JSAA's Podcast: Recent Episodes
JSAA
Light has always been in conversation with architecture and the built space. Either sneaking in through windows and roshandans in closed rooms, or highlighting the grandiosity of a Mughal monument, or just present as the banal tube light in a concrete brutalist corridor, light is an integral part of the built form. Light much like bricks & cement is a subtle skin of any structure or building. This conversation on light and architecture brings together architect Manav Bhargava and artist Parul Gupta and their relationships of seeing, making and working with light in the forms of the spatial.
In the age of Digital Reproduction, what meaning does the architectural image now hold? As one significant arm of architectural representation, has its apparent form and content trans-mutated over time for both its producers and its consumers?
The architectural photograph has often been accused of the neutron bomb affect, yet this is not outside of its own context, as well as the context which it hopes to capture. Does it frame and form its object, as before, when the very act of controlling this has changed over time? Does every new instance of it enter into a dialogue with versions that have been deemed iconic?
In a world, where the digital eye, has increasingly become the mediator of all our experiences, how do we begin to approach, dissect, and disseminate an image?
Does the making and un-making of a place ever stop? Is it possible to weave art into the everyday life of ordinary places? Alternatively, can streets and neighborhoods take the form of an open art gallery? Can street art be used strategically to re-generate neglected neighborhoods? What does it mean to curate artwork at the scale of the neighborhood and the city?
How does the city and its public spaces give voices for inclusion through street art? Can we use street art for community engagement and enable social awareness and empowerment?
The speakers Giulia and Poornima, will explore with us the various facets of street art in Indian cities through their illustrious and long standing work of curation and community engagement. Watch Dr. Alokeparna Sengupta, Giulia Ambrogi & Poornima Sukumar.
Is architecture the making of a clay pot, a brick, a tile or is it the making of a house, a spice rack, a ship or a play ground? Do materials, masons and contractors build buildings, or do architects build them?
This webinar, with Prof. Sarover Zaidi explores the ideas of materials and making so centrally placed in the field of architecture. How do we build? and what worlds of materiality and making do we inhabit in our built environments?
The speakers Asha and Arijit, explore for us the ubiquitous Mangalore tile. Albeit developed by Swiss missionaries on the Marseilles pattern, and made with Malabar clay, the Mangalore tile holds many layers this Indian Ocean history of making.
Curt Gambetta's work explores how engineers, architects, contractors, builders negotiate aspirations of the modern home and everyday constraints imposed on its construction in contemporary India. Through historical & ethnographic research he dwells on the use of building materials for different processes of self-making & materiality in South Asia.
COVID-19 and the consequent national lockdown has been an unprecedented moment of collapse of spatial scales. City after city, millions of people inhabiting hidden dwellings, and hitherto invisible – suddenly poured onto the streets and began walking, cycling, hitching rides in trucks; all this while being hungry and thirsty. They did feats that tested the endurance limits of the body.
As people deployed knowledge and ignorance tactically, relied on networks of trust to get by, figured out how to make neighborhoods survive, COVID-19 did what the theorist and the practitioner have not been able to do on one’s own until now – decenter both the theorist and the practitioner.
We will discuss all this as witnesses to uncertainty of an unprecedented degree. And why this democratisation of practice and theory is the single most important outcome of the last three months
Our lives are a veritable bricolage of objects, some inherited, some bought, some found, others gifted. Surrounded by them, stored away or lovingly displayed, they define and shape us. Objects move, and they move us; they hurtle us through time and space, both past and of the future. And, they endure, gathering stories and impressions, of generations of hands.
Yet, we mistakenly equate value with money, not memories. We look at the artwork hanging on our walls, and skip past that chipped, faded bowl picked up by our grandmother sitting on the kitchen shelf. We revel in the new, and push back the old, the mundane. Binaries such as these are created, not necessarily lived.
How do we, especially designers, celebrate the ordinary? How do we understand its affective power? How do we recover our personal and collective histories? How do we embrace material culture? How do we make place memories, and make place for them?
"To build originally means to dwell. To dwell means to live our lives." - Martin Heidegger
Architecture is about building houses, building homes and building lives. The act of building a house though located on technical drawings, brick, and concrete continues after the structures have been built. To then think, about the idea of Ghar, home Ashiana, we are compelled to ask some questions of the discipline. Do we build houses or homes? Where does building end and dwelling begin? When is a house actually complete? Do houses grow? And is building, also a form of dwelling and living?
This episode's discussion brings together two architects who have intensely addressed some of these questions. Prof. Neera Adarkar's work on mill workers housing in the city of Bombay, and Prof. Solly Benjamin, on housing for refugees and migrants to the city of Delhi, opens for us new ways about thinking about houses and homing. As architects they have extensively researched the ideas of how buildings dwell, and how they come to live their lives.
Urban industry in India seems to have disowned its own muscle – the labourers – who were driving the wheels of the economy and urban expansion. The COVID-19 situation exposes how inequality is entrenched in neoliberal urban design and how it jeopardises the future of urban economics in India. As over 50 million migrant labourers languish in deep distress, face subhuman conditions, walk thousands of kilometres back home, it is critical to understand how unjust and inequitable our urban evolution has been and more importantly, what will the ramifications be of this mass exodus on our cities, towns, economic zones. Equally important to understand are the likely impacts on rural economies and development, as this disjunction and rupture now threatens to economically isolate these spaces.
We look at Rosie the Riveter as the figurehead of emancipation. In reality, as women designers, we are expected to be rosy merely in appearance. Liberated from labour only at the hearth, most of us are now chained to our desks; dissuaded from the actual site and act of making with our hands; from wielding power tools, from shaping materials, from getting down and dirty. Why? So, that Masculinity and heteronormativity can remain secure. Most women. Not all. Rosie still has a tribe, and they are happily wielding tools, driving nails into skewed representations. What is it like to be at home, in the workshop? What is it make with your own hands? What is it like to learn from and be transformed by material investigations? How do we challenge patriarchal norms? How do we grow the tribe? Tune in to this week’s podcast, to find out how ‘crush’ is not merely the noun for a passive object of desire, but can be a verb for the active decimation of gendered stereotypes.
Architecture is constantly predicting the future of towns, cities and nation states. Haunted by many ideas of utopia, architectural thinking and practices often hold for us the promise of many and diverse futures.
This podcast brings together an architect, planner and urbanologist who have worked in varied cities, spaces and built environments to attend to some primal questions around architecture futures:
Who do we build for? What and how do we build? And who will inhabit these buildings? Is the present more important than the future? Where are we going with the future of architecture?
Postcolonial urbanism, in our path dependant governance, has successfully created cityscapes that segregate and delineate more than they integrate and assimilate. Social and political urban design has compartmentalised internal city spaces into ghettos for different communities, services, functions. This in turn heavily undermines access, rights, dignity of communities. During the current COVID-19 crisis, the fault line has been blatantly exposed where the urban design itself has jeopardised basic human security of a large number of labourers who make our cities in the first place. In this we will discuss some of these critical issues with Prof. Mohan to understand how postcolonial urbanism can be just and equitable, Tune in to find out! .
Over the last two decades, we have seen interiors explode in the public imagination, both as a veritable field of work and as a disciplined to be studied. It would be amiss to mention, that this has naturally coincided, not only with a transnational movement of materials, technologies and systems, but also with the rampage of social media. In this new era, where a wide variety of practices have come to the fore, practices which are often mired in profitability, and one where images are proliferating like never before, designers have come into their own as influencers with their ability to reach out to a wider range of audience than ever before.
What though does this mean for the role and responsibilities of the designer, the very being of the designer, as well as those who are training designers? Moreover, what does this mean for the networks: professional, social and disciplinary, from which we operate? What does this mean for networks which are both tangible and intangible? How do these networks intersect with multiple other networks? What networks should we choose to be a part of, and what networks are past their expiry?