Architecture Off-Centre

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 is 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.