Abstract

French and Canadian architects are amongst those contributing expertise in emergency humanitarian situations. Postcolonial dimensions of emergency humanitarian architectural practice have forced some architects to wrangle with professional and personal subjectivities. For example, contributing their know-how to projects involving refugees has helped professionals at Québec’s Architecture Sans Frontières (ASF-Québec), formerly known as Architectes de l’urgence et de la coopération (AUC), to highlight an apparent disconnect between professional norms and standards supposedly impervious to imperialism and a more personal ethic broadly shaped by a postcolonial consciousness. The essay is used to explicate how architects in France and Québec, respectively, have responded to recent and ongoing humanitarian crises and why their responses signal how the postcolonial has the power to change notions of what it means and can mean to be ethical in architectural practice. Codification of a new postcolonial ethic in Québec, at ASF-Québec, has not appeared in formal documents aligned with the architect’s professional and legal responsibility. Instead, situated within an economy of humanitarian architectural practice, this codification is embodied in the everyday of humanitarian architectural practice.