Architecture Off-Centre

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 works at the Farm Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where she is the research coordinator for the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms. 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 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, 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/