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PATIO, Ahmedabad (2026)

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.

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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.

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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.

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29/12/2025

PATIO Conversation 17 will be under the theme ‘Tools of Building Practice.’ This theme questions the way the design, managerial and construction tools influence the conception and creation of built environments. After a first conversation on building contracts and a second on architectural drawings we now turn to cartography and urban plans.

We’ll be joined by Nathan Taylor-Goh and Malini Krishnankutty as speakers and Jiat-Hwee Chang as respondent.  Nathan is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. His research explores nineteenth‑century imperialism, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, examining the intersections of urban development, cartography, and colonial knowledge production. His talk ‘Scientific Cartography and the Invention of Colonial Singapore’ will examine the evolution of British maps of the Singapore region, it demonstrates that as mapmakers adopted a more scientific framework privileging empirical observation and verifiable European sources, they systematically excluded the Indigenous knowledge that had informed earlier mappings. The effect of this narrowing of knowledge recast the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula as a vacant space, stripped of its interior, its population, and detached from geographic, social, and imperial context. Malini is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay and an urban planner who, over the last two and half decades worked on several spatial planning projects, including Regional Plans, development plans, and sectoral projects in India. Her talk ‘The Mapped, the Unmapped and the Mappable in Indian Planning,’ will discuss Bombay’s 1967 and 1991 development plans to provide insights into the ‘expert culture’ of planning practice, how it problematises the city, and what its underlying values are. Based on a recent participatory planning project in Kerala, she will reflect on how maps can redress the typical silences in master plans and enable a decolonial and relatively sustainable urban planning praxis.

design

01/12/2025

Our upcoming paper presentation proposes the ‘Indian Ocean Rim’ as a conceptual frame that can help decentre traditional narratives of knowledge transfer. It reflects on the intellectual exchanges within the newly established scholarly network PATIO (Platform for Architectural Transfer in the Indian Ocean rim), to demonstrate how this maritime geography functions not merely as a connector but as a generative space for building practices. By analysing the first year of PATIO’s scholarly exchanges, we make a case for reconfiguring architectural histories by centring flows of construction techniques, material practices, and spatial knowledge alongside, beneath, and sometimes in resistance to colonial and neo-colonial power structures. Check our website for details and join us if you’d be attending the conference!

.design

08/11/2025

PATIO Conversation 16 will be under the theme ‘Landscape, Ecology and Environment.’ This theme addresses issues of ecological significance at a point at which our actions increasingly exert impact on the earth’s ecosystems. The long view that emerges from exploring relationships between development and ecology in a historic context opens questions with relevance to contemporary practice and responsibilities.

In this session, we’ll be joined by Bérénice Girard and Alican Taylan as speakers and Shubhra Raje as respondent. Bérénice Girard’s talk titled Transforming Landscapes, Powering the Nation: Energy Monuments in Independent India will draw on a comparative study of two types of large-scale energy infrastructures in India at different periods — the construction of large dams in the decades following Independence and the development of solar parks today. It analyzes how large dams and solar parks are shaped by an aesthetic of gigantism and by mapping and quantification techniques that render space legible and available for development. While both infrastructures transform landscapes and local ecologies, many of their socio-environmental consequences are rendered invisible through diverse discursive and bureaucratic mechanisms. Alican Taylan will draw on unpublished archival material from the Greenlaw collection at the Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the Sudan Archives at Durham University. His presentation documents Suakin, an entirely coral-built port city on the Red Sea, developed architecturally under Ottoman rule in the 17th & 18th centuries. Because coral is porous and brittle, builders encased exterior walls in plaster and combined coral with timber to add tensile capacity and accommodate settlement, improving performance under heat, salt, and humidity. Projecting wooden roshans regulated light, air, and privacy, and mitigated heat retention in coral masonry, producing a material and spatial system calibrated to the climate. This hybrid system treated once-living matter as an architectural body that required ongoing care.
.design

02/10/2025

PATIO Conversation 15 will be under the theme: “Built Environment Pedagogy.” For this session we are excited to draw attention to art and architectural education in British India. Our first presenter, Dr. Patrick Zamarian will share his recently published research on the Sir JJ School of Architecture and its efforts to attain formal recognition from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Our next speaker, Tanya Talwar, will share her ongoing research on the transregionality of art education in India through the four schools of art in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore (c. 1850-1950). Dr. Mustansir Dalvi, Professor at Sir JJ School of Art, Architecture and Design, and a noted author and architecture critic, will be our expert respondent, sharing insights from his own experience and work in Mumbai.

Visit our website, link in bio, to receive the zoom link!

design

09/09/2025

PATIO Conversation 14 will be the second session under the theme ‘Architecture and Media Cultures.’ The first session opened a Pandora’s box of critical questions about institutional support and public scholarship in the region for expressing histories of the built environment. We now focus on one media practice at a time. The upcoming session will look closely at two innovative publishing and journalism practices—The Funambulist and MATTER. Léopold Lambert and Shivangi Mariam Raj will chart how the Funambulist grew from a blog in 2010 to a magazine (print/digital/podcast) dedicated to the politics of space and bodies across geographies. Then, Ruturaj Parikh and Manasi Hattangadi will talk about their interdisciplinary practice MATTER that combines curation and journalism through projects like thinkMATTER, [IN]SIDE and others. Dr. Kathleen James Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at University College Dublin will be our expert respondent.

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