Architecture Off-Centre

"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...

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?

"Let's make it so intriguing, so curious that people have to come into these ideas of their own volition." Have you ever seen a storefront opening up as a theatre? Or a dilapidated house becoming a community event space? Or ever dined on an unfolding table that serves food from plants on the verge of extinction? What about a lamp post that is lit by converting dog poop into electricity? If you kno...

"I was told that you go to the US to learn the more innovative and technologically driven ways of practicing. But that was simply not the case." If you have ever worked on a construction project and had a hard time searching for and specifying building products, you will be relieved to know that Acelab co-founders Vardhan Mehta and Dries Carmeliet are trying to ease the workflow and make your life...

"Projects such as the Central Vista underscore the agency of architecture for 'those that govern us'—and how, misleading or not, design itself can construe the image of the nation." The juxtaposition of New Delhi's Central Vista project over the ongoing public health crisis in India has raised several questions regarding the relationship between political power and architecture. In this episode, A...

"What is the camera? It's a surrogate for the human eye." If you've ever watched a Hollywood super-hero film and wondered what goes on in the making of it or thought about who designs the submarines and the palaces and the spacecrafts or even questioned what it takes to design spaces for a camera, set designer Tim Croshaw will answer all of it as he takes us through his world of film-making in Hol...

"Virtual worlds in a game enable certain things which are harder to make in the physical space, but they also, in many ways, continue the heuristics of physical space like navigation." Video games today touch upon discourses on virtual economies, the metaverse and the social element in online games. Alina Nazmeeva's work investigates the relationship between cities and digital games, interfaces an...

"Understand that your mission was the building… That at the end of the day, your politics or your own sense of values, might never meet the middle point, I sat down to negotiate the existence of our building, [otherwise] they will blow the whole thing up." In its efforts to build new infrastructure with foreign aid, Afghanistan, as a post-conflict nation, welcomed international organizations and a...

"It really has to do with designing services around women and women's lives… For us as women, we live our lives inside our bodies…" Cristina Alonso is a midwife, who believes that all women can make informed choices about their bodies and lives. She advocates for the design of a healthcare system that serves women where they are and in a way that makes sense to them. Cristina Alonso is a midwife s...

"The evolution of cities is barely ever linear and gradual. It follows an almost cyclical pattern of development that is highly influenced by political and religious currents." Karan Saharya recently co-taught a course called Reincarnating Cities with Vaissnavi Shukl, where he took a deep dive into the changing architectural articulations of heritage, nationalism and religiosity in the contemporar...

"It's so paradoxical - something which is so big, something which is so huge… It's almost invisible." Rajji Desai talks about the afterlives of orbital infrastructures and how these objects in the outer space have an influence on everything that spans from the earth's high orbits to its high seas. Rajji Desai is an Urban Climate Researcher-Designer at CBT Architects in Boston, where her work focus...

"Designers must design the conditions that enable things to be created." John Wagner and Nadyeli Quiroz, recent graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, first became involved in the Kutupalong refugee camp as a part of an option studio led by prominent architect Anna Heringer. They continued their engagement in the camp even after their studio ended – marking the beginning of a research...

After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2020, Vaissnavi Shukl was about to move to California for a new job when she received a polite rejection from the design firm stating a shift in their hiring priorities due to COVID-19. Unsettled and unsure of her future, she thought about all the incredible people she knew, who were associated with architecture but were doing some pre...