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Lecture:Expert in the Galleries | Architecture and Scarcity in the Early Years of Independent India

Turkey Architecture News - Apr 01, 2014 - 19:21   4249 views

Lecture:Expert in the Galleries | Architecture and Scarcity in the Early Years of Independent India

Photographer unknown. Bhakra Dam under construction. Between 1960 and 1963. 6.3 × 6.1 cm. Fonds Pierre Jeanneret, CCA Collection. ARCH264671. Gift of Jacqueline Jeanneret

3 April 2014, @6:00 pm
Presented in English

 

Ateya Khorakiwala discusses the political imagination and the food crises that drove decisions to build cities, manage rivers, and invest in infrastructure during the early years of India’s independence. The aim was to sustain the lives of the state’s subjects while transforming them into model citizens; however the path to modernity was never so straightforward.

The talk will journey through aesthetic and infrastructural interventions like the Bhakra dam, a dairy in Mehsana, an unbuilt silo in Ludhiana, and the siting of Chandigarh to discuss what happens when architectural questions of imagination and meaning are refracted through political questions of sovereignty and justice, and technological questions of expertise and planning.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a third year student in the Ph.D. program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She holds a Master in Architectural Studies from MIT where she wrote her master’s thesis on road construction research in India around 1960. She also holds a Bachelor of Architecture from KRVIA in Mumbai. The Expert in the Galleries series is presented in conjunction with the exhibition How architects, experts, politicians, international agencies and citizens negotiate modern planning: Casablanca Chandigarh.

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