Architecture Off-Centre

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 Donald 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