Architecture Off-Centre

"It's so paradoxical - something which is so big, something which is so huge… It's almost invisible."

Rajji Desai talks about the afterlives of orbital infrastructures and how these objects in the outer space have an influence on everything that spans from the earth's high orbits to its high seas.

Rajji Desai is an Urban Climate Researcher-Designer at CBT Architects in Boston, where her work focuses on integrating interdisciplinary tools of research with urban planning practices to help shape the development of cities facing extreme risks of climate change. She is a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Masters in Design Studies concentration in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology.

To know more about the afterlives of orbital infrastructures, check out Rajji's essay: https://toxicnews.org/2019/11/18/afterlives-of-orbital-infrastructures-from-the-earths-high-orbits-to-its-high-seas/

"Designers must design the conditions that enable things to be created."

John Wagner and Nadyeli Quiroz, recent graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, first became involved in the Kutupalong refugee camp as a part of an option studio led by prominent architect Anna Heringer. They continued their engagement in the camp even after their studio ended – marking the beginning of a research project that critically looks at spaces of migration as well as a practice that promotes a new kind of design advocacy.

John David Wagner works at the convergence of public space, design, and human rights. He received an M.Arch, with Distinction, from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and was a 2020 Irving Innovation Fellow. John is currently an instructor at Wentworth Institute of Technology and a post-graduate fellow at Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute where his research focuses on the design and production of social spaces in refugee camps.

Nadyeli Quiroz is an Architect and Landscape Architect with two master's degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Currently, she is a Research Affiliate at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and the 2020 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar. Her ongoing research studies urban form in its intersection to territorial ecologies on spaces of movement and displacement. She is also an adjunct professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

To check out their work on forced migration: www.beyondencampment.com

And their professional practice: https://www.instagram.com/off_co_de/

After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2020, Vaissnavi Shukl was about to move to California for a new job when she received a polite rejection from the design firm stating a shift in their hiring priorities due to COVID-19. Unsettled and unsure of her future, she thought about all the incredible people she knew, who were associated with architecture but were doing some pretty incredible stuff. This is the preview of her new (and first) podcast "Architecture Off-Centre".