ArchitectureTalk

This week, we sit down with Michael Benedikt, the 2004 ACSA Distinguished Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. In this fascinating and meandering conversation, Vikram and Michael discuss the impressions of childhood on our adult life, inter-subjectivities and the force-relations of things, spirituality in architecture, and posthuman humanism.

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.

How might literature help inform the way we talk, think, and design the city? How differently would we build it? This week, scholar and translator Arshia Sattar brings her immense knowledge of the Hindu Epic The Ramayana to talk about ethics, morality, sensuality, and space and how we might imagine a city of changing shape.

This week, we gain new perspectives on architectural pedagogy today in the time of Zoom University and Coronavirus as we speak with long-time educator and architectural practitioner Neelkanth Chhaya. Fresh off the success of a fully online studio titled Poche, Neelkanth reflects on studio culture and pedagogy today and in the past.

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.

“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.

What happens when your home becomes your laboratory for architectural learning and speculation? According to Nandan Balsavar, Zoom enables his students to incorporate the oral histories from generations of family members into regular lessons. This week, we’ll be discussing architectural pedagogy, culturally inherited forms of knowledge, and teaching under the regime of Zoom with educator and architect Nandan Balsavar!

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.

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 sit down with Lydia Kallipoliti, an award-winning architect, engineer, scholar and curator and an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. The conversation traverses many scales - from the individual to the environment and world - looking closely at the culture of hygiene and the architecture of confinement and how these technologies are connected to the politics of the body in the time of Coronavirus.

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.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with two distinct, yet parallel discussions. The first conversation, with Benedikt Hartl of Opposite Office, probes the possibilities in future-driven narrative architecture to achieve sustainability and resiliency in the face of climate change, pandemics, and the unknown. The second, with Ryan Scavnicky of Extra Office, discusses the internet meme as a tool for critiquing and reframing the culture around architecture and looks to Object-Oriented Ontology as a philosophical framework for speculation in architecture.

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 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.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone where we discuss his work on inter-relational subjectivities in the creation of new urban conditions, his personal response and experience with the Corona virus, and his response to the protests around Black Lives Matter.

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 Soumitro Ghosh.

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 continue with the mini series Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with a transnational discussion on COVID19 response in India with architect Manit Rastogi. Here, we examine the social, political, and architectural implications of a pandemic on an individual to a city level.

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architect and theorist Prem Chandavarkar. In this episode, we dissect how the Corona virus highlights marginalized communities, how it changes the ways in which we think about governance, and we ask what are the mechanisms by which we construct the notion of the city?