The modern anchors of spatial pedagogy that consolidated in the last century are under tremendous interrogation. The supremacy of orthography and cartography, the objectification of environment; the standardisation of inhabitation, and the dominance of linear factory processes in building are all being critically examined. Classical ideas of the field, the archive, the classroom, conceptual frameworks are also simultaneously getting reconfigured, where the distinctions between teacher and student, self and the other, theory and practice, product and process, and physical and digital space are blurring. In many ways, the monolithic modern educational institution for spatial pedagogy is reconfiguring into a fuzzy space, facilitating autonomous selves into becoming autodidacts. This is surely a liberating experience of post-institution, where pedagogy seems to be leaving the bureaucratic clutches of educational institutions. How does one then think of pedagogy and what should educational institutions transform into? Four conversations are organized as a part of this symposium to discuss the emerging contours and coordinates of spatial pedagogy. These conversations are held around experiments and research undertaken at SEA on drawing, environmental studies, habitat studies and emerging technologies.
Event Website: https://sites.google.com/view/post-institution/home
Prasad Shetty Prasad Shetty is an urbanist based in Mumbai. He currently teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture and is a partner with the BARDStudio, Mumbai. Earlier, he has worked with several government, non-government and international development agencies as an urban management expert. His work includes exploratory research and experimental pedagogy on different aspects of urban form, experience, practice and culture.
Rupali Gupte Rupali Gupte is an architect and urbanist based in Mumbai. She teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture and is a partner at BARDStudio. Her work often crosses disciplinary boundaries and takes different forms - writings, drawings, mixed-media works, installations, curation, conversations, walks and spatial interventions. The work involves extensive research on contemporary Indian architecture and urbanism with a focus on tactical spatial practices, housing and urban form. Her works have been shown internationally in several galleries and biennales including, Manifesta 7 2008, the X Sao Paulo Architecture Biennale 2013, the 56th Venice Art Biennale 2015, Seoul Art and Architecture Biennale 2017, MACBA, Barcelona, Project 88 Mumbai, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and Mumbai Art Room. She has a wide range of publications and has delivered lectures and has been on juries around the world.
SCHEDULE NOTE: ALL TIMESTAMPS ARE IST
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INTRODUCTION / 1300 - 1315 Prasad Shetty
CONVERSATION 1 / 1315 - 1500 EMERGING QUESTIONS IN PEDAGOGY OF HABITATION Gautam Bhan, Shreyank Khemalapure, Vastavikta Bhagat and Vishwanath Kashikar
CONVERSATION 2 / 1510 - 1705 VISUAL CULTURE AND ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY Anuj Daga, Apurva Talpade, Niall Hobhouse, Sanchayan Ghosh and Ya’ara Gil-Glazer
CONVERSATION 3 / 1715 - 1900 PEDAGOGY IN THE TIMES OF DIGITAL / DIY / NEW MEDIA ECOLOGIES Bhavleen Narula, Dipti Bhaindarkar, Dushyant Asher and Kush Patel
CONVERSATION 4 / 1915 - 2100 THINKING THROUGH TEMPORALITIES AND CARE IN HABITATION Gediminas Urbonas, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Rohit Mujumdar and Sabaa Giradkar
SUMMARISING & CONCLUDING / 2100 - 2115 Rupali Gupte
Gautam Bhan Gautam Bhan is Senior Lead, Academics and Research, at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. He teaches and researches urban housing, social protection, and urban theory. He is most recently the co-editor of the Companion to Planning in the Global South, and author of ‘In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi’.
Shreyank Khemalapure Shreyank completed his post graduation from The Berlage, Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, Netherlands in 2014. He teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture and has been engaged with the housing research cluster at the school since 2017. He is also researching at SPARE, a research initiative by sP+a Mumbai, where he is studying the relationship between housing form and building regulations in Mumbai.
Vastavikta Bhagat Vastavikta is an architect focusing on the spatial and environmental politics surrounding post-intensive mining landscapes and climate change in Indian cities. She is currently researching a wide range of household experiences and responses to wetness in suburban Mumbai. Drawing on a year long Research Associateship at SEA (2018), she is concurrently developing a graphic novel and journal article manuscript on the contestations surrounding the futures of Goa’s mining landscapes. She was a Field Stations 2019 Fellow under the Wright Ingraham Institute in Colombia and has worked earlier with Anupama Kundoo Architects, KRVIA-Design Cell and Ranjit Sinh Architects.
Vishwanath Kashikar Vishwanath Kashikar is interested in clarity and precision! Over the past 10 years as a full time faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture, having taught most courses at the undergraduate program; he has developed an interest in architectural education. He has been part of many curricular revisions at CEPT and now conducts teachers training workshops, and curriculum revision workshops across the country. He is particularly keen on studying the gap between teaching and learning. Vishwanath is also interested in urban housing. His research focuses on studying the role of architecture in the current housing scenario in India. Through courses on housing design in India and national/ international workshops, he attempts to explore the limits of architectural design in housing.
EMERGING QUESTIONS IN PEDAGOGY OF HABITATION CONVERSATION 1 / 1315 - 1500
Housing discussions in India have been largely focused around affordability, habitability and tenure security. The pedagogy of housing in architectural schools have followed these concerns and produced responses accordingly. With such focus, the questions on housing remain limited to providing standard houses that are habitable, affordable and secure. Here the housing issue is collapsed into provision of houses for permanent occupation of a nuclear family. As this response fits very well with the techno-legal and financial systems, these become acceptable. SEA has been engaged with the study of second cities of India since 2017. Our studies show that cities like Mysore, Mangalore, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Coimbatore and Tiruchirapalli are witnessing an emergence and proliferation of new economic and cultural landscapes, where new forms of living are being worked out. While short-term occupations, work-living simultaneities, different forms of households beyond nuclear families, concentration of social / demographic groups (like the elderly, youth, etc.) have emerged, there have also been issues regarding dilapidation of inner city housing stock, remittance and speculation driven housing investments, aggressive state led developments, etc. The markets and the local inhabitants seem to be responding to these contexts by providing access to habitations that can hold manifold forms and practices of living. Our studies also indicate that a vast majority of housing works with small, incremental and diverse logics often in the absence of the technocratic frameworks of the state or modernist building processes. On the other hand, policy and pedagogy landscapes embedded in modern frameworks of linear and clear processes, appear to be focused on technocratic frameworks - even if they are often appropriated by both the state and the private sector. Keeping this disjunction in mind this panel would like to articulate some of the following questions: How can one teach the small, incremental, transient and other diverse processes of housing? How can architectural practice (a.k.a mainstream design engagement) be taught with respect to the multiplicity of housing processes? How does one teach form of housing with respect to emerging contexts for urbanization? How can pedagogy engage with the practice of housing in the emerging urban conditions?
Anuj Daga Anuj Daga is an architect, writer and curator based in Mumbai. He graduated from Academy of Architecture, Mumbai (2008) and went on to pursue his interest in History & Theory of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture, USA (2014). His practice is informed by diverse engagements in fields of design, research and academia that have resulted in numerous roles as writer, critic, commentator, theorist or interlocutor in the cultural field. Anuj has worked with several cultural institutions as well as research & artist organizations including Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, CRIT - Mumbai, MoMA - New York and CAMP - Mumbai in different capacities. He has been the Curatorial Assistant for the visual arts project “Young Subcontinent” since first organized by Serendipity Arts Foundation in Goa in 2016 until 2018 as well as ‘When is Space?’ commissioned by the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur (2018). He has keen interest in studying the processes of visual culture and meaning-making in the contemporary built environment in South Asia.
Apurva Talpade Apurva Talpade is an architect and visual artist whose primary field of investigation is the reading and representation of the architectural image. Apurva graduated from the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) in 2011 and went on to pursue her Master’s degree in Visual Arts with a focus on Illustration from the Camberwell College of Arts at the University of Arts London (UAL). She has also exhibited her work in London as part of an artist collective. Her work explores real and imagined landscapes and the forms and form-making of modern architecture. She has previously taught Architectural and Allied Design at the KRVIA and also has an independent architectural and art and design based practice.
Niall Hobhouse Niall Hobhouse is a collector of architectural drawings, models and sketches. He curates exhibitions, and writes about buildings, landscape and museums. He established the ‘Drawing Matter’ Trust to explore the role of drawing in architecture, architectural education and exhibition. He has served on the boards of several institutions including the London School of Economics, the Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA.
Sanchayan Ghosh Sanchayan Ghosh is a visual artist and pedagogue. He lives and works in Santiniketan and Kolkata,West Bengal India, and is currently an Associate Professor, Department of Painting, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. Sanchayan Ghosh has been practicing site-specific art as a workshop based collective community dialogue leading to numerous forms of public engagements over the last twenty years. He has also been associated with different pedagogy projects in Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, National School of Drama(NSD), FICA( New Delhi) and Five Million Incidents of Max Mueller Bhavana, Kolkata. He also co-curated the second session of Under The Mango Tree in Santiniketan in 2020. Kochi- Muziris Students’ Biennale, Kochi 2018.
Ya’ara Gil Glazer Dr. Ya’ara Gil-Glazer is a senior lecturer and the Head of the Education through Art Program, Department of Education, Tel-Hai Academic College, Israel. Gil-Glazer researches and teaches courses in photography, visual culture and critical art education. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art and visual culture and their educational discussion in social-cultural contexts such as gender & sexuality, class, and ethnicity; the relationships between images and texts; photography books and the historiography and theory of photography. She authored The Documentary Photobook: Social-Cultural Criticism in the U.S. during the Great Depression and the New Deal published in June 2013 by Resling [Hebrew]. She received her Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from the University of Haifa, Israel, in 2010. Gil-Glazer regularly presents research papers at international conferences and writes and publishes articles on photography, visual culture and critical pedagogy.
VISUAL CULTURE AND ARCHITECTURAL PEDAGOGY CONVERSATION 2 / 1510 - 1705 Architectural drawing is the intervening medium at which architects labour to produce understandings and imaginations of (non)fictional and (im)possible spaces. It is the language that mobilises form, thought & experience, and stems from our interactions with our visual culture. Visual culture here constitutes the lexicon of images that we associate with in our everyday, those which are constantly shaped not just by the institutions and structures, myths and beliefs, interactions and alliances, and socio-economic positions; but also by our routes to work, kitchen calendars, movies and all cultural practices that we live through. The images around us are echoes across long corridors of thought and time constantly shaping our imaginations. On the other hand, the institutionalized architectural drawings that have consolidated in the past hundred years have been rather disassociated from these very specificities of visual culture that constitute meaning for our everyday and have rather remained trapped in orthographic and cartographic methods. At the School of Environment and Architecture, we have been working towards building an ecology that activates broadening of visual language that is interrogative and reflective and where different methods and processes of drawing are mobilised as a means to ask questions, make arguments, challenge institutional ways of learning and constitute the production of new knowledge. Our explorations so far have experimented with ways to imagine sensoriums, narratives, social patterns and such other non-physical dimensions of space that work their way into forms of inhabitation. In the past twenty years, the digital space has been able to provide access and opportunities to make visual culture active in the everyday. The collectors, archivists and the curators of these spaces have brought to us both; collections around fragments and throwaway ideas as well as those built around questions that are central to our understanding of ourselves. They bridge cultures and generations across space and time to make accessible and visible a commonality that underlies the ways in which we think and produce images. For an ecology of visual culture then, pedagogues may have to reconstitute themselves from being concerned with solutionised ways of teaching “how to draw�, towards building a thinking capacity in students wherein they are able to inhabit the world through images. The pedagogues could position themselves as collectors, archivists and curators, where they actively engage in locating the students and their questions in broader visual culture, interrogating them and developing newer processes, inquiries and imaginations. The pedagogue hence becomes active in the production of work that further adds itself to the lexicon of images in visual culture. This conversation hopes to spark discussion around new frontiers in visual cultures and what this could mean for the study and practice of architecture. What would it mean for pedagogues to shift their positions? What kind of institutional spaces might be required? What happens to drawing itself? And what happens to processes of making buildings?
Bhavleen Narula Bhavleen Kaur Narula is a computational designer, creative technologist, and an educator. Trained as an architect, her work explores the multiplicities in the field of computational design and architectural education. She specializes in interactive technologies, additive manufacturing, and digital fabrication methodologies. She is currently pursuing her Mention in Research from ELISAVA and holds an academic position as an assistant Professor at Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, Mumbai, where she is actively involved in developing digital pedagogies for both graduate and post graduate programs. After receiving her masters in Advanced Design and Digital Architecture at ELISAVA, Spain in 2015, she continued her interest in this field and collaborated with several offices in the design of installations, sculptures, and pavilions - including the installation at the exhibition ‘When is Space?’, Jaipur in collaboration with Sameep Padora and Associates, Mumbai.
Dipti Bhaindarkar Dipti Bhaindarkar is an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture and has been engaged with the school since its inception. She has completed her graduation and post graduation in urban design from University of Mumbai. She holds IGBC accreditation for green building design. Her practice has engaged with varied questions of academic administration, institutional thinking, urban studies and the city, technological studies and sustainable development.
Dushyant Asher Dushyant is an architect and technologist who is interested in the spatial interfaces of technology and life. He has worked in the design and computational domain since his masters at the Städelschule Architecture Class, Frankfurt (2010). He is currently engaged in research on material studies as a part of the academic teaching programs at the School of Environment and Architecture.
Kush Patel Dr. Kush Patel (they/he) is a queer feminist educator, writer, and public scholar, working at the intersections of architectural history-theory, environmental design studies, and the digital humanities (DH). They co-lead (with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob), “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed,” an anti-colonial DH practice that locates itself within cross-disciplinary DH frameworks to reconceptualize how instructors might approach the teaching of digital skills and tools to destabilize colonial ideologies that are naturalized within mainstream digital humanities practices. They have held academic appointments as Associate Faculty Librarian of Digital Pedagogy; as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and the Michigan Humanities Collaboratory; and as Adjunct Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which is also the institution where they earned their PhD in Architecture. Currently, they are affiliated with Avani Institute of Design near Calicut in Kerala, where they teach advanced research design courses, including an urban humanities and community-centered digital storytelling studio, as well as lead initiatives on architectural history-theory in relation to online and public knowledge writing.
PEDAGOGY IN THE TIMES OF DIGITAL / DIY / NEW MEDIA ECOLOGIES CONVERSATION 3 / 1715 - 1900
The digital space, DIY-enabling technologies and the new media appear to have created ecologies which have destabilised institutions, physicalities, ways of thinking and making. Moreover, human bodies are reconstituted to include virtual, animated and fabricated entities, where new instincts and experiences have emerged. For architectural pedagogy three questions emerge here: First, what are the reconfigurations in conventional conceptualisation such as public / private, domestic / workspace, etc., and what are the ways in which instincts, behaviours, meanings and experiences are getting reworked? Second, what are the terms of engagement with these ecologies that are extremely dynamic - what tools does one have, where are the starting and ending points, what are the components and elements (is it the algorithmic part as against a line or a polygon), what is the role of human energy and desire, etc? And third, how do pedagogy and educational institutions need to change in this ecology where the classroom seems to have dissolved and the auto-didact seems to have emerged?
Gediminas Urbonas Gediminas Urbonas is artist, educator, and co-founder of the Urbonas Studio (together with Nomeda Urbonas), an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Urbonas have exhibited internationally including the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei Biennales, Folkestone Triennial, Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their writing on artistic research as a form of intervention was published in the books Devices for Action (MACBA Press, 2008), Villa Lituania (Sternberg, 2008), and Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017). Urbonas curated the Swamp School at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. The book Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy is forthcoming in 2021 (Sternberg, MIT Press). Gediminas is Associate Professor at MIT‘s Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Mriganka Madhukaillya Mriganka Madhukaillya is the founder of the Media Lab within the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. He has been an assistant professor of New Media Technology and Cinema in the Department of Design of IIT Guwahati since 2005. His background is in quantum mechanics and communication design. He has conducted research and taught at many universities worldwide. He was a DAAD Visiting Professor at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart in 2019, and a visiting professor at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou in 2016-17. He was a member of several managing and advisory boards, including a Juror in Visual Arts at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. He is currently a member of research networks Biopolitica, a biopolitics research network, and Substantial Motion Research Network, initiated by Prof. Laura Marks and Prof. Azadeh Emadi. He is a founding member of the art collective Desire Machine Collective, with which he was nominated for the LUMA award in 2011. His public platform Periferry, active between 2007-2013, was nominated for Visible Award 2015, Tate Liverpool. At present he is developing the research and design studio Forest Cybernetics.
Rohit Mujumdar Rohit Mujumdar is an architect and a planner, and teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai. His current research focuses on understanding coastal cities by attending to the housing experiences, responses and innovations to the monsoon’s everyday wetness and its extreme events. He is also engaged in articulating the new housing questions that emerge from the emerging contexts of urbanization in second cities in South India. His earlier research has focused on examining the spatial and cultural politics of collaborative action in establishing Special Economic Zones in Maharashtra.
Sabaa Giradkar Sabaa is an architect having core interests in the adoption of sustainable practices for the built environment. She graduated from Nagpur University in 2011 and completed her Masters in Environmental Architecture from Mumbai in 2015. With keen interests in the different practices of Environment Sabaa has been associated with TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) as a researcher and a Green Building consultant. She worked on evaluating the designing and planning measures implemented to achieve GRIHA (Green Rating Integrated Habitat Assessment) rating. At SEA, through her studios, she has been involved in framing questions around what it means to engage with the environment beyond it being an external entity. Currently she is also designing a course that discusses environment through lived experiences and through the practice of care.
THINKING THROUGH TEMPORALITIES AND CARE IN HABITATION CONVERSATION 4 / 1915 - 2100
The uncertainties associated with menacing global environmental changes such as deglaciation and proliferating pathogens present capacities to transpose life to a putative tipping point of habitat change, or a new normal. Design and planning fields largely attempt to futureproof places from this tipping point ‘all at once,’ and thus sketch teleological visions that do not acknowledge the changing rhythms and temporalities of everyday lives. Such visions often mobilise conceptual tropes such as the ‘rule of law’ for environmental protection, on the one hand, and ‘the local,’ ‘embodied energy’ and ‘green technology’ for environmental conservation, on the other hand. Posing the environment thus, as a horizon of resources outside the human realm, not only has led to significant implications for the claims of a wide range of low income groups but also to the freezing of dynamic interspecies relationships. We at SEA, therefore, have come to consider the environment as a visible and invisible infrastructure of dynamic, unsynchronized relationships always forming and reforming - between humans themselves and other species, and with ‘things’ in their habitat. Changing the environmental horizon conceptually from a singular, static standpoint and literally moving the senses left and right, above and below, and near and far foregrounds new questions for architectural pedagogy: How do the changing rhythms and temporalities of (non) human life weave into habitats? What forms of attention and care do individuals and groups pay to one another, and to ‘things’ in their habitat? How could architectural pedagogy and practice articulate an ethics of care in the changing rhythms and temporalities of life, and in the face of the current discourses of growth and degrowth, degradation and risk, stress and resilience and so on? What could be the orientations of new engagements with the habitat that emerge from such ethics? What is required of pedagogy to respond to these interrogations?
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