ArchitectureTalk

Discussing his work on the transurban, Jean Louis Cohen takes us on a tour of the history of ideas that have shaped, formed, and deformed the various cities that stitch together the seams of the world. This conversation continues the ongoing conversation centering the impact of Modernism on architecture and contemporary culture in the world today.

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 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.

How do ideas travel across the world? How do ideas change? Why do they change? This week, we contemplate these questions in the mid-century context of the emerging Indian nation-state in the 1950s into the contemporary cultural climate we see today. Sunil Khilnani is professor of politics and history at Ashoka University and author of the book The Idea of India.

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.

In part one 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 revisit two past episodes as a preamble to the forthcoming panel discussion “One Continuous Line: is Indian MidCentury Modernism still relevant today?” In this crossover episode we discuss the project of Utopia and its colonial situatedness, modernity and its critiques, and the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.

This week, we turn the mic back on Vikram Prakash to discuss his newly published book One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash. The conversation picks up the thread of the book, mapping out and analyzing the life and multi modal work of Vikram’s father, Aditya Prakash, in Mid Century Modern India.

How might we navigate and negotiate the skins of the Earth in the face of climate change? What can Byzantine architecture and Plato’s Khôra teach us about urban living in the 21st Century? What is the role of the architect in current cultural production? This week, we have a fascinating conversation with Raoul Bunschoten, Professor of Sustainable Urban Planning and Urban Design at the TU Berlin, and founder of Chora an architectural design and urban planning group.

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'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.

How do moods and cultural objects work in the construction of history, politics, place? In this episode, Dipti Khera joins us to discuss her newly published book The Place of Many Moods:
Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century, which deconstructs the affects of the painted letters traditions of Northwest India on the construction of place.

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.

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 we look back at our miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and educators Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha. In this re-issue, 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, 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.

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.

The basic issue is: what do we recognize as heritage? What is worth remembering? And who decides? This week, Prem Chandavarkar 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.

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!