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PATIO, Ahmedabad (2026)

30/08/2026

PATIO Conversations: Exhibiting Architecture in South Asia
As part of the ongoing PATIO Conversations series on Architecture and Media Cultures, this session turns to the exhibition space as a critical site for architectural discourse in South Asia. Unlike contexts with robust institutional archives, exhibiting architecture here often means working against limited formal documentation—pushing practitioners to engage vernacular records, oral histories, personal papers, and other unconventional forms of research as primary source material. This also raises pressing questions of agency, where the standard exhibition model, centred on the architect as sole protagonist and framing architecture as an end product, sits uneasily within a region shaped by collective, informal, and often uncredited modes of building practices. Bringing together practitioners working across curation, archiving, and institution-building, the conversation examines how museums, archives, and independent initiatives are rethinking whose stories get told, and how, when the source material—and the very idea of authorship—resists conventional framing.

This special session will be held in-person at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), India, as a part of our exhibition. If you’re in Bengaluru, we encourage you to join us in person with family and friends.

Amit Srivastava Curating for Culture Melsens Sarah Saptarshi Sanyal Catherine Outram Desai Gauri Priya Jain Yakin Kinger

30/08/2026

PATIO Conversations: Exhibiting Architecture in South Asia
As part of the ongoing PATIO Conversations series on Architecture and Media Cultures, this session turns to the exhibition space as a critical site for architectural discourse in South Asia. Unlike contexts with robust institutional archives, exhibiting architecture here often means working against limited formal documentation—pushing practitioners to engage vernacular records, oral histories, personal papers, and other unconventional forms of research as primary source material. This also raises pressing questions of agency, where the standard exhibition model, centred on the architect as sole protagonist and framing architecture as an end product, sits uneasily within a region shaped by collective, informal, and often uncredited modes of building practices. Bringing together practitioners working across curation, archiving, and institution-building, the conversation examines how museums, archives, and independent initiatives are rethinking whose stories get told, and how, when the source material—and the very idea of authorship—resists conventional framing.

This special session will be held in-person at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), India, as a part of our exhibition. If you’re in Bengaluru, we encourage you to join us in person with family and friends.

Amit Srivastava Curating for Culture Melsens Sarah Saptarshi Sanyal Catherine Outram Desai Gauri Priya Jain Yakin Kinger

12/08/2026

Join us for PATIO Conversation 24, on the research theme ‘Writing Histories’, at 17.00 Indian Standard Time on Thursday, 13th August 2026. This PATIO Conversation will be the fourth session under the research theme Writing Histories. After a first conversation on methods and perspectives, second on community archives, third on religion and architecture, we now turn to domesticity.

In this session, we’ll be joined by Soumitri Varadarajan, Piyush Das and Zahra Yasmoon as speakers and Dhara Patel as respondent. Soumitri Varadarajan is a Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Design at RMIT University, Australia. Varadarajan writes on material culture, the environment, and the human body, and is the author of The Social Object: Apprehending Materiality for Industrial Design Practice (Intellect Books). The book examines domestic spaces and objects in middle-class Indian homes, exploring how people make meaning of the things they buy, own, and gift. Piyush Das is a conservation architect, researcher and academic whose work examines the intersection of architecture, Indian knowledge systems, cultural landscapes, and heritage studies. Zahra Yasmoon is a PhD Scholar at VIT Vellore, where she is Assistant Professor at V-SPARC. She specialises in urban regeneration, cultural heritage, and architectural history, with research spanning socio-cultural resilience, Indo-Saracenic and Islamic architecture, and urban contestation studies. This conversation will bring together their research on domesticity and will explore various social dimensions of it, along with methodological questions around drawings and memory.

Amit Srivastava Saptarshi Sanyal Melsens Sarah Catherine Outram Desai Gauri Curating for Culture Priya Jain Yakin Kinger Fiona Evangeline

08/07/2026

PATIO Conversation 23 will be on the research theme ’Tools of Building Practice’, at 17.00 Indian Standard Time on Thursday, 9th July 2026. After conversations on contracts, drawings, and maps, we now turn to the Treatise.

In this session, we’ll be joined by Neena Zutshi, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and Pedro Guedes, professor emeritus at the University of Queensland, who will each present an iconic Treatise from the South Asian subcontinent. Professor Vibhuti Sachdev, Dean at GITAM School of Architecture, will be the respondent. Drawing from her recent book, Neena’s talk, titled Classical architectural knowledge system, ideation to manifestation, interprets the 11th-century Samrāṅgaṇasūtradhāra as a mediator of authority, knowledge, and labour. Pedro explores what lies Behind and beyond the Roorkee Treatise of Civil Engineering. First appearing in 1866 and revised and reprinted till after India’s Independence in 1947, the trusted textbook remained highly influential in South Asian official building circles.

Do not forget to register for the Zoom link through our website.

Saptarshi Sanyal
Melsens Sarah
Amit Srivastava
Catherine Outram Desai
Gauri
Curating for Culture
Priya Jain
Yakin Kinger

02/06/2026

Our upcoming PATIO Conversation 22 will be the third session under the research theme Writing Histories. In this session, we’ll be joined by Sara Ather and Penny Unni as speakers and Stephen Legg as respondent. Sara Ather is a PhD student in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University. Her work examines the relationship between architecture and the minoritization of Muslims in post-independence India, particularly under the rise of Hindu nationalism. Her talk, titled Architecture of Fascism: Sacred Labor and the destruction of Babri will examine the ritual processes that enabled the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 by Karsevaks (Hindu nationalist volunteers) and the eventual construction of the Ram Mandir in 2024. It argues that the long planned campaigns that eventually led to the demolition of Babri, by the bare hands of Karsevaks, functioned as a pedagogical apparatus of conversion, not only replacing a historical mosque with the aspiration of a future temple, but equally reshaping the laboring bodies that enact this violence. Penny Unni is an instructor at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Her research investigates the spatial politics of water infrastructures in South Asia. Her talk, titled Sacred Life of Dams: Myth, Ritual, and Nationalist Space in the Narmada Valley, will examine how pilgrimage routes and rituals along sacred rivers blur the distinction between dam and temple, extending mythic meaning to bridge developmentalist narratives of gigantic infrastructures with religion. By highlighting the case of the Narmada Valley, the presentation will reveal how stakes of dam construction exceed questions of infrastructure, extending to the terms through which landscape, history, and national belonging are made legible.

Do not forget to register for the Zoom link through our website.

.design

10/05/2026

Our upcoming PATIO conversation will be on the theme “Built Environment Pedagogy.” For this session, we are excited to trace historical and contemporary parallels between architectural education across the Global South. Our first speaker, Dr. Farhan Karim will discuss his recent co-edited book “The History of Architectural Education in the Middle East and North Africa.” Our second speaker, Dr. Amrita Madan will explore what it means to reframe the “practice-education” relationship in the Indian context. Our respondent Dr. Badrinarayan Srinivasan, will offer thoughts based on his own experience as an architect/educator his research on architectural pedagogy.

design

06/04/2026

Our upcoming session of PATIO Conversations is the third on the theme: “Material and Construction Histories.” This theme examines questions of material production, labor, and ecology, with particular attention to the social, environmental, and political lives of building materials. In this session, we explore the histories and contemporary trajectories of brick as both a construction material and a mediator of social and territorial relations, across distinct yet connected contexts in India.
This session brings together speakers Sprya Sharma and Akshar Gajjar, with Nachiket Chanchani as respondent. Sprya is an architectural researcher and a PhD candidate at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi. In her presentation, Politics of Bricks, she reflects on the cultural, material, and moral debates surrounding brick in South Asia, tracing its shifting status from craft and art form to a contested material within colonial and postcolonial architectural discourse. Akshar is an architect and researcher, currently a PhD student at EPFL Lausanne. In his presentation, Brick Ecologies: Farm, Soil, and Land at the Edges of Urban Expansion, he examines how brick production in the agrarian landscapes of Gujarat mediates relationships between agriculture, labor, and urban expansion, foregrounding the entanglement of soil, land transformation, and speculative construction.

Visit our website, link in bio, for details and registration.

design

27/02/2026

Solidarities in the Indian Ocean Rim brings together scholars examining how architecture and infrastructure became powerful sites of transnational solidarity across the Global South. Through two innovative roundtable sessions, the symposium traces alternative networks of cooperation that emerged across the Indian Ocean world and beyond.
The first session ‘Architectures of Solidarity’ investigates how solidarity is framed, spatialized, and practiced across varied social and political contexts. Through cases ranging from feminist reappropriations of monuments to everyday infrastructures of collective care and alliance-building, the session explores how built environments mediate communal world-making. The second session ‘Constructing South-South Cooperation’ examines how architecture and infrastructure made visible the emergent concepts of non-alignment and Third World solidarity that followed from Cold War rivalry.

Through concrete cases of Afro-Asian housing collaborations, Egypt-led Arab networks supporting African Unity, and India-Africa technical cooperation in soil engineering, the session reveals how built projects were simultaneously stages for solidarity, practices of cooperation, and material results of new transnational networks.

Together, these conversations reframe postcolonial development narratives by foregrounding the ‘non-aligned’ trajectories often obscured by Cold War North-South paradigms. Focusing on the Indian Ocean Rim as a crucial zone of exchange, the symposium reveals how architectural and infrastructural cooperation challenged imperial legacies and created material and symbolic stages for Global South solidarity.

design

08/02/2026

Our next PATIO Conversation will be the third session under the theme: “Institutions: Colonial and Postcolonial.” This theme examines questions of agency, equity and power, with particular reference to institutional forms, frameworks and systems of colonial design and construction and their post-colonial legacies. In this session we examine built heritage in Jinja, Uganda and Bulandshahr, India, exploring how unique architectures were produced from specific socio-cultural encounters taking place within extra-colonial networks or beside established colonial systems.

This session brings together speakers Anthony K. Wako and Binita Bose, with Peter Scriver as respondent. Anthony is a lecturer and researcher in Architecture at the Faculty of the Built Environment, Uganda Martyrs University, and the Emerging Architect Fellow (2025–2027) at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. In his presentation, Tracing the Footprints of Entangled Narratives of South Asian Migrants to Uganda between 1900 and 1972, he will explore the socio-cultural encounters that shaped the built heritage of Jinja, Uganda. Binita is an Assistant Professor at the Apeejay School of Architecture, Greater Noida. In her talk, Re-examining the Relationship between Colonial Building Practices and Native Craftsmen, she examines the Bulandshahr Town Hall, constructed under the supervision of F. S. Growse during his tenure as Collector of Bulandshahr, and discusses how sustained engagement with local craftsmen informed an alternative architectural approach. Peter is a founding member of the Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide, where he commenced teaching Modern Architectural History, Theory and Design in 1996. In addition to his pioneering work on postcolonial India, he is also an expert on colonial modernity.

.design

PATIO

30/08/2026

30/08/2026

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