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PATIO, Ahmedabad (2026)

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.

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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.

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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!

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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.
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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!

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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.

design

11/08/2025

PATIO Conversation 13 will be the second session under the theme: “Material and Construction Histories.” The previous conversation on the history of cement-concrete and the construction of colonial roadworks in September 2024 put the spotlight on how such histories can deepen and indeed revise our understanding of South Asian histories.

In this session we have Priya Joseph discussing historical brick buildings in South India. Priya ‘reads’ the buildings as an archive of their construction, thus opening up the revelatory potential of material histories. The next speaker is Vishesh Kandolkar, who centres plaster in his reading of the history and future life of the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa. Architectural historian Pedro Guedes will be our expert respondent, sharing insights from his work on materials histories and interactions between colonial building cultures.

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

design

06/07/2025

PATIO Conversation 12 will be the second session under the theme: “Writing Histories.” This theme reflects on the peripheries of our discipline and brings new and alternate voices to the forefront. Our upcoming roundtable session “The Community as Archive” will highlight alternative methodologies of knowledge production that question normative history writing. In this session we will be joined by Sarah Melsens (CNRS and FLAME University), Ish*ta Shah (Curating for Culture), and Pamudu Tennakoon (Brown University). Our panelists will critically reflect on their experience and research on working with communities to present lesser and unknown histories. Sarah Melsens and Ish*ta Shah will trace the history of communities of stone and earth workers from the Wadar caste in Pune, India, showing the potential of ethnographic approaches to architectural historiography. Continuing the thread of colonial historiography, Pamudu Tennakoon will discuss De Soysa building in Colombo, Sri Lanka, bringing to attention the changing relation of communities to buildings through a close and simultaneous reading of archival, oral, and artistic narratives.

PATIO Conversation 12 has been curated and will be moderated by Saptarshi Sanyal and Yakin Kinger, the theme director and coordinator, respectively, of Writing Histories.

Please register through our website for the zoom link, link in bio.

design

08/06/2025

PATIO Conversation 11 will be the second session under the theme: “Solidarities and Opportunities.” This session promises a fascinating exploration of “Migration and Remittances in Architecture of the Indian Ocean” with participants Madhumathi A. and Zahra Yasmoon (Vellore Institute of Technology); Nirodha Dissanayake (University of Adelaide) and Dipti Shukla (Manipal Academy of Higher Education - MAHE, Dubai), thereby covering a large expanse of our network’s collective geographical scope of inquiry and viewing architecture through the lens of transfers of people, finances, labour, and cultures..

We hope, over this conversation, to discover how money sent home by migrants creates unique hybrid architectures that blend local traditions with global influences. The session features three compelling presentations on remittance houses: Madhumathi A. and Zahra Yasmoon will talk about Tamil Nadu’s Chettiyar community and their connections with Malacca region in Malaysia, while Nirodha Dissanayake will discuss their recent doctoral research on Sri Lankan fisherfolk’s transformative Gulf experiences, and finally Dipti Shukla will share their emerging research on Kerala and its architectural evolution through Gulf labour migration. These stories reveal the profound ways in which migration transforms not just individual lives but entire communities through their built environments.

Please register through our website.

design

05/05/2025

Our next PATIO Conversation will be the second 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. The first session under this theme, which took place in July 2024, focussed on late-19th century colonial India. In this second session, we shift the historical and geographic focus to the emerging post-colonial states of Malaysia and Singapore between the 1940s and the 1960s to explore how the commercial networks of the late-colonial building world along with the politics of decolonisation influenced the construction of government buildings and the development of new university campuses.

In this session we will be joined by Nicholas Bill and Lai Chee Kien as speakers and Cole Roskam as a respondent. Nicholas Bill is a senior lecturer (Associate Professor) at Cardiff University, his research covers both practical engineering and histories of engineering and construction. In his presentation ‘More Than Just a Military Base: Commercial Construction in Colonial Singapore’ he will discuss how innovative global building technologies and resources which were transferred across the British Empire impacted construction in Singapore. He will examine the Sultan Ibrahim Building, c. 1940 as a key case study. Lai Chee Kien is a lecturer and registered architect in Singapore, researching histories of the built environment in Southeast Asia at architectural and urban scales. His presentation ‘University of Malaya’ explores the complex and intertwined histories of the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya. The role that the design of campuses and buildings played on both sides of the Causeway will be discussed. Cole Roskam is Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. His research explores architecture’s role in mediating China’s relationship to the world.

design

03/04/2025

PATIO Conversation 09 marks our first anniversary edition! Having circled through our eight research themes in the past year, we bring you a fresh format for this session, a special roundtable on ‘Drawing Matters’, under the theme ‘Tools of Building Practice’.

In this session, we will be joined by pre-eminent architectural scholars Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Megha Chand Inglis (The Bartlett, University College London). Our panellists will reflect critically on their own research, inviting us to re-imagine where and how the drawing can be located in the building process, in particular, for the making of ephemeral structures for the Durgapuja festival in Bengal, eastern India, and the more permanent building restoration and archiving practices of the Sompuras, a western Indian community of temple builders. The discussion seeks to move beyond binaries like structure and permanence in the understanding of vernacular architecture, on the one hand, and the ‘modern’ professional and the ‘traditional’ builder-artisan, on the other. In thus delving into matters of the drawing and, in effect, why the drawing matters, the session seeks to challenge our perception of the drawing as a mode of exerting unidirectional authority by the professional architect.

PATIO Conversation 09 has been curated and will be moderated by Sarah Melsens and Saptarshi Sanyal, the theme director and co-ordinator, respectively, of Tools of Building Practice.

Please register through our website for the zoom link, link in bio.

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27/02/2026

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02/10/2025

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