The Process Within: Architecture, its Labour and Languages

Date: 4 Oct 2024

Time: 9:30 AM –10:30 AM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 421

The Process Within: Architecture, its Labour and Languages

Seeing architecture as a finished product dominates much of its twentieth-century histories, often affecting what its professionals idealise and students strive towards. Yet, complex, contingent arcs of time, people and cultures that shape architectural production have only received recent attention, particularly for regions that experienced colonisation. To advance such an inquiry, might we think about architecture as a process? How does adopting this approach reorientate what we study? What precise methodological challenges emerge in examining architecture’s modes of becoming? How do such challenges reconfigure its historiography?

Responding to such questions, the seminar moves between three themes. It foregrounds knowledges through which architecture comes into being, certain overlooked agents who produce built spaces, and interrogates rigid boundaries that circumscribe what architecture constitutes. The underlying research focuses on South Asian examples from its last years of colonial rule (1910s-40s)—a milieu when explicit critiques of imperialism were emerging globally. Its methods lend analytical substance, from architectural studies, to Donna Haraway’s call for ‘situated knowledges’, and equally, what Sanjay Subrahmanyam terms modernity’s ‘connected histories’. These methods traverse archival studies, linguistic analyses, on-site fieldwork and digital network-mapping tools to discover, for instance, the unusual experience of constructing the Golconde dormitory, a modernist project at Pondicherry in south-eastern India. They reveal how language animates built and landscaped spaces in Santiniketan, a highly experimental settlement in eastern India. By navigating archival silences, this approach also helps to uncover the overlooked practice of Surendranath Kar, one among the innumerable self-taught architects in colonial territories.

Such grounded perspectives about the process within architecture, centring a former Asian colony, ushers in novel initiatives for its pedagogy. By demonstrating how more inclusive narratives can emerge when we critically rethink what ‘architecture’ is, these perspectives serve to both expand and nuance the scope and methods of architectural history and theory.

Saptarshi Sanyal is an architectural historian, educator in architecture and a conservation architect. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India. Sanyal’s research lies at the intersections of colonialism, modern architecture, the histories of work, building and spatial production. His PhD, completed at the Bartlett, University College London, was supported by the UK Commonwealth Scholarship (2018-22), and his doctoral thesis won an honourable mention at the University of California at Berkeley’s South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize (2023).

His published works have appeared in the Architecture Research Quarterly, Architecture Beyond Europe, Landscape, Context and SPACE journals, among others. In 2024, Sanyal co-founded PATIO (Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim), an independent scholarly network that fosters dialogues on intra- and trans-regional architectural histories by connecting early career researchers to established academics and institutions.