Architecture Off-Centre

For our final episode for this season, we speak to doctor and architect Diana Anderson, who has skillfully carved a unique career path for herself as a “dochitect” – by pioneering a collaborative, evidence-based model for approaching healthcare from the medicine and architecture fields simultaneously.

Dr. Diana Anderson is a triple boarded professional – healthcare architect, internist, and a geriatrician. She is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University, and a recipient of an Alzheimer's Association Clinician Scientist Fellowship. She is also a healthcare principal at Jacobs, contributing her thought leadership at the intersection of design and health.

Diana’s website: www.dochitect.com

In our previous episode, we got an overview of medical tourism around the world and the key factors that drive people to travel from one country to another for medical treatments and procedures. Today, we take a closer look at some of the medical tourism hubs along a very specific geographic area, i.e., the US-Mexico border. 

Viviane Clement is an epidemiologist and a cultural Anthropologist whose research focuses on the macro and micro effects of health and environmental policies and politics on under-sourced and under-researched communities. For her article on medical tourism titled ‘In Search of Health: Medical Tourism at the US-Mexico Border/Lands’, she collaborated with Emma Newsome and Dr. Sergio Lemus to apply transborder theory and virtual ethnographies to analyze the variation in access to health care for populations who share the US-Mexico border/lands.

Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has emerged out of people’s need to travel across country borders to access medical treatments and procedures. In order to understand this global movement, we need to understand the reason for travel, the destinations that attract individuals and the web of factors that shape this global industry.

Dr. Valorie Crooks is a health geographer who specializes in health services research. She is a Professor at Simon Fraser University where she also holds a Canada Research Chair and currently serves as Associate Vice-President, Research. For more than a decade she has been qualitatively studying the ethical and equity impacts of medical tourism. This work has taken her to countries as diverse as India, Mongolia, Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, St. Lucia, Cayman Islands, Guatemala, Mexico, South Korea, and Belize.

More on Dr. Crooks: https://www.sfu.ca/geography/about/our-people/profiles/Valorie-Crooks.html

What is your idea of good mental health? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like to touch? And if you could design your own safe space, what would it look like? What would you have in it?

James Leadbitter, also known as The Vacuum Cleaner, is a UK based artist and activist who makes candid, provocative and playful work. Drawing on his own experience of mental health disability, he works with groups including young people, health professionals and vulnerable adults to challenge how mental health is understood, treated and experienced.

James’ project Madlove: A Designer Asylum - http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/madlove-a-designer-asylum/

It has been a while since architects have been attempting to address various forms of disability in the buildings, neighborhoods and cities they design. However, these attempts are most often limited to increasing access for differently abled bodies. Our guest today, David Gissen, argues that a disability critique of architecture is not one that solely seeks to make the built environment more accessible but instead understands how embedded the ideas of physical incapacity and impairment are within architecture.

 David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. His recent book, The Architecture of Disability, has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” He is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at The New School University/Parsons School of Design and Dean's Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

 David’s website: https://davidgissen.org/

We don’t talk about the technical and logistical aspects of death enough. For example: How does one’s economic status affect the conditions in which they die? Do gender identities play a role in how people receive end of life care? Can we choose the memories that we want to leave behind for our loved ones? And how does social media become an archive of one’s life after passing? We speak to artist Oreet Ashery about death in the digital age.

Oreet Ashery is a visual artist whose practice navigates established, institutional and grassroots contexts. Ashery was a Turner Bursary recipient in 2020 and won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, which looks at the emergent field of digital death. Ashery is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

To watch Revisiting Genesis: https://revisitinggenesis.net/
Oreet’s work: http://oreetashery.net/

Historically, many communities around the world spatialized the bodily function of menstruation and integrated it within their architecture in the form of menstruation huts – often leading to the isolation and oppression of women as impure beings. Our guest today argues that these spaces in the west African Benin Kingdom were intentionally designed for women to rest and recuperate – that the isolation rooms were essentially spas. 

Minne Atairu is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice seeks to reclaim the obscured histories of Benin Bronzes. Utilizing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and additive fabrication, Atairu reassembles visual, sonic, and textual fragments into conceptual works that engage with repatriation-related questions. She is the recipient of the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.

Minne’s Graham Foundation project: http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/6457-the-menstrual-isolation-room-is-a-spa

Over a century ago in 1896, the bubonic plague broke out in colonial Bombay. While the British officials maintained detailed records of the various aspects of the plague, local newspapers reported on the public sentiment towards the disease and its colonial management. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar explored one such archive to draw out a subaltern narrative of the bubonic plague.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises of a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Most of his long-term projects are research-intensive and attempt to unlock historical and contemporary data by placing the work in the context of an unseen social history. His works have been showcased at Bergen Assembly Art & research Triennale, Colomboscope Biennale, and several galleries in India and overseas.

Ranjit’s city-based practice: http://cityinflux.com

The discourse on care within the field of architecture has recently been gaining a lot of traction as ideas about health are expanding beyond the limits of traditional hospitals. In this conversation with Fiona Kenney, we discuss the history of long-term care facilities, residential hospices and pediatric respite centers, and how they differ from institutions that are aimed at providing cure.

Fiona L. Kenney is a PhD candidate at the McGill University School of Architecture, where she studies spatial expressions of care. Fiona holds an MDes in History and Philosophy of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her doctoral work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Friends of the CAMH Archives, and McGill University. She currently works at the Palliative Care Division of the Bruyère Research Institute.

 Fiona’s website: www.fionakenney.com

Ever since the pandemic, questions and concerns over the human body and the public health have heightened. We wanted to ensure that the conversations we would have with our guests went beyond our experience of the last three years. Some of the questions we ask this season are:

Can we look at the role of architecture for providing care beyond the design of hospitals?
What are the ways in which medical tourism defines entire cities?
How do we shape our environment to foster healthy living – both physically and mentally?
And how do we leave behind a digital legacy as designers, after death?

With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, here’s introducing Season 5.

We explored the themes of agriculture, food and waste in season 4 but did not get into too much detail about the idea of hunger, which is caused by the lack of food. For this bonus episode, we speak to Abby Leibman, who was at the forefront of conceptualizing The Hunger Museum - a virtual museum that takes a deep dive into the history of hunger and how it can be ended.

Abby J. Leibman has been President & CEO of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger since 2011. She has a distinguished record of community and professional leadership, including developing and managing the Child Care Law Project at Public Counsel and co-founding and directing the California Women’s Law Center. 

The Hunger Museum: http://hungermuseum.org/

For this season’s final episode, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva about the fears, concerns and anxieties of a young architect.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmentalist, ecofeminist, writer and activist. She is the founder of Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of indigenous seeds along with the promotion of organic farming and fair trade.

To learn more about her work at Navdanya: https://www.navdanya.org/

Parts of Ateya Khorakiwala’s doctoral research focused on grain silos in India and how they were a post-colonial import - built not just for the purpose of creating food security after witnessing one of the worst famines in the country but also to serve as a currency for exchange. In this conversation, Ateya talks about the history of silos, its construction materials and her course Feasting and Fasting at Columbia University.

Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian and is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Her research focuses on India’s development decades, examining the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project, Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside.

Link to Ateya’s upcoming conference on material landscapes: https://www.arch.columbia.edu/events/2569-material-landscapes

Her website: http://ateyakhorakiwala.com/

Three farm laws passed by the Parliament of India in 2020 received major pushback from farmers around the country - with many of them mobilizing in Punjab and heading to the capital New Delhi. The protest site at the border village of Singhu outside Delhi turned into a mini-city of sorts with the Sikh farmers operating community kitchens and serving meals to thousands of people every day, including the policemen watching over the very barricades that restricted their entry into Delhi.

Sarover Zaidi is a philosopher and a social anthropologist, who currently teaches at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture. She works at the intersections of critical theory, anthropology, art, architecture and material culture studies. Sarover has extensively worked on religious architecture, and urbanism in the city of Bombay and currently co-runs a site on writing the city called Chiragh Dilli (https://chiraghdilli.wordpress.com).

Her essay on food, cooking and the protest: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/412221/the-gift-of-food/

A few weeks before the COVID lockdowns began in 2020, Rem Koolhaas’ much awaited exhibition Countryside opened in The Guggenheim museum in New York. It was in the exhibition’s thick but small pocket size handbook that I first came across Lenora Ditzler’s essay on pixel farming; a very innovative method of farming that questions the widespread monoculture and shows us a new way of looking at agriculture by dividing a farm into smaller pixels.

Lenora Ditzler works at the Farm Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where she is the research coordinator for the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms. Her doctoral thesis titled ‘Towards Diversified Industrial Cropping Systems?’ proposed the design of cropping systems that qualify as both industrial and agroecological.

Lenora’s academic research: https://research.wur.nl/en/persons/lenora-ditzler

The idea of food deserts was not known to me a few years ago. I recognized my privilege in having access to nutritious fresh food but still had a lot to learn about how certain areas are devoid of that basic necessity because of planning policies, politics and economic factors.

Jane Battersby is an urban geographer based at the University of Cape Town with an interest in all things food related, with a particular focus on the African context. Her work focusses on the interactions between urban systems and food systems in shaping lived experiences of food security and nutrition.

Planning for Food Secure African Cities Podcast: https://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/planning-for-food-secure-african-cities-podcast/

Tomatoes and Taxi Ranks (book): https://www.tomatoesandtaxiranks.org.za/

The world of speculative design affords us the liberty of approaching urban planning through lenses we would have conventionally disregarded as overly ambitious or impractical. In today’s conversation, we think out loud about unused garden spaces outside malls, the function of terrace gardens and farmers as service providers.

Depanshu Gola co-runs a research-backed design studio, Architecture for Dialogue (AfD) with Abhimanyu Singhal. His work at AfD explores the future of architecture and habitat. The studio has participated in projects across city-making, futurism, experience design and public engagement — often working in intersections. Depanshu was selected as one of the top 20under35 emerging Indian designers by DesignXDesign in 2021.

Delhi Agro-city 2050: https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/24e93255-2381-4359-9427-3c31ee975a43/

Architecture for Dialogue: https://afd.city

The first time I heard the word “folly” was in relation to Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris – the large park with dozens of red structures strategically organized in a grid – each embodying the principles of deconstruction. I had been fascinated with the relevance and functionality of follies and even more amused by the lack of its typology.

On graduation from Oxford, Rory Fraser wrote and illustrated his first book Follies: An Architectural Journey, which he then presented as a documentary. Rory subsequently completed an MPhil in Architectural History at Cambridge. He lives in London where he divides his time between writing, lecturing and painting architectural commissions.

Link to the series: https://watch.shelter.stream/follies

Rory’s work: https://www.instagram.com/roryfraserr/

If you are a fan of eating potato fries, you would have never guessed that the potato waste generated in the process of making those fries could be used to make consumer products!

Rob Nicoll is the co-founder of Chip[s] Board, a company previously known for developing a sustainable polymer called Parblex and is currently developing eco conscious lactic acid by utilizing waste produced from industrial food manufacturing. While the company has moved away from their focus on polymers they believe that their current product will help increase the sustainable credentials of countless items we use in our daily lives.

To learn more: https://www.chipsboard.com/

How often do we really think about where our food comes from? I don’t mean the supermarket or the vegetable vendor where we buy it from but the place where it is grown or the kind of seeds that are sown and everything that concerns the cycle of crops and the resources that are involved in the production of food. It is not until someone explicitly forces us to think about the origin of our food that we give it any attention.

Adriana David’s work lies at the intersection of architecture and the natural world. Her recent projects include LIMBO urban seedbanks, a choreography for a more-than human world, a performance dinner on the impact of today’s impact of agribusiness on food and a set of tools to achieve Harvard’s Food Sovereignty for the future.

Adriana’s work: www.doma.mx

Report of her study supported by the Mellon Grant at Harvard: https://mellonurbanism.harvard.edu/food-sovereignty-or-how-lan-interdependent-food-system-future-case-milpitas-supply-chamexico-city