Architecture Off-Centre

In our previous episode, we spoke to the team from Better Shelter about their kit-of-parts approach to providing emergency shelters in crisis situations. Today, we continue that line of inquiry and look at the work that Pop-Up Housing has been doing in India by deploying an industrial and modular construction system. Sampat Althur is the founder of Pop-Up Housing, a social innovation organization working on improving sustainable housing and infrastructure in low income communities in India. Using latest advancements in industrial construction, sustainability and hands on volunteering, Sampat is simplifying housing and enabling infrastructure development in marginalized communities. More on Pop-Up Housing: https://popuphousing.org/

The very first episode of our podcast focused on the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and highlighted the role of designers in alleviating the living conditions of the refugees. Today, we speak to Better Shelter about their work in providing shelters to refugees and displaced people around the world. Better Shelter is an independent Swedish non-profit without political or religious ties. They design and provide temporary shelters to help people live safer and more dignified lives until they can return or move to a new permanent home.  About Better Shelter: https://bettershelter.org/ And their photo project What Makes a Home: https://www.whatmakesahome.org/

We have been talking extensively about housing this season but have not really looked at the identity of the cities within which it exists. In today's episode, we zoom out a little to take stock of new capital cities and discuss their planning through the theoretical lens of feminism. Dorina Pojani is Associate Professor of urban planning at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her latest books are Trophy Cities: A Feminist Perspective on New Capitals (Edward Elgar, 2021) and Alternative Planning History and Theory (Routledge, 2023). Her forthcoming book is Early Planning Utopias: A Feminist Critique (Anthem, 2025).  About Dorina: https://about.uq.edu.au/experts/11894

For those of us who have grown up in India, we were introduced to the concept of segregation and apartheid very early on as we were taught about the discrimination Gandhi faced while living in South Africa and how that marked the beginning of the independence movement in India. In this episode, we speak to Adi Kumar about the history of apartheid in South Africa and how those land policies continue to affect the supply of affordable housing in Cape Town today. Adi Kumar is a trained architect and seasoned land and housing activist. Over the last two decades, Adi has been leadership positions in several civil society organisations working across the globe in India, Southern Africa, Lebanon and United States on development programmes. He is former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. Adi's current work: https://www.seeingtheother.org/

In this episode, we speak to Yutaka Sho about working in a context that has a history of genocide and colonization, and we discuss the challenges of working on ground, at the grassroots level.  Yutaka Sho is a partner of nonprofit architecture firm General Architecture Collaborative  (GAC) that has been working in Rwanda since 2008, and a professor of architecture at Meiji University in Tokyo. GAC works with underrepresented communities to build sustainable and aesthetically engaging spaces while using the construction sites for end-user training.  About GAC and their work: https://www.gacollaborative.org/

We are no strangers to the AirBnB phenomenon – and how it has revolutionized the travel industry. Over the last two episodes, we have been focusing on the rental housing markets in Kenya and India, and today we'll take pan over to Australia to see what the short-term rental market looks like.  Dr. Thomas Sigler is an academic researcher in urban and economic geography. He holds a PhD and MSc from the Pennsylvania State University, and a BA from the University of Southern California. He is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School in the School of the Environment at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and a Guest Professor of Geography at the University of Luxembourg. About Dr. Sigler: https://environment.uq.edu.au/profile/9602/thomas-sigler

Bandhu is an AI driven urban-tech startup that is solving for India's rapid urbanization by enabling low-income workers to access urban jobs along with housing and thereby directly addressing the roadblocks that rural migrants face while entering the urban workforce. Rushil Palavajjhala is Co-founder and CEO of Bandhu, and holds a Master's degree in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focused on finance and technology for urban development in the Global South.  Jacob Kohn is Co-founder and COO of Bandhu, where he heads product development and data science. Jacob holds a Master's degree in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focused on technology integration in informal urban economies.  About Bandhu: https://www.bandhu.work/

When we talk about discourses on housing, we usually draw references from the western context. It is only in the last few decades that developing countries have come to the forefront of housing dialogues owing to their growing economies and increasing populations. Today, we take a closer looking at the housing market in Kenya, especially in Nairobi. Etta Madete is an architect, sustainable design expert, and developer passionate about sustainable real estate development in emerging markets. Passionate about advocacy, Etta previously taught at the University of Nairobi, is an EDGE Expert, Aspen and Mandela Washington Fellow. She has co-led acclaimed exhibitions at the Barbican and at the Guggenheim with Rem Koolhaas and has over 15 publications in Aljazeera and Architectural Record, amongst others. Etta's affordable housing initiative: https://zimahomes.co.ke/

Toolshed is a platform, a project and a place in Hudson, New York, where artists Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris collect and share tools for ecological living. They have categorized these tools into four distinct groups: food, kin, shelter and magic. Today, we speak to Susannah and Edward about what ecological living means and how Toolshed plays into it. Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) work with photography, video, writing, installation and open-source projects. Of primary concern are contemporary efforts to develop ecological consciousness and the possibilities for art in support of social movements. From 2006 – 2020 they co-directed The Canary Project, a studio that produced media and art to deepen public understanding of climate change and other ecological issues. More on Toolshed: www.tool-shed.org

People are increasingly making the conscious choice to live alone and it just so turns out that the number of people living alone in Europe has doubled since the 1980s. We speak to architects Maria Vittoria Tesei and Flavio Martella about the social, economic and architectural implications of living alone.  Founded by Maria Vittoria Tesei (architect and urban planner) and Flavio Martella (PhD architect), m²ft architects is a multidisciplinary firm working in the fields of architecture, urban planning, public space and research. Through design by research, they propose to produce architecture through the understanding of new contemporary lifestyles. Living Alone on Future Architecture: https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/9e224ad4-acb9-411f-86ff-29c1fc97ff2b/ Their work: https://m2ft-architects.com/

By living in a world of wars and unrest right now, we are witnessing one of the largest human displacements to have ever happened. People around the world are on the move to seek refuge – whether it is because of military action or a natural disaster. The idea of a “home” is under constant scrutiny as entire populations are uprooted from the very places where they built their whole lives. We ask our guests about how the concept of home has evolved in the last century. How do policy and design intersect to alleviate or exacerbate housing crises in cities around the world? Why are governments failing to reduce homelessness? What is the temporary housing market and how is it driven by migrant workers? And how can architects play a role in creating emergency shelters?  Introducing Season 6, supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

In this bonus episode, we speak to Kim Holden, whose change of careers has been unconventional and courageous at the same time. She was a founder, managing principal and architect at the renowned SHoP Architects and decided to become a doula after 20 years of practice. We speak to Kim about her initiative Doula x Design and how she helps people during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum. Kim is a registered architect and certified doula focused on the intersection of design and women's health. Through the examination of the role that environment plays in the physical, physiological, and psychological experience of birth, Kim seeks to create awareness, improve outcomes, and to reframe childbirth as a societal topic, rather than as a women's issue. Kim's website: https://doulaxdesign.com Image credits: Kate Randall and Adventure to Motherhood: The Picture Story of Pregnancy and Childbirth, J. Allan Offen, MD, 1960

For our final episode for this season, we speak to doctor and architect Diana Anderson, who has skillfully carved a unique career path for herself as a “dochitect” – by pioneering a collaborative, evidence-based model for approaching healthcare from the medicine and architecture fields simultaneously. Dr. Diana Anderson is a triple boarded professional – healthcare architect, internist, and a geriatrician. She is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University, and a recipient of an Alzheimer's Association Clinician Scientist Fellowship. She is also a healthcare principal at Jacobs, contributing her thought leadership at the intersection of design and health. Diana's website: www.dochitect.com

In our previous episode, we got an overview of medical tourism around the world and the key factors that drive people to travel from one country to another for medical treatments and procedures. Today, we take a closer look at some of the medical tourism hubs along a very specific geographic area, i.e., the US-Mexico border.  Viviane Clement is an epidemiologist and a cultural Anthropologist whose research focuses on the macro and micro effects of health and environmental policies and politics on under-sourced and under-researched communities. For her article on medical tourism titled ‘In Search of Health: Medical Tourism at the US-Mexico Border/Lands', she collaborated with Emma Newsome and Dr. Sergio Lemus to apply transborder theory and virtual ethnographies to analyze the variation in access to health care for populations who share the US-Mexico border/lands.

Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has emerged out of people's need to travel across country borders to access medical treatments and procedures. In order to understand this global movement, we need to understand the reason for travel, the destinations that attract individuals and the web of factors that shape this global industry. Dr. Valorie Crooks is a health geographer who specializes in health services research. She is a Professor at Simon Fraser University where she also holds a Canada Research Chair and currently serves as Associate Vice-President, Research. For more than a decade she has been qualitatively studying the ethical and equity impacts of medical tourism. This work has taken her to countries as diverse as India, Mongolia, Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, St. Lucia, Cayman Islands, Guatemala, Mexico, South Korea, and Belize. More on Dr. Crooks: https://www.sfu.ca/geography/about/our-people/profiles/Valorie-Crooks.html

What is your idea of good mental health? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like to touch? And if you could design your own safe space, what would it look like? What would you have in it? James Leadbitter, also known as The Vacuum Cleaner, is a UK based artist and activist who makes candid, provocative and playful work. Drawing on his own experience of mental health disability, he works with groups including young people, health professionals and vulnerable adults to challenge how mental health is understood, treated and experienced. James' project Madlove: A Designer Asylum - http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/madlove-a-designer-asylum/

It has been a while since architects have been attempting to address various forms of disability in the buildings, neighborhoods and cities they design. However, these attempts are most often limited to increasing access for differently abled bodies. Our guest today, David Gissen, argues that a disability critique of architecture is not one that solely seeks to make the built environment more accessible but instead understands how embedded the ideas of physical incapacity and impairment are within architecture.  David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. His recent book, The Architecture of Disability, has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” He is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at The New School University/Parsons School of Design and Dean's Visiting Professor at Columbia University.  David's website: https://davidgissen.org/

We don't talk about the technical and logistical aspects of death enough. For example: How does one's economic status affect the conditions in which they die? Do gender identities play a role in how people receive end of life care? Can we choose the memories that we want to leave behind for our loved ones? And how does social media become an archive of one's life after passing? We speak to artist Oreet Ashery about death in the digital age. Oreet Ashery is a visual artist whose practice navigates established, institutional and grassroots contexts. Ashery was a Turner Bursary recipient in 2020 and won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, which looks at the emergent field of digital death. Ashery is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. To watch Revisiting Genesis: https://revisitinggenesis.net/ Oreet's work: http://oreetashery.net/

Historically, many communities around the world spatialized the bodily function of menstruation and integrated it within their architecture in the form of menstruation huts – often leading to the isolation and oppression of women as impure beings. Our guest today argues that these spaces in the west African Benin Kingdom were intentionally designed for women to rest and recuperate – that the isolation rooms were essentially spas.  Minne Atairu is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice seeks to reclaim the obscured histories of Benin Bronzes. Utilizing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and additive fabrication, Atairu reassembles visual, sonic, and textual fragments into conceptual works that engage with repatriation-related questions. She is the recipient of the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.  Minne's Graham Foundation project: http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/6457-the-menstrual-isolation-room-is-a-spa

Over a century ago in 1896, the bubonic plague broke out in colonial Bombay. While the British officials maintained detailed records of the various aspects of the plague, local newspapers reported on the public sentiment towards the disease and its colonial management. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar explored one such archive to draw out a subaltern narrative of the bubonic plague. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises of a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Most of his long-term projects are research-intensive and attempt to unlock historical and contemporary data by placing the work in the context of an unseen social history. His works have been showcased at Bergen Assembly Art & research Triennale, Colomboscope Biennale, and several galleries in India and overseas. Ranjit's city-based practice: http://cityinflux.com

The discourse on care within the field of architecture has recently been gaining a lot of traction as ideas about health are expanding beyond the limits of traditional hospitals. In this conversation with Fiona Kenney, we discuss the history of long-term care facilities, residential hospices and pediatric respite centers, and how they differ from institutions that are aimed at providing cure. Fiona L. Kenney is a PhD candidate at the McGill University School of Architecture, where she studies spatial expressions of care. Fiona holds an MDes in History and Philosophy of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her doctoral work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Friends of the CAMH Archives, and McGill University. She currently works at the Palliative Care Division of the Bruyère Research Institute.  Fiona's website: www.fionakenney.com

Ever since the pandemic, questions and concerns over the human body and the public health have heightened. We wanted to ensure that the conversations we would have with our guests went beyond our experience of the last three years. Some of the questions we ask this season are: Can we look at the role of architecture for providing care beyond the design of hospitals?What are the ways in which medical tourism defines entire cities?How do we shape our environment to foster healthy living – both physically and mentally?And how do we leave behind a digital legacy as designers, after death? With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, here's introducing Season 5.

We explored the themes of agriculture, food and waste in season 4 but did not get into too much detail about the idea of hunger, which is caused by the lack of food. For this bonus episode, we speak to Abby Leibman, who was at the forefront of conceptualizing The Hunger Museum - a virtual museum that takes a deep dive into the history of hunger and how it can be ended. Abby J. Leibman has been President & CEO of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger since 2011. She has a distinguished record of community and professional leadership, including developing and managing the Child Care Law Project at Public Counsel and co-founding and directing the California Women's Law Center.  The Hunger Museum: http://hungermuseum.org/

For this season's final episode, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva about the fears, concerns and anxieties of a young architect. Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmentalist, ecofeminist, writer and activist. She is the founder of Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of indigenous seeds along with the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. To learn more about her work at Navdanya: https://www.navdanya.org/

Parts of Ateya Khorakiwala's doctoral research focused on grain silos in India and how they were a post-colonial import - built not just for the purpose of creating food security after witnessing one of the worst famines in the country but also to serve as a currency for exchange. In this conversation, Ateya talks about the history of silos, its construction materials and her course Feasting and Fasting at Columbia University. Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian and is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Her research focuses on India's development decades, examining the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project, Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India's postcolonial countryside. Link to Ateya's upcoming conference on material landscapes: https://www.arch.columbia.edu/events/2569-material-landscapes Her website: http://ateyakhorakiwala.com/

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, including the policemen watching over the very barricades that restricted their entry into Delhi. Sarover Zaidi is a philosopher and a social anthropologist, who currently teaches at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture. She works at the intersections of critical theory, anthropology, art, architecture and material culture studies. Sarover has extensively worked on religious architecture, and urbanism in the city of Bombay and currently co-runs a site on writing the city called Chiragh Dilli (https://chiraghdilli.wordpress.com). Her essay on food, cooking and the protest: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/412221/the-gift-of-food/

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 agriculture by dividing a farm into smaller pixels. Lenora Ditzler is a researcher at the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms and was a previously a research associate in the Farm Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her doctoral thesis titled ‘Towards Diversified Industrial Cropping Systems?' proposed the design of cropping systems that qualify as both industrial and agroecological. Lenora's academic research: https://research.wur.nl/en/persons/lenora-ditzler

The idea of food deserts was unknown 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, with a particular focus on the African context. Her work focusses on the interactions between urban systems and food systems in shaping lived experiences of food security and nutrition. Planning for Food Secure African Cities Podcast: https://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/planning-for-food-secure-african-cities-podcast/ Tomatoes and Taxi Ranks (book): https://www.tomatoesandtaxiranks.org.za/

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 Dialogue (AfD) with Abhimanyu Singhal. His work at AfD explores the future of architecture and habitat. The studio has participated in projects across city-making, futurism, experience design and public engagement — often working in intersections. Depanshu was selected as one of the top 20under35 emerging Indian designers by DesignXDesign in 2021. Delhi Agro-city 2050: https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/24e93255-2381-4359-9427-3c31ee975a43/ Architecture for Dialogue: https://afd.city

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 wrote and illustrated his first book Follies: An Architectural Journey, which he then presented as a documentary. Rory subsequently completed an MPhil in Architectural History at Cambridge. He lives in London where he divides his time between writing, lecturing and painting architectural commissions. Link to the series: https://watch.shelter.stream/follies Rory's work: https://www.instagram.com/roryfraserr/

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 industrial food manufacturing. While the company has moved away from their focus on polymers they believe that their current product will help increase the sustainable credentials of countless items we use in our daily lives. To learn more: https://www.chipsboard.com/

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 that we give it any attention. Adriana David's work lies at the intersection of architecture and the natural world. Her recent projects include LIMBO urban seedbanks, a choreography for a more-than human world, a performance dinner on the impact of today's impact of agribusiness on food and a set of tools to achieve Harvard's Food Sovereignty for the future. Adriana's work: www.doma.mx Report of her study supported by the Mellon Grant at Harvard: https://mellonurbanism.harvard.edu/food-sovereignty-or-how-lan-interdependent-food-system-future-case-milpitas-supply-chamexico-city

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 speaking to artists, scientists, planners, and activists to map the contemporary concerns in the food systems around us.

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 thematic inquiries, the function of repetition in public dissent and the potential of museums in being institutions for dialogue, reconciliation and reaching closure. Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner with her primary concerns lying between cultures of violence, memory, space and the body. She has conceptualized and designed the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict, in Ahmedabad and Raipur, and Mehnat Manzil, a Museum of Work in Ahmedabad. She is a recipient of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice 2020-2022 housed at the New School, New York. The museums: https://www.conflictorium.org/ https://mehnatmanzil.org/

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, public engagement and human-centered design to tackle a wide range of urban challenges. Dr. Lindsay Asquith is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and was the Director of the Designing Out Crime Research Centre. She has a PhD in architecture and behavior, wherein her research focuses on how design can affect behaviour change. She has recently led projects that reframe the problem of damage to social housing properties as well as use design methodologies to minimize violence and aggression in hospital emergency departments. DOC's work: http://www.design-innovation.com.au/designing-out-crime https://www.designforsocialjustice.xyz/home

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 Viswanath is the co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, a social enterprise that uses technology and data to advocate for gender inclusive urban spaces and mobility. She is part of Delhi government Women's Safety Committee and has worked as a consultant with UN Women and UN Habitat. She is also a member of the Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI) at UN Habitat, Board member of SLOCAT, ICPC and Jagori. About Safetipin: www.safetipin.com

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 crimes against humanity and underscores the culpability of architects in creating these instruments of murder. Anne Bordeleau and Donal McKay are two of the four principals who worked on The Evidence Room. Anne is an architect, a historian and professor at Waterloo Architecture. Her research interests include the epistemology of the architectural project, as well as the historiographical and practical bearing of investigating the relations between architecture and time. Donald McKay, Professor Emeritus, served as a full-time faculty at Waterloo Architecture until 2018. Currently living between France and Canada, McKay is developing A Photographic Atlas of Cimetière du Père Lachaise, writing, and serving as managing editor of CHALK BOOKS. Details about The Evidence Room - https://evidenceroomfoundation.com/

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 Auschwitz. Robert Jan Van Pelt has taught at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987. His book, ‘Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present' with Deborah Dwork and subsequent report ‘The Case for Auschwitz' generated The Evidence Room at the 2016 Venice Biennale. He is also the Chief Curator of the traveling exhibition ‘Auschwitz. Not Far Away. Not Long Ago'. More on Robert: https://uwaterloo.ca/architecture/people-profiles/robert-jan-van-pelt

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 alternate method of seeking justice, for this one, we wanted to look at what is happening in the world of prison reforms. Pia Puolakka trained as a forensic psychologist and has been working as a prison psychologist for the Criminal Sanctions Agency in Finland. In 2018, she was appointed as the project manager of the Smart Prison Project, where she developed digital services for prison inmates' rehabilitation. Pia's article on the Smart Prison Project: https://www.penalreform.org/blog/towards-digitalisation-of-prisons-finlands-smart-prison-project/

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 saw circle work being done within the restorative justice method, I was surprised by the candidness and vulnerability of the circle participants and how deeply satisfying the process was. Shailly Agnihotri, is the founder of The Restorative Centre in New York, which she started in response to the heartbreak she experienced as a public defender trying to attain justice for her clients. Shailly has spent more than 20 years as an attorney, with expertise in criminal justice through working as a prosecutor in the Orleans Parish, teaching at the Georgetown Law School and Southern University Law Center, and as a public defender in New York City. The Restorative Centre: https://www.therestorativecenter.org/ And their podcast Justice Reimagined: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Q3GHAY2Q9OAsrDyfPlVXy?nd=1&si=BInbeZ_SR4WZGypjF4hz2g

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 and Crime Mysteries from a Bauhaus Estate'. Natascha Meuser is an architect and publisher based in Berlin. She is a professor of design at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and leads DOM Publishers. Natascha has extensively authored books on design methodologies and drawing for architects, along with several publications on the history of architecture and zoology. More on Natascha's work: http://www.nataschameuser.com , https://dom-publishers.com

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 conduits for escorting large amounts of cash and gold bars out of the buildings. Geoff Manaugh is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of the New York Times-bestselling book, “A Burglar's Guide to the City.” His most recent book, “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine,” co-written with Nicola Twilley, was picked as one of the Best Books of 2021 by Time Magazine, the Financial Times, and the Guardian. His short story “Ernest” has been adapted for film by Netflix, under the title “We Have a Ghost,” and will premiere globally in 2022. For an overview of Geoff's work: http://burglarsguide.com/, http://untilprovensafe.com/, http://bldgblog.com/

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 Foucault's Discipline and Punish to Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. While I came out enlightened at the end of these books, I was left wondering what the current discourses in architecture are, when it comes to addressing these themes. Season 3 of Architecture Off-Centre positions itself as a provocation to examine the relationship of architecture with violence, crime and justice through conversations with historians, writers, lawyers, artists, forensic psychologists and, of course, architects.

“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 abandonment of private property and structures of cultural heritage. In the walled city of Lahore, Hindu temples and Sikh havelis are being inhabited by low-income and marginalized communities as informal settlements – leading to what one may call “accidental preservation”. Rabeeya Arif works on urban and disaster risk management at the World Bank on issues ranging from post-conflict housing reconstruction in Beirut to urbanization in Mauritania. She is a graduate of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program at MIT and has previously worked as a conservationist with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Lahore. Rabeeya's thesis: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123576

“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 about what historic monuments, most frequently seen as stone statues on pedestals, signify in the contemporary context and what new monumentality could look like. Paul M. Farber is the Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, who were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's “Monuments Project,” a $250 Million initiative to “transform the way our country's histories are told in public spaces,” including Monument Lab's National Monument Audit and the opening of research field offices throughout the United States. Everything about Monument Lab: www.monumentlab.org

“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 has spent 30 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, working as a reporter, foreign correspondent and architecture critic. In 2014, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her architectural writing. She is author of two books: ‘Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again' and ‘Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy'. Inga's articles: https://www.inquirer.com/author/saffron_inga/

“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 is an intriguing conservation practice where entire buildings are gutted for (re)development but their facades are kept intact to retain a certain architectural character at the scale of the street, the neighborhood or even the city. Clemency is a PhD researcher in Architectural & Urban History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and has degrees in both Classics and Cultural Heritage. She previously worked as a heritage consultant and as a researcher at Foster + Partners. She is currently an early-stage researcher at UN-Habitat's MetroHub. Link to Clemency's work: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/clemency-gibbs

“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 associated with altruism and public memory. Our guest, Rahul Chemburkar, is on a mission to restore the pyaavs and activate the space around them to become thriving socio-cultural hubs of urban life. Architect and heritage enthusiast Rahul Chemburkar in involved in conserving varied built heritage through his firm Vaastu Vidhaan by successfully reviving & rendering a glimpse of a glorious past to the current society. To follow Rahul's work on the pyaavs: https://www.vaastuvidhaan.in/The-Pyaav-Project.html and https://www.instagram.com/p/CQufeJpJ_9u

“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 in the gothic cathedrals. Brianne's preservation practice highlights stained glass not only as a medium and a material but also as an architectural element that has witnessed tremendous transformation over the years. Brianne Van Vorst received an MA in Stained Glass Conservation and Cultural Heritage Management from the University of York. She returned to the United States and worked for a private stained glass studio before starting Liberty Stained Glass Conservation (LSGC) in 2016. LSGC was created to have a positive impact on the United States' stained glass heritage by requiring an ethical, measured and high-quality approach to conservation treatment. If you're curious about Brianne's work: www.libertysgc.com

“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 the buildings that we were going to see. We spoke extensively about patronage, culture, gentrification and urban regeneration – and there was no way I was not recording it! Ranajay Chand is a Master of Public Policy candidate at Georgetown University and has received his BA in Politics and International Relations from Royal Holloway, University of London. He has worked for the Secretary General's Envoy on Youth at the United Nations and is currently involved in the urban historic regeneration of his hometown Rajpipla in India.

“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; Casting Blackhall' subverts traditional methods of physical and non-physical preservation while navigating through the themes of redaction and transience. Elliot is a recent MArch graduate from The Bartlett, UCL. His work there focuses on alternative definitions of heritage in London, and poetic methods of construction. His latest project 'Blackhall' proposes a counter-monument for London through various material histories. Elliot also teaches at The Bartlett, and leads Open City's Accelerate programme, which aims to diversify the built environment industry. Check out his project: https://summer2021.bartlettarchucl.com/pg12/year5-elliot-nash