16 - Beyond Pathological Space - Space, Architectural Research, And the Time of a Virus - Day 4
Space, Architectural Research, And the Time of a Virus
UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
21 - 24 DECEMBER 2020
Forty eight final year students from the undergraduate programme of the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) embarked on their dissertation research in May 2020. The global proliferation of COVID-19 during the preceding months had led the Indian state to frame, at multiple scales, severe policing measures to partition space that effected - or at least attempted to effect - a strict quarantine for the circulation of individuals and objects. Concurrently, the harsh time of the virus also shaped conversations in India’s public sphere that intensified older readings of its society and space, which have been situated in pathological metaphors of production, community and proximity. Drawing on critical scholarly research across the architecture, art and social science fields that complicates such parochial readings, SEA’s undergraduate dissertation programme has endeavoured to open out new avenues for thinking about architectural production over the course of the last two years. But what does it mean to complicate pathological readings of society and space in the time of a virus? And what philosophical avenues and actual methodological strategies may be opened out to pursue such critical scholarship in architecture when both the researcher and field interlocutors find themselves in quarantine? In other words, what transgressions can architectural research make in working against the grain of visible and invisible partitions that society has built in a pandemic, and whose effects might be considered as a new normal beyond its time? These are the larger questions that loom over our heads and in our face as we engage in a discussion on the scholarship of the third cohort of SEA’s undergraduate students. The subjects they cover cut across diverse areas: urban sensorium and mediatized environments; streets and urban publics; beauty and culture in urban neighbourhoods; urban memories and elasticities; ecologies, associations and negotiations of home; claims of gendered bodies and social difference to space; interfaces of nature and society; pandemic spatialities and questions to pathological readings of the city.
The symposium will be coordinated and moderated by the faculty of SEA with responses by Sarovar Zaidi, Kush Patel, Prasad Khanolkar and Vishwanath Kashikar.
Projects:
Experiences of Retail Spaces in Mumbai’s suburbs - Mayuri Mistry
Hybrid Houses: The cultural practices living and work in a village - Rushikesh Hirulkar
(Un)learning a Mofussil: A glossary of institutions, urban practices and architecture - Srushti Karale