Architecture Off-Centre

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, includin...

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 agricu...

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, w...

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...

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 wro...

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 industr...

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 tha...

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...

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 thema...

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, p...

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 Viswan...

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 crim...

In 1996, British author and Holocaust denier David Irving filed a libel case against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, stating that she had defamed him in her book Denying the Holocaust. In what became the case, David Irving versus Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, architectural historian Robert Jan Van Pelt was brought in as the defense's expert witness owing to his work on the history of Au...

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 alt...

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...

Twenty students at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences developed ideas for crime stories to shed new light on the workers' estate designed by Walter Gropius in Törten between 1926 and 1928. Led by Professor Natascha Meuser, this unorthodox approach to teaching helped the students gain a deeper understanding of the world-famous row houses and became the genesis of 'The Törten Project: Murder...

While the intentions of architects and burglars are diametrically opposite in nature – with the former designing for safety, and the later breaching it through the very design aimed to protect, the single common thread between the two is how they foreground architecture in their operations. All of a sudden, storm water drains, vaults, staircases, parking lots, terraces and retaining walls become c...

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...

"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 abandonm...

"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 abo...

"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 h...

"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...

"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 associate...

"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 i...

"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...