Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim
About  |  

UPCOMING
CONVERSATION

10th April 2025
Thursday 7.30 pm IST

DRAWING MATTERS

A roundtable with:

Swati Chattopadhyay
(University of California, Santa Barbara)
Megha Chand Inglis
(The Bartlett, University College London)

<Registration Link>


DRAWING MATTERS

 Inglis, Megha Chand. ‘Living (in) the Archive’. Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 26, no. 1  (2022): 69.   


                
 Chattopadhyay, Swati. ‘Ephemeral by Design’. Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2022): 30–46. 





The drawing is hardly a neutral tool of building practice. Architectural historiography conventionally views the drawing as an authoritative document through which the professional architect wrests control over the process of making, thereby marginalising the builder or artisan. Yet, might the drawing also become a site for such authority to be challenged? Does its very nature reveal a set of social relations overlooked in established architectural narratives?
Could the drawing, then, serve as a way to access novel ways of understanding modernity by recovering previously unheard voices and experiences? Might the drawing recast the archive as an affective realm of its producers and users? Or, even, could the drawing construct its own history? In this conversation on the tools of building practice, between the lifeworlds of the Sompura temple builders in Gujarat and the practices underlying the making of Durgapuja pandals in Bengal, we explore these questions related to the matter of drawing, and, in effect, why the drawing matters.

PAST
SESSIONS


PATIO Conversation No. 08 | Labib Hossain & Javairia Shahid
PATIO Conversation No. 07 |  Shaikhah Ali Alsalhi & 
Ali Javid     
PATIO Conversation No. 06 | Sarover Zaidi & Saniya Siddiqui
PATIO Conversation No. 05 | Mehwish Abid & Johann Peiris 
PATIO Conversation No. 04 | Meenakshi Jain & Richa Shah       
            
PATIO Conversation No. 03 | Anthony Wako & Dhaval Chauhan
PATIO Conversation No. 02 | Kairavi Maniar & Esa Shaikh
PATIO Conversations No. 01 | Chetan Sahasrabudhe & Ashmita Gupta
 






PATIO
CONVERSATIONS

PATIO Conversations are open to all; we aim to meet once a month, and scholars get an opportunity to share their work in progress. These presentations may be on a topic of their choice, which may relate to one or more of PATIO’s thematic umbrellas, or even critically reconsider and reconfigure our definition of particular themes. Participants may include independent scholars, Master's students, or aspiring PhD students as well as postdoctoral researchers who can contribute as speakers or choose to be an active part of the audience. Each such conversation foregrounds two scholars presenting their work for 20 minutes, followed by feedback from relevant respondents invited by the PATIO team in relation to the topic, and finally opening the discussion out to the larger audience. As such, PATIO Conversations offers a platform for critical dialogue while both disseminating recently completed work and providing mentorship to aspirant researchers, including potential PhD candidates. These sessions provide researchers with the resources to further their work related to the state of the field by involving active experts and engaging with current bodies of relevant work, published or otherwise. 
PATIO Conversations is directed by Saptarshi Sanyal and Sarah Melsens with the help of Thematic directors and Coordinators.