Architecture Off-Centre

Do you know where your food comes from? Is it grown in a farm on the outskirts of your city or flown in from another country? How is food security different from food sovereignty? What happens to the waste that is generated in the process of consumption? And how can cities be planned with a food-sensitive approach?

These are some of the questions we ask in season 4 of Architecture Off-Centre while speaking to artists, scientists, planners, and activists to map the contemporary concerns in the food systems around us.

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I drove eastwards to the old city of Ahmedabad to interview Avni Sethi at the Conflictorium, a museum of conflict housed in a 100-something year old building. We talked about her being a cultural practitioner, who foregrounds the issues of caste, violence and oppression in a city with a painful history of riots. We also discussed their exhibits, ongoing thematic inquiries, the function of repetition in public dissent and the potential of museums in being institutions for dialogue, reconciliation and reaching closure.

Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner with her primary concerns lying between cultures of violence, memory, space and the body. She has conceptualized and designed the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict, in Ahmedabad and Raipur, and Mehnat Manzil, a Museum of Work in Ahmedabad. She is a recipient of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice 2020-2022 housed at the New School, New York.

The museums: https://www.conflictorium.org/

https://mehnatmanzil.org/

What if we approached urban crime as a design problem and deployed our methods and skills to reframe the questions we have been asking to ameliorate – if not completely obliterate – criminal activities? The team at Designing Out Crime (DOC), a collaboration between the New South Wales Department of Community and Justice, and the University of Technology Sydney, did just that. They used research, public engagement and human-centered design to tackle a wide range of urban challenges.

Dr. Lindsay Asquith is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and was the Director of the Designing Out Crime Research Centre. She has a PhD in architecture and behavior, wherein her research focuses on how design can affect behaviour change. She has recently led projects that reframe the problem of damage to social housing properties as well as use design methodologies to minimize violence and aggression in hospital emergency departments.

DOC's work: http://www.design-innovation.com.au/designing-out-crime

https://www.designforsocialjustice.xyz/home

If you are a young woman, who has grown up in a city or travelled to another, you might have been warned about steering off certain areas of the city because they were deemed ‘not safe’. What lends safety to urban areas is not only a matter of data and statistics, but it is also often subjective – relying heavily on how one ‘feels’ while traversing through that part of the city.

Dr. Kalpana Viswanath is the co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, a social enterprise that uses technology and data to advocate for gender inclusive urban spaces and mobility. She is part of Delhi government Women’s Safety Committee and has worked as a consultant with UN Women and UN Habitat. She is also a member of the Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI) at UN Habitat, Board member of SLOCAT, ICPC and Jagori.

About Safetipin: www.safetipin.com

Self-explanatory in its nomenclature, The Evidence Room was first presented at the 2016 Venice Biennale as a room with architectural evidence from Auschwitz to assert the existence of the gas chambers used for committing genocide in the Nazi concentration camp. It presents three monuments – a door, a wall hatch and ladder, and a gas column along with a number of plaster casts as proofs of the crimes against humanity and underscores the culpability of architects in creating these instruments of murder.

Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay are two of the four principals who worked on The Evidence Room. Anne is an architect, a historian and professor at Waterloo Architecture. Her research interests include the epistemology of the architectural project, as well as the historiographical and practical bearing of investigating the relations between architecture and time.

Donald McKay, Professor Emeritus, served as a full-time faculty at Waterloo Architecture until 2018. Currently living between France and Canada, McKay is developing A Photographic Atlas of Cimetière du Père Lachaise, writing, and serving as managing editor of CHALK BOOKS.

Details about The Evidence Room - https://evidenceroomfoundation.com/

Robert Jan Van Pelt has taught at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987. His book, ‘Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present’ with Deborah Dwork and subsequent report ‘The Case for Auschwitz’ generated The Evidence Room at the 2016 Venice Biennale. He is also the Chief Curator of the traveling exhibition ‘Auschwitz. Not Far Away. Not Long Ago’.

More on Robert: https://uwaterloo.ca/architecture/people-profiles/robert-jan-van-pelt

There are splitting views in the design profession on the role of architects in the perpetuation and even existence of prisons, which stems from an ethical and a professional belief that incarceration is not the most optimum solution to crime and that the very design of prisons creates conditions that subject the inmates to inhuman living conditions. While in the previous episode we focused an alternate method of seeking justice, for this one, we wanted to look at what is happening in the world of prison reforms.

Pia Puolakka trained as a forensic psychologist and has been working as a prison psychologist for the Criminal Sanctions Agency in Finland. In 2018, she was appointed as the project manager of the Smart Prison Project, where she developed digital services for prison inmates’ rehabilitation.

Pia’s article on the Smart Prison Project: https://www.penalreform.org/blog/towards-digitalisation-of-prisons-finlands-smart-prison-project/

I had no idea what restorative justice was up until two years ago. It was naïve of me to think that justice was always “served” in the courts of law – buildings with high plinths, long walkways and large rooms with the typical setup that we see on screen. And because I did not think it was possible to create spaces for conflict resolution and reconciliation outside of the courts, the first time I saw circle work being done within the restorative justice method, I was surprised by the candidness and vulnerability of the circle participants and how deeply satisfying the process was.

Shailly Agnihotri, is the founder of The Restorative Centre in New York, which she started in response to the heartbreak she experienced as a public defender trying to attain justice for her clients. Shailly has spent more than 20 years as an attorney, with expertise in criminal justice through working as a prosecutor in the Orleans Parish, teaching at the Georgetown Law School and Southern University Law Center, and as a public defender in New York City.

The Restorative Centre: https://www.therestorativecenter.org/

And their podcast Justice Reimagined: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Q3GHAY2Q9OAsrDyfPlVXy?nd=1&si=BInbeZ_SR4WZGypjF4hz2g

More on Natascha's work: http://www.nataschameuser.com , https://dom-publishers.com

Geoff Manaugh is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, “A Burglar’s Guide to the City.” His most recent book, “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine,” co-written with Nicola Twilley, was picked as one of the Best Books of 2021 by Time Magazine, the Financial Times, and the Guardian. His short story “Ernest” has been adapted for film by Netflix, under the title “We Have a Ghost,” and will premiere globally in 2022.

For an overview of Geoff’s work: http://burglarsguide.com/, http://untilprovensafe.com/, http://bldgblog.com/

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon got me thinking about the function of design in exercising power and control in society – even though rotundas preceded the panopticon and contemporary prisons have since evolved into newer typologies. I dug deeper and immersed myself in the vast pool of knowledge existing around the themes of violence, punishment, surveillance and crime – awkwardly jumping from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. While I came out enlightened at the end of these books, I was left wondering what the current discourses in architecture are, when it comes to addressing these themes.

Season 3 of Architecture Off-Centre positions itself as a provocation to examine the relationship of architecture with violence, crime and justice through conversations with historians, writers, lawyers, artists, forensic psychologists and, of course, architects.

“There is this informal inhabitation of spaces of heritage within the walled city that actually subverted the original intent of the buildings, however, they helped in the social economic development of the spaces that were being inhabited.”

The exodus that followed the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 caused one of the largest human migrations in the world and resulted in the mass abandonment of private property and structures of cultural heritage. In the walled city of Lahore, Hindu temples and Sikh havelis are being inhabited by low-income and marginalized communities as informal settlements – leading to what one may call “accidental preservation”.

Rabeeya Arif works on urban and disaster risk management at the World Bank on issues ranging from post-conflict housing reconstruction in Beirut to urbanization in Mauritania. She is a graduate of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program at MIT and has previously worked as a conservationist with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Lahore.

Rabeeya’s thesis: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123576

“It's far easier to protest the statue than a statute, which is to say that power that lives through policy institutions embedded into practices made across generations are hard to dive into.”

In our effort to question the premise of this season’s three central themes: preservation, restoration and conservation, we often came across the idea of public memory and monuments. This led us to think about what historic monuments, most frequently seen as stone statues on pedestals, signify in the contemporary context and what new monumentality could look like.

Paul M. Farber is the Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, who were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “Monuments Project,” a $250 Million initiative to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces,” including Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit and the opening of research field offices throughout the United States.

Everything about Monument Lab: www.monumentlab.org

“It's really hard to preserve the community. Easier to preserve buildings.”

Our guest today is a writer and uses the power of the written word to raise awareness, drive change and create accountability. She often writes about preservation – most notably focusing on the African-American history of Philadelphia and how cultural and historic preservation lock horns with urban planning.

Inga Saffron has spent 30 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, working as a reporter, foreign correspondent and architecture critic. In 2014, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her architectural writing. She is author of two books: ‘Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again’ and ‘Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy’.

Inga’s articles: https://www.inquirer.com/author/saffron_inga/

“But if all you can see is this frozen façade, that's the period that you're choosing to keep the public appearance of the building as, which doesn't really create any meaningful dialogue between the old and the new.”

Facadism or facadism practices, as Clemency Gibbs refers to them, stand for “privileging of the façade above other aspects of the building, within the context of development.” There is an intriguing conservation practice where entire buildings are gutted for (re)development but their facades are kept intact to retain a certain architectural character at the scale of the street, the neighborhood or even the city.

Clemency is a PhD researcher in Architectural & Urban History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and has degrees in both Classics and Cultural Heritage. She previously worked as a heritage consultant and as a researcher at Foster + Partners. She is currently an early-stage researcher at UN-Habitat’s MetroHub.

Link to Clemency’s work: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/clemency-gibbs

“Pyaavs today really could be instigators and facilitators mainly as drinking water fountains [but] at the same time also create a cultural connect and socio-cultural tourism.”

Not too long before potable water became a commodity that could be bought and sold, its presence in the Indian urban infrastructure as drinking water fountains – or pyaavs as they are known in Mumbai – was closely associated with altruism and public memory. Our guest, Rahul Chemburkar, is on a mission to restore the pyaavs and activate the space around them to become thriving socio-cultural hubs of urban life.

Architect and heritage enthusiast Rahul Chemburkar is involved in conserving varied built heritage through his firm Vaastu Vidhaan by successfully reviving & rendering a glimpse of a glorious past to the current society.

To follow Rahul’s work on the pyaavs: https://www.vaastuvidhaan.in/The-Pyaav-Project.html and https://www.instagram.com/p/CQufeJpJ_9u

“Rather than restoration, we're not changing the object [in conservation], we're retaining the object, even with all of its marks of age.”

I was taught that one of the identifiers of gothic architecture along with the flying buttresses, the pointed arches and the gargoyles – was the stained glass windows. But that was pretty much all I knew and thought about the stained glass – it was an element in the gothic cathedrals. Brianne’s preservation practice highlights stained glass not only as a medium and a material but also as an architectural element that has witnessed tremendous transformation over the years.

Brianne Van Vorst received an MA in Stained Glass Conservation and Cultural Heritage Management from the University of York. She returned to the United States and worked for a private stained glass studio before starting Liberty Stained Glass Conservation (LSGC) in 2016. LSGC was created to have a positive impact on the United States’ stained glass heritage by requiring an ethical, measured and high-quality approach to conservation treatment.

If you’re curious about Brianne’s work: www.libertysgc.com

“It’s part city beautiful movement, part preservation, part making the city more walkable and just creating like a nice civic space that people can enjoy.”

This summer, my friend Ranajay invited me to spend a weekend in Rajpipla and promised to show me some really good buildings – not quite telling me at first that he belonged to the royal family of Rajpipla and that his ancestors had commissioned the buildings that we were going to see. We spoke extensively about patronage, culture, gentrification and urban regeneration – and there was no way I was not recording it!

Ranajay Chand is a Master of Public Policy candidate at Georgetown University and has received his BA in Politics and International Relations from Royal Holloway, University of London. He has worked for the Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth at the United Nations and is currently involved in the urban historic regeneration of his hometown Rajpipla in India.

“I started to design things that might catch passersby or the weather, the things that aren't normally remembered...”

The act of building a counter-monument is an oxymoron in itself. Artists and architects around the world have used voids to create these counter-monuments while challenging the notion of physically building spaces to retain public memory. Elliot Nash’s project 'Forgetting Whitehall; Casting Blackhall' subverts traditional methods of physical and non-physical preservation while navigating through the themes of redaction and transience.

Elliot is a recent MArch graduate from The Bartlett, UCL. His work there focuses on alternative definitions of heritage in London, and poetic methods of construction. His latest project 'Blackhall' proposes a counter-monument for London through various material histories. Elliot also teaches at The Bartlett, and leads Open City’s Accelerate programme, which aims to diversify the built environment industry.

Check out his project: https://summer2021.bartlettarchucl.com/pg12/year5-elliot-nash

After a few weeks of restructuring and lots of planning, Season 2 of Architecture Off-Centre is ready to go live! On this season, we are focusing our attention on the ideas of preservation, restoration and conservation in the built environment by posing a simple question: what does it mean to conserve, restore and preserve something in the contemporary context?