ArchitectureTalk (Vikram Prakash)

This week, we travel back in time with architectural historian and theorist William J.R. Curtis and his reading of the narrative of Indian Modernism. Part one of a two part series, Curtis and Prakash focus today’s conversation on the life and work of Aditya Prakash, the nature and production of Modernism in India, and Curtis’ own engagement with Indian Modernism.

This week, we are joined once again with Ambrose Gillick for Part II of Comparting Connections in the Ethosphere. In this episode, Gillick shares his thoughts on the connections of his two interests in sacred architecture and the modalities and politics of design and the city influence that connects to architecture trends. 

Muqarnas Vault, Masjid-i Shah/Imam, Isfahan. Source: Daniel C. Waugh, Courtesy of Archnet.org

We talk with Architectural historian Christian Hedrick, currently working at the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT as a researcher, visiting lecturer at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University and GAHTC contributor, about the intersection of Islamic architecture with cultures in India, China, North Africa, and Europe. We explore ideas of global exchange, translation and transformation of Islamic forms and materials, such as the pointed arch, as well as brick, stucco, and ornamental ceramic tiles and techniques like haft-rangī. We touch on ideas of Orientalism, and the circulation and representation of Islamic visual material culture in the Abbasid empire and Ummayad dynasty.

“1970s Israel was a period of taking things that were constructed and making them into things that are taken for granted, that become 2nd nature, that you don’t question.”

This week, we are joined by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, head of the Arenson Built Heritage Research Center in Haifa, Israel. This conversation looks at the question and problem of modernism and its relation to the formation of the nation-state, particularly as it relates to Israel and India.

Based on her recent book, Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design, we discuss with University of Washington's Gundula Proksch the myriad implications of re-thinking our food culture. Conversation topics range from community gardens to hydroponics, edible school yards to Mars colonies, the slow-food movement to bio-engineered buildings. 

This week, Architecture Talk sits down with the Office of (Un)Certainty Research to find out who they are, where they are, and where they are going. Find out what it's all about!

This week, we invite Architect, Historian and Educator, Peter Scriver to share with us his story of uncovering a love of Architecture History through Indian Modernism. Peter Scriver is an associate professor at the University of Adelaide in the school of architecture and built environment.

Image: After The Masters, Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, Mapin Pub. 1990 

“All of those natural materials - stone, wood - we’ve always seen ourselves in them, in some way.”

Today we engage in a broad-ranging discussion on the contemporary and future applications of what are considered to be vernacular or traditional materials with architect and professor Elizabeth Golden. Besides their structural, economic and political entanglements, our conversation also veers towards the spiritual and intangible ramifications of working with non-modernist materials.

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Cassie Blair, JoAnn Hindmarsh Wilcox and Tim Richey are part of the committee putting on the 2017 Seattle AIA awards. We discuss trends in the local architecture and talk about how this fast‐growing city can serve its residents. Topics include: migration, diversity, regionalism, densification, risk‐taking and the pains of a growing city.

This week, we are joined by Clara Kraft Isono, who directed the architecture film Bawa's Garden. Isono is an architect, film maker, and educator in the UK and is currently focused on film making. In this discussion, Isono talks about what film making is, as well as what an architecture film is and what it should be.

The Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus miniseries continues this week with Frankfurt-based educator, theorist, and architect Nikolaus Hirsch. Host Vikram Prakash and Nikolaus Hirsch speculate on the architecture school of the future, posthumanism as a framework for transdisciplinary practices, and question what architecture is and could be.

What is an architecture of the Nightrise? How might we spatialize the unseeable, or “freeze” the shadows of a conjuration? This week, we have a fascinating discussion with Mohamad Nahleh, a recent MIT graduate, about his recent personal research and graduate thesis on the night in Jabal ‘Amil in the southern reaches of Lebanon.

This week, we investigate settlement, agency, pedagogy and architecture's tireless hope for utopia with esteemed professor of architecture history and criticism at The Cooper Union, Anthony Vidler. 

Image: "Warped Space", Anthony Vidler. MIT Press, 2002 

This week, we continue interrogating the modern nationalist project in India, its legacy and implications for thinking the present with Dan Williamson, professor and scholar of Mid-century Ahmedabad. We learn why and how Amedabad, a city in Western India, came to be home to some of the best and most amazing advances in Indian Modernism.

Today we are joined by Martien de Vletter who is the associate director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and gathers archival material dedicated to rethinking, remembering, and preserving architectural thoughts and memories. Vletter also talks about decolonizing the archive and transforming it into something more diverse, inclusive, and multifaceted.

A great conversation with Seattle’s great conversation starter, John Boylan. We’ll discuss art and science, engineering, technology, industry and the potential of rigorous inquiry in both scientific and artistic explorations. John is a respected member of Seattle's technology community and instigator of interdisciplinary creative works such as 9e2 Seattle.

This week we are joined by Mindy Seu who published The Cyberfeminism Index electronically and physically. What we focus on is how the index is gathered, organized, and shared and how it could be applicable in the built environment.

This week, we are joined by James Graham who is currently an assistant professor at CCA, and used to be faculty at Columbia University and handled publications there. His work heavily revolves around the planetary and climate crisis.

This week, in honor of our 50th episode, we will be hearing from two incredible architects as they describe their pursuits of the indescribable. This special editors choice edition combines our conversation with Javier Sanchez as well as our conversation with Pritzker Prize winning architect, B.V. Doshi.

Here in the United States, we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the midst of all the feasting, we were not able to release a new episode. But we would love for you to revisit one of our favorite episodes from last season, Transversality: Klee, Kahn and the Persian Imagination with Shima Mohajeri. 

Image: Central California History Museum: Proto-Formal Section by Perry Kulper 2006

What is architecture and what is its frontier of thinking in the time of Corona virus? This week, we talk with architect and architectural thinker Perry Kulper about his work methods, inspirations, drawing techniques, and thoughts on the current pandemic.

Today we speculate about life, the purposes of life and architectural thinking with Danish architect Lene Tranberg, founding partner of Lundgaard & Tranberg in Copenhagen, Denmark. Discussion topics include: Phenomenology, the body in space, intuition as embedded knowledge, transcendence, doubt, translation, and striving to understand the interwoven character of material and place.

This week, we are joined again by Mark Jarzombek to discuss the data society on contemporary architecture, as well as his book Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age.

The modernist legacy has helped proliferate the current environmental crisis on a global scale. In architecture, what is to be done to address this civilizational problem? Could oracular visions be a way to rethink how we practice and teach architecture? Join us for this week's conversation with Mark Jarzombek, professor at MIT and co-director of the Office of [Un]certainty Research.

Carla Keyvanian, Associate Professor of Architecture at Auburn University, talks about her module for GAHTC that looks at the ‘Medieval’ architecture as a product of the complex cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean, that includes Islamic, African and diverse Christian forces, rather than just a ‘Romanesque’ evolution. Topics include Byzantium, Armenia, Umayyads, and Córdoba. We also discuss the Crusades and their abiding influence on contemporary conflicts.

What can architecture do in the time of a pandemic? What is an architecture of medical necessity? This week, we talk with Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group to discuss architecture in the time of COVID-19.

This week, Vikram and veteran guest, Mark Jarzombek, meet at MIT to discuss the status of the Global Project. This was recorded in front of an audience of Mark's students and teaching assistants who participated in a Q&A following our episode. 

A Global History of Architecture, Wiley, 2rd Ed. 

Ayad Rahmani is a licensed architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Washington State University who writes on a diverse array of topics ranging from the Islamic city to Frank Lloyd Wright to Dubai today. In this episode we try and connect the dots that link his diverse interests. Discussion topics include: publicity and privacy in the Islamic city, Wright’s Broadacre plan, ruralization and food security, and, migration and the search for roots via architecture. 

THIS WEEK, as the second episode in our Editor’s Choice Edition, we revisit conversations with Nicole Huber and Yomi Braester as we investigate the art of storytelling through architecture and film.

Today we are joined by Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Desjardins who talk about building alternative technologies that respond to and critique the world of data, and their project “Soft Data and Common Wares”.

Cornell University’s Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History, Dominick LaCapra discusses the constitutive role of transference in our relationship to history, historiography, animals and architecture. We discuss transference’s relationship with empathy and connecting with Others, and when it ‘crosses the line’ and becomes pathological. Topics include the architecture of Auschwitz, the skyscraper versus adobe, and the possibility of a non-anthropocentric ecological future.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and educators Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha. Here, the discussion touches on Mathur and Da Cunha’s concept of wetness - a re-writing of what it means to live in relationship to water - and what it means for architecture and ecological thinking in the time of Coronavirus.

This week's episode invites you to look back to the 19th century with four Persian travelers making their way through a modernized Europe. In their travel diaries, we see Europe from an Occidentalist gaze, which charges these Western spaces with eroticism, magic, and wonder. What can we learn about Persian utopia from these "farangi," or foreign, narratives? Join us, for this discussion with Vahid Vahdat, assistant professor of architecture and interior design at The School of Design and Construction, Washington State University and author of the newly published Occidentalist Perceptions of European Architecture in Nineteeth-Century Persian Travel Diaries: Travels in Farangi Space.

Today we discuss Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind, and the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics in terms of its implications for architectural thinking. Discussion topics include design studio pedagogy, creativity, the art of the podcast and the relationship between practice and the design studio. Sean Lally is the host of the Night White Skies podcast.

 Architects from Niger and Iran, Mariam Kamara and Yasaman Esmaili, discuss their award-winning work, the challenges of practicing globally, and the difficulties and rewards of learning to translate across languages and cultures via architecture. Topics include: feminism and architecture, Islam in the world, international practice, and the non-Western roots of the modernist aesthetic.

As we kick off our new season on ArchitectureTalk, we are bringing back our conversation with Anthony Vidler: Modernism, Utopia, and Living Catastrophe. Anthony Vidler (1941-October 19, 2023) was an architectural historian, role model, and friend who will be missed dearly.

Kicking off our new season of ArchitectureTalk, we engage in a conversation with Ambrose Gillick. Gillick shares his interest and findings in participatory and community-led architecture through a collaborative project with self-organising women's- co-op in Dakar, Senegal, and  theory of sacred space in medieval church architecture.

“We have to not take things as given, but rather tap into [our] own imaginaries, into [our] own yearnings, and longings, as an alternative world.”

Today we discuss the potential of architecture as the work of the perennially unfinished project, as a site for transgression, as the other to utopia and fundamentalism. Nicole Huber is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Discussion topics include: Fiction making, post-critical architecture, Tarkovsky and science fiction, surrealism and design thinking.

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The basic issue is: what is the value of collective/cultural memory? What happens when we privilege certain memories over others? This week, Sarosh Anklesaria, Shubhra Raje, Riyaz Tayyibji and Vikram Prakash converse about recent developments at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM) where controversial deliberations have led to the decision to demolish a large swath of dormitories on its campus designed by Louis Kahn, architect.

Katerra Project Delivery CREDIT: Katerra

Katerra is a new global leader in innovation and efficiency in construction project delivery. Design Director Craig Curtis, FAIA, shares eye-opening insights as a member of the Executive Team. Katerra is challenging conventions to deliver successful, sustainable, and innovative projects on par with Ikea, Apple and Tesla in supply chain and smart sourcing, construction and beautiful design. Through its commitment to Research and Development and environmental responsibility, Katerra aims to completely disrupt the design and construction industry, and has just received $865 million in new funding!

https://katerra.com/

Once again, we travel back in time with architectural historian and theorist William J.R. Curtis for Part two of this conversation. We pick up right where we left off, rumbling through the dusty roads of India with William on his way to meet Balkrishna Doshi, the living link between the force that is Corbusian Modernism in India and deep, deep Indian tradition.

This week, we are joined by Professor Jeremy Till, who talks about his work with the research collective MOULD and their project Architecture after Architecture which interrogates the constitutive entanglement between architecture and modernism. With modernism responsible for the climate emergency, we will have to re-think what architecture is in fundamental terms, and Till discusses architecture as the solution. 

This week, we discuss the work, the working style and legacy of the late Catalonian architect, Enric Miralles with our guest Ayad Rahmani. Ayad is a Professor of Architecture at Washington State University.

Image: Floor Plan of Hostalets Civic Center, El Croquis Magazine, 1995

Today we speak with activist designer Sergio Palleroni, who has been taking students around the world to work with disadvantaged communities to make a difference, to build with them and to teach students how they can learn from building with them. We discuss the politics of design-build activism, and what that implies in terms of asking the brick what it wants to be!

How do we re-think what is essential? How does the spiritual influence design thinking? How can we understand the poetics of transgression in the design world? This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and Nisha Mathew and Soumitra Ghosh.

This week we are joined by Kyle Bergman, who is the CEO of the Architecture and Design Film Festival. Bergman shares with us his thoughts about the connections between film, architecture, and design, and more.

This week, we discuss augmentation, artificial intelligence and architecture of the mind with Rajesh Rao. Rajesh is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where he also directs the Neural Systems Laboratory.

Image: Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction, Rajesh P. N. Rao (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

This week, we discuss nomadism, connection and intercultural dialogue with architect and urbanist, Kunlé Adeyemi. Kunlé is founding Principal at NLÉ Works.

How can a piece of music describe moving through an architectural space? For composer Bright Sheng, it’s all about the structure. This week, we’ll be discussing music, architecture and process with the globally renowned conductor, composer, pianist and educator!

Finding your place in the field of architecture, particularly as a woman of color, can be complicated. This week, Renée Cheng, Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington,  helps us unpack how she found herself becoming a leading architecture educator, forging new paths for diversity and interdisciplinary thinking in an increasingly challenging and hierarchic world.

This week, Nigerien architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara joins us in a stimulating discussion about reimagining architecture and epistemologies that come from West Africa. Kamara also touches on how African, South Asian, and other non-European can help us think out of modernity.

“Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?” - VP

“Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” - MJ

In today's episode, we engage in a far-ranging and open-ended discussion on the question of the global with my longtime collaborator Mark Jarzombek. Circulating around the question of the larger agenda of the global, discussion topics include the modernity and its critiques, the nation-state and its limits, autobiography and its pitfalls, and what are the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.

2:31 Magdalenian culture and civilization: the caves. The Gravettians.

4:09 A Global History of Architecture textbook + GAHTC: what is this global project?

6:50 Modernism, Postmodernism, and the critical question of the “after the modern”

11:23 Modernism as dualism: the good and the bad in equal doses, continuously, vs a Hegelian dialectic (destruction at the end)

13:30 “How to develop a critique that doesn’t entrap you into being complicit in one side of the game or the other side of the game?” -MJ

‘Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?’ -VP

14:26 “Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” -MJ

17:43 Ethics, rights, powers, and personal agency

19:00 Give money to Greenpeace but not on the boat: individual agency and the social matrix

21:06 “Ethical in a particular way,” haunting to one’s subject-position  

22:26 The shadowy terror of monotheism

23:35 The ‘Global’ as an ethics-opening term

25:04 Parallels and intersections of global histories with the craziness emerging with quantum theory in astrophysics

27:24 Uncertainty, possibility, and knowing (Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad)

28:04 What the people in Lascaux and Chauvet knew

28:14 “This sounds a little Hindu-ish to me, a little Vishnu,” and the conflicted presence of singular Judaism

34:36 Modernism and a vortex of non-dualities

36:42 Derrida as a “renegade rabbi”: reading from the margins

37:38 Connection between new materialism, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Jewish philosophy and Buddhist thinking?

39:06 No singular global can apply to everything

39:13 Biography as entry? Significance of personal epistemologies in critical thinking of the world.

43:58 “Vishnu-Modernism”

45:35 the Post-Holocaust vs the Post-Colonial Global

1:00:20 Limitations of Derrida’s critiques: ethics and Buddha’s ear to the ground

1:03:19 “Other oralities need to be known.”: this is the global history project

1:05:33 “Writing on writing. Writing on writing on writing.” Iterations.

1:07:37 Writing corrodes oral-communicative structures

Today we examine the sketchbooks of Dutch architect and urban designer Frits Palmboom and understand drawing as a kind of quasi spiritual adoration of the landscape. We also discuss the role of tracing and errors in design thinking, as also the differences between the Indian, European and American city.

This week, we talk with Aneesha Dharwadker, assistant professor in architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of the recently published article Dystopia’s Ghost. In this episode, we revisit the remaking of New Delhi’s Central Vista project, its design, politics, and history.

This week, we continue our conversation with Sarosh Anklesaria, Shubhra Raje, and Riyaz Tayyibji about the recent developments at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM) where controversial deliberations have led to the decision to demolish a large swath of dormitories on its campus designed by Louis Kahn, architect. While this decision has been temporarily halted, it has generated much conversation surrounding the value of experience, collective and micro histories, the role of empathy within the built environment, and changing the terms of engagement with a “growth” mindset.

This week, we discuss the booming industry that is Indian Cinema, the Cinema House and Bollywood with Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Washington, Sudhir Mahadevan.

This week, we sit down with Architect, Urban Planner, and long-time friend Franz Ziegler to exchange thoughts on Holland and global architecture, drawing with the hand, and to reminisce on mutual experiences in India.

What's in a placename? What are the geneologies and lineages of the land we live on? As mapmaker and transdisciplinary scholar, Amir Sheikh reveals that there are many intersecting and sedimented narratives of place and placenames, in part, tell these stories. Join us as we talk with him about his work with the Waterlines project and storytelling with the shapes of time.

Tom Avermaete, professor of architecture at Delft University of Technology, discusses his GAHTC module, co-authored with Michelangelo Sabatino, on the historiography of mid-century modernism. Entitled "The Global Turn" the six lectures of their module articulate an alternative history of modernism as a network of collaborations cultivated in the context of the decolonizing world. Discussion topics include (post)colonial modernism, multi-layered collaborations, migration and housing, modernism and neoliberalism, Chandigarh, Casablanca and the 'commons' in the city.

What was it like to grow up in the Neutra household? What memories of Richard Neutra’s early and practicing life live on in his children? This episode explores the idea of legacy and memory with Raymond Neutra, youngest child of famous Mid-Century Modern Architect Richard Neutra.

This week, we sit down with Firoza Jhabvala, musician and daughter of Cyrus and Ruth Jhabvala. We talk about growing up with two creative parents, the trans-disciplinarity of Cyrus' Jhabvala’s architecture practice, parallels with Vikram’s own father, Aditya Prakash, and the politics of colonial and post-colonial India.

This week, we sit down with Joseph Clarke to discuss his new book Echo’s Chamber: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space. The discussion looks at the convergence of politics, acoustics, and the metamorphosis of acoustic spatial thinking from Wagner to Le Corbusier and beyond.

In anticipation of the next installment of the One Continuous Line webinar series on Globalization and the Modernist City (being held online on December 13, 2021) this episode is a re-release of the previous panel discussion. This episode features guests Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani who discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.

This week, we talk with Martino Stierli, MOMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, about MOMA’s current exhibition entitled The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with guest Dr. Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT. In this episode, we look beyond the individual and beyond North America to turn our heads towards the Middle East and the aggravated complexities that have arisen in these challenging times.

Today we are joined by SB Divya who wrote the science fiction novel Meru and helps us think about potential futures on Earth. Meru as we discuss in this episode is a future in which tech is developed based on imaginations of current technology and science and possibilities unknown but conceivable.

This week we are once again joined by Mariam Issoufou Kamara for the Faada-Adda Conversations Part II: Future Hériter. In this conversation, Kamara talks about breaking free from the boundaries of the cardinal directions and getting into new ways of being.

In part two of our two-part series One Continuous Line, we sit down with Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani to discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with two distinct discussions. The first conversation, with Rachel Minnery, AIA, asks what does it mean to plan in the face of unknowable risk? The second, with Patrick MacLeamy, former CEO of HOK, discusses the history and culture of HOK, the future of design firms in a changing world, and firm strategies during a recessive economy.

This week, we kick off our summer long Editor's Choice series! This week, we re-visit our conversations with Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana as well as Rahul Mehrotra to see if we can start to unpack what it is that makes a city vibrant! 

This week, we discuss global history in our conversation with Amit Srivastava, Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, on post-postcolonial history and historiography in the Indian Ocean context. Discussion topics include: history of the modern architecture of India, globalization and contemporary South Asian architecture and infrastructural history versus 'big-name' architectural history.

This week we are joined by Junichi Satoh, who is current faculty in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. Junichi shares with us how he has incorporated architectural thinking in diverse and constructive ways throughout his life, and how it has gotten him to where he is today.

This week we sit down with Prof. Richard Williams of the Edinburgh College of Art to discuss his recently published book Reyner Banham Revisited

Seattle based fashion designer and performance artist with a background in industrial design, Anna Telcs discusses our relationship to clothes, and the rituals of dressing, as modalities of expressing our selves, our bodies and our place in the world. Discussion topics include donning church dresses, uniforms, and the male body.

 

Mud brick fortification walls from the 10th century at Merv, Turkmenistan SOURCE: Manu Sobti

Dr. Manu P. Sobti, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, discusses his co-authored GAHTC module, Peripheries of Contact, which explores the architecture and urbanism created by migrant populations who traversed Central Asia and engaged with 'settled' peoples at the edges of their world. We discuss migration, loss and memory; graphic design, photography and cultural landscapes; the Mongols, Timurs, Uzbeks, Russians, Delhi Sultanates and Islamic identity in the medieval times.

Biography

MANU P. SOBTI is an Islamic architecture and urban historian, specifically focused on examining changing borderlands in the Asia-Pacific. Prior to his recent arrival at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture as Senior Lecturer and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program, he served as Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA, Coordinator of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim and Uzbekistan Summer Program (2008-15), and directed the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13) in partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sobti also chaired SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies. Mapping urbanity and its scalar geographies feature prominently in his ongoing projects, a vantage determining how future urbanists view the multiplicity of emergent stakeholders within the contentious realms of the historical city and its changing meanings. His recent explorations have focused on the urban histories of early-medieval, Islamic cities along the Silk Road and the Indian Subcontinent, with specific reference to the complex, ‘borderland geographies’ created by riverine landscapes. Within a trans-disciplinary examination of medieval Eurasian landscapes straddling the region’s Amu Darya River, he is completing a project entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians – an unprecedented work on the historical, geo-politics of the Amu Darya, collating his extensive fieldwork and employing multiple Arabic, Persian, Russian and Uzbek sources. The Oxus borderland is also the subject of his ongoing filmic project entitled Medieval Riverlogues (intended for Public Television) which captures archival research within a re-drawn map series, state of the art computer-generated renderings and live footage on this cultural crucible, while suggesting provocative connections to enduring questions on cultural ‘indigeneities’ and identities, sustainability and resources. Mapping and the spatial humanities remain central to his work on the fast-changing urbanscapes of Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad & Bhopal, documented in the completion of two forthcoming book manuscripts - the first titled Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (under contract with I. B. Tauris Press, expected April 2018); the second titled Riverine Landscapes, Urbanity and Conflict: Narratives from East and West (under contract with Routledge Press, expected Dec. 2017). His continuing work on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Asia has resulted in a third publication entitled Chandigarh Rethink (ORO Publishers, published June 2017).

This week, we conclude our editor’s choice series with an episode to inspire new possibilities in how we can approach issues of, and futures within our changing climate. We will hear two approaches to how we might re-imagine our relationship with climate. From Daniel Barber we will hear a conversation that focuses on contemporary issues in how we envision sustainability as a movement and culture. And our second conversation, with Dilip da Cunha re-imagines, not how we relate to climate necessarily, but how we define, culturally and physically, what our environment is.

SOURCE: Afroditi Psarra

We talk to multidisciplinary artist, Afroditi Psarra (Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Washington) about her work with electronic textiles, "alienesque" aesthetics, soft circuits and our the new relationships that we have to establish between our bodies and responsive technologies. Discussion topics include: collaborative practice, DIY culture, parametic design, bio-feedback, open-source working and the uncanny. 

Today we are joined by Sumangala Damodaran who teaches in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, trained economist, dedicated her life to documenting and being a part of leftist oppositional protest movements. Today, Damodaran discusses her protest songs, her songs of sorrow, her singing, the research she has done to connect civilizations, and the diverse impact she has created internationally.

What can architecture do in the time of a pandemic? What is an architecture of medical necessity? This week, we talk with Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group to discuss architecture in the time of COVID-19.

What can we learn about an urban environment when we understand it, both socially and spatially, as an ecology? This week, we investigate the intersection of environmental justice and public space with sociologist, Amita Baviskar as we discuss her new book, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi

Sage Publications, Dec. 19, 2019

How do we design against extinction in the time of Corona virus? This week, we talk with Dr. Mitchell Joachim and Nicholas Gervasi of TerreformOne about working within the Earth’s metabolism and with actual living organisms to reconfigure what design means in changing times.

How might we think about architectural education differently in a post-pandemic world? What are the intersections between Covid and Climate Change? How does seeing architecture as a site of thinking impact education today? This week, we sit down with Mark Dorrian to take a deep dive into the material, political, cultural and educational realities surrounding the ongoing pandemic.

MIT Professor Mark Jarzombek discusses his GAHTC module on the Architecture of First Societies, establishing the importance of thinking architecture beyond established canons based on cities and technology. Instead he argues the origins of architecture in the ‘social package’ and in the representational networks of ‘modeling’.

This week, we are joined by prolific architect of northwest modernism, Gordon Walker as we discuss Grant Hildebrand’s biography, “Gordon Walker, A Poetic Architecture”   

Published by Arcade, July 2, 2019

Image: Lucia | Marquand

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architect, biomimicist and educator Ilaria Mazzoleni. In this chat we see that the “eco-laboratory” is an apt metaphor to describe the body, architecture, and manifestations of “living” at various scales.

In this SPECIAL EDITION we talk with Warren Etheredge, critic, screenwriter, teacher and charismatic co-founder with Tom Skerritt of The Film School. Warren is also the author of TheWarrenReport and host of the podcast, The High Bar. Over a meal in the University of Washington Faculty Club, we discuss his career, screenwriting and the importance of storytelling, emotional vulnerability and honesty in film. We explore the art, craft (and crap) of cinema and design and interrogate issues of practice, celebrity, consumer culture, profit, auteurship and aesthetics in filmmaking and architecture through the work of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and others.

We are experiencing rapidly rising global temperatures making it increasingly difficult for Earth to remain habitable. Yet, the dominant power structure of the free-market economy is not really reacting. Enter the greenhouse as the future of life in a changed climate…or is it simply a perpetuation of what got us here in the first place? Listen as Luis Berríos-Negrón traces the lineage of the greenhouse through history and critiques the deployment of the greenhouse typology as a “solution” to climate change.

This week, we welcome in the new year with a stunning discussion on the relationship between dance and the spaces we perform in with Chair to University of Washington’s department of dance, Jennifer Salk. 

Image: "Murmur" work by Jennifer Salk and D Chase Angier on site at Chateau Le Coste Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France, 2018 

This week we are joined by Phillip Thurtle, who is the director of the Comparitive History of Ideas (CHID) program at the University of Washington Seattle. Thurtle talks to us about the gothic, what it is and what it means to him and what he researches. 

This week, we are joined by Jan Schmidt-Garre, who directed the film The Promise. Architect B.V. Doshi which was shown at the ADFF (Architecture Design Film Festival). This film took place in the last few years of his life and highlighted his philosophies and outlook on architecture and design.

Today we are joined with Ayad Rahmani who teaches architecture at Washington State University. Rahmani's love for literature and architecture leads us to today's conversation about Moby Dick and architecture.

This week we end our miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with Grounded founder and Principal Architect Anjali Mangalgiri. The discussion touches on motherhood, architectural thinking, sustainability, and Anjali’s memories that led her to pursue architecture.

From the catwalk to the department store, there are many modalities of showcasing high fashion. In the realm of window displays, how do you draw people in? For Peter Mohlmam, it's all about seduction. This week, we dive into the wickedly beguiling world of the Window Witch - where fashion design and architecture meet and design is life.

This week, we are joined by architect and artist, Anthony Pellecchia, as he shares with us his perspective on the profession of architecture, and his path from Hoboken, New Jersey, through the office of Louis Kahn, to a love of conceptual practice.

Image: "Skyline", Anthony Pellecchia