-south-africa-by-wolff-architects

Tayob, H. 2022. “The Porous Infrastructures of Somali Malls in Cape Town.” In Infrastructure Designs: Global Perspectives from Architectural History, ed. Joseph Heathcott. Pg. 153- 162.

Tayob, H. 2022. “Migration at the Margins.” In Transit, Architectural Review, May 2022: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/books/migration-at-the-margins

Tayob, H. 2022. Trans-national Homes: From Nairobi to Cape Town in Luce Beeckmans, Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh, Hilde Heynen (Eds). Making Home(s) in Displacement: Critical Reflections on a Spatial Practice. Leuven University Press. pg.347 – 366.

Tayob, H. 2022. “Review: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 130 pp., US$10.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-5179-0753-2” Social Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2022.2022264 .

2021

Edited book: Patel, Naadira, De Villiers, Sarah & Tayob, Huda. 2021. Unit 18, Hyperreal Prototypes, Johannesburg: Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. Ebook: https://issuu.com/gsaunit18/docs/unit_18_hyperreal_prototypes_2020-2021_web_midres

Tayob, H. 2021. “Transnational Practices of Care and Refusal”, Coloniality of Infrastructure ed. Kenny Cupers, Nick Axel. [Access at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411251/transnational-practices-of-care-and-refusal/]

Tayob, H. 2021. “Opaque Architectures of Care”, Society and Space Forum:

https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/opaque-architectures-of-care

Tayob, H. 2021. “Architectures of Care” Of Migration, eds. Siddiqi, A and Lee, R. Canadian Centre for Architecture. [Access at https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/30/of-migration/81159/architectures-of-care]

De Villiers, S., Tayob, H., Patel, N. 2021. “Temporal Mediums”, Architecture SA, June-July 2021, 30 – 31.

Tayob, H., 2021. “Conversation Rooms: Critical Dialogues in Architectural History and Theory at the GSA, Johannesburg.” Architecture and Culture 9 (2):

DOI:10.1080/20507828.2021.1918895

Tayob, H., 2021. “Unconfessed Architectures” Survivance, E-flux Architecture: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/386349/unconfessed-architectures/]

Tayob, H., 2021. “Reading Architecture through La Noire de…”, Canadian Centre for Architecture. [Available at https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/78256/reading-architecture-through-la-noire-de]

2020

Tayob, H., Hall, S., and Loewenson, T. 2020. Race, Space & Architecture: Towards an Open Access Curriculum. [Access at racespacearchitecture.org]

Tayob, H. 2020. “Black Markets: Architectures of Refuge in Cape Town” in Refuge in a Moving World, edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. London: UCL Press, pg. 349 - 361. (peer-reviewed book chapter)

Tayob, H. 2020. “Opaque Infrastructures,” In Folio: Noir Radical, edited by Lesley Lokko, Vol.2: 25 - 37.

Tayob, H. 2020. “Race, Space & Architecture”, Places Online Journal. [Access at: https://placesjournal.org/article/race-space-and-architecture/]

Tayob, H., and De Villiers, S. 2020. “Dialogues with Dust”, Site Magazine [https://www.thesitemagazine.com/huda-tayob-sarah-de-villiers]

2019

Tayob, H. and Hall, S. 2019. “Race, Space and Architecture: Towards an Open-Access Curriculum”: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100993/3/Race_space_and_architecture.pdf

Tayob, H. 2019. “Architecture-by-migrants: The Porous Infrastructures in Bellville” in Anthropology Southern Africa, edited by Corrine Kratz, Noëleen Murray, Jill Weintroub, Brett Pyper, 42:1, 46 - 58

Tayob, H. 2019. “The Unconfessed Architectures of Cape Town.” In Telling The City: The Materiality of Literary Narratives, edited by Richard Dennis, Jason Finch, Silia Laine, Lieven Ameel. London: Routledge Series in Urban History, pg. 203- 221.

Tayob, H (ed). “Archiving Forgetting Architecture”. Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. (Folio Supplement).

Tayob, H., Gok, E.(eds). 2019. “Infrastructures of Care: Catalogue” Organised by H.Tayob, I.Katz, G.Astolfo and E.Gok. (Exhibition Catalogue).

2018

Tayob, H. 2018. “Subaltern Architectures: Can Drawing ‘tell’ a different Story?” In Architecture and Culture, edited by Jessica Kelly, Vol 6 (1): 203 – 222.

2017

Tayob H. 2017. “Drawing out Home-Making.” In Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, edited by Helene Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, Helen Runting. London: Routledge Critique Series in Architectural Humanities, pg. 265-269.

2016

Tayob, H., Read, S., Ferencz, J.(eds.) 2016. Bartlett Drawing Research Series January – June 2016. (Pamphlet).

Tayob, H. 2016. “’For Everyone a Garden’ Interview with Moshe Safdie” in Lobby Abundance, edited by Regner Ramos, No.4 Spring/ Summer, pg. 60 – 66.

Tayob, H (editor). 2016. “Enter the Margin”, Conference booklet: Bartlett School of Architecture.

2009

Contributor to: A Place to be Free: A Case Study of the Freedom park Informal Settlement Upgrade; Research report: Development Action Group Contribution.

contact Huda.Tayob [at] rca.ac.uk

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