Neeraj Bhatia: New Investigations in Collective Form

This lecture will be aired on this page starting at 6:30PM, followed by a public Zoom discussion starting at 7:00PM. Please register in advance here. Zoom account registration is required. 

Today, society continues to face urban challenges – from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment – that, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. New Investigations in Collective Form presents a group of design experiments by the design-research office The Open Workshop, that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist. Organized into five themes for producing collectivity – Frameworks, Articulated Surfaces, the Living Archive, Re-Wiring States, and Commoning – the projects straddle the fine line between the individual and collective, informal and formal, choice and control, impermanent and permanent.

The lecture presents work from the eponymous book which contains contributions by: Neeraj Bhatia, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Peggy Deamer, Clare Lyster, Keith Krumwiede, Jenny Odell, Albert Pope, Rafi Segal, and Charles Waldheim.

The lecture will be followed by a public live panel discussion including Neeraj Bhatia, Peggy Deamer and Keith Krumwiede moderated by Nora Akawi.

Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer whose work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where he also Directs the urbanism research lab, the Urban Works Agency. Bhatia has also held teaching positions at UC Berkeley (as the visiting Esherick Professor), UT Arlington (as the visiting Ralph Hawkins Professor), Cornell University, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. Neeraj is founder of The Open Workshop, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Architectural League Young Architects Prize, Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence, and the Canadian Prix de Rome. He is co-editor of books Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and co-author of Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling — Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism and New Investigations in Collective Form. Neeraj has a Master degree in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture and principal in the firm of Deamer, Studio.  She is the founding member and the Research Coordinator of the Architecture Lobby, a group advocating for the value of architectural design and labor. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design and the forthcoming Architecture and Labor. Her theory work explores the relationship between subjectivity, design, and labor. She received the Architectural Record 2018 Women in Architecture Activist Award.

Keith Krumwiede is the Dean of Architecture at the California College of the Arts. He is the author of Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction, which was named the 2017 book of the year by critics Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster. Krumwiede’s work was featured in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennale and the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennial and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions. His projects, essays, and experimental texts have appeared in Cartha, Drawing Futures, The Architect’s Newspaper, The Avery Review, Log, Praxis, Perspecta, 306090, and Domus. Krumwiede has taught at UC Berkeley, MIT, NJIT, Yale, and Rice. In 2018, he was the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Nora Akawi is Assistant Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union. Her research and teaching lie at the intersections of displacement, erasure, and memory with architecture—drawing from migration and border studies, mapping practices, and archive theory. Prior to joining The Cooper Union, Nora taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she was director of Studio-X Amman. Most recently, Nora curated Al Majhoola Min Al-Ard (This Land’s Unknown) at the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans 2019, and co-curated Friday Sermon, the Bahrain Pavilion exhibition in the Biennale Architettura 2018 in Venice. She co-edited the books Friday: An Assembly (2018) and Architecture and Representation: The Arab City (2016). Recent publications include “Mapping Borderlands: Drawing From the Jawlan” in GTA Papers 2: War Zones (ETH Zürich, 2019), and “Worlding From the South” in Manifesta 12: Palermo Atlas, (OMA / Humboldt Books, 2018).

This remote lecture and discussion is free and accessible to the public.