Drawing Out Natures by SEA
About
In a series of nine fortnightly monsoon 2022 public seminars, SEA (School of Environment and Architecture) Conversations delves into the idea of ‘drawing out natures’ to advance imaginaries of engagement with contemporary ecological crises and climate emergencies, and the contests that come to erode and expand sociospatial claims in the shared ecologies of our worlds. It invites provocations on two questions: How can creative, exploratory and analytical engagements draw out natures of the contemporary ecological crises and climate emergencies? How can drawing out natures advance openings for the imagination of ecologically sustainable, and socially and spatially just, futures worlds?
Insight
The design of Drawing out natures is methodologically structured around three areas of ongoing research and design inquiries amongst SEA’s faculty and students, which include explorations into monsoonal ecologies, architectures of non-extraction, and cohabitation. This series extended invitations to academics and practitioners not only from the field of architecture and landscape architecture but also from the fields of urban studies, anthropology and visual arts.
Learning from/within Ecotones
Educational Experiments for a Critical Urban Pedagogy beyond Anthropocentrism
by Fotini Takirdiki
What does it entail to regard the “Ecotone“ as a pedagogical framework and an experimental field for relearning urbanism? In her talk, Fotini Takirdiki discusses the ecological concept of the Ecotone (e.g. wetlands, mangrove forests or grasslands) as a facilitator of biodiversity and a vessel for imagination as well as the educational practices that might emerge from it. She does so by connecting ideas from educational philosopher Paulo Freire and from anthropologist Gregory Bateson with own ethnographic investigations of the swamp Briesetal in North Brandenburg, Germany.
ABOUT
Fotini Takirdiki is a doctoral student and program curator in the field of experimental learning spaces. Her phd project “Political Ecologies of Knowledge in the Anthropocene“ is embedded at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin as well as at the Institute of Arts and Media at the Potsdam University. In her work she focusses on a critical exploration of knowledge production in the Anthropocene, the transformation of human-environment-relations and urban ecologies.
Monsoon As Method
by Lindsay Bremner
This presentation arises out of the work of Monsoon Assemblages, a research project funded by the European Research Council from 2016-2021. The presentation will think through what it means to reframe spatial research around the monsoon and to approach cities as monsoon assemblages or weather worlds. It will challenge ways of thinking cities and climate or society and nature as separate entities stacked up against one another, instead exploring the multiple ways they are entangled and co-produced.
ABOUT
Professor Lindsay Bremner is a research architect and educator at the University of Westminster in London where she is Director of Research in the School of Architecture and Cities. She recently (2016-2021) held European Research Council grant no. 679873 for Monsoon Assemblages, a project exploring three Bay of Bengal cities – Chennai, Dhaka and Yangon, as monsoonal assemblages being disrupted and transformed by globalisation and climate change. She holds a B.Arch from the University of Cape Town and an M.Arch and DSc.Arch from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Afforesting Urban Landscape: Miyawaki Forest
by K Sakhtivel and Vibhavari Sarangan
This presentation discusses a collaborative experiment between architects, researchers and cultivators that aims at infusing the urban fabric with indigenous and fast growing forests. These environmental nodes or zones, we hope, shall act as resilient corridors towards alleviating the effects of climate change.
ABOUT
Sakthivel is a Madurai based environmentalist. He founded and manages RainMan Enviro Solutions, Madurai. He is renowned for creating Madurai’s first Miyawaki forest and has gone on to cultivate and care for many such large scale Miyawaki forests in Tamil Nadu. Through this organisation, since 2012, Sakthivel has been conducting tree plantation drives, environment awareness campaigns, water management programmes, surveys of ground and rain water data and has also offered RWH consultation to the citizens of Madurai city. By collaborating with SEA’s Green Lab, he aims to create micro-forests across Maharashtra.
Vibhavari is an architect from SEA Mumbai (2020). Her graduate thesis ‘Relinking Padmanagar’- was based on rejuvenating the existing social networks of Padmanagar, Deonar – through a series of social and environmental interjections. In an attempt to apply her thesis project on site, she referenced cultivation practices in dense urban areas and curated a greening project that aims to create environmentally-active social nodes in Padma Nagar and other such vulnerable settlements that dot the edges of the Deonar dumpyard.
Architectural Innovations in Bamboo: Designing for Mainstream Futures
By Hemang Mistry
The philosophy of Hemang Mistry’s practice is to borrow from nature and give back to it. While bamboo is categorised as grass, his works demonstrate how it can be one of the most promising materials for the future, that can be used in landscape, architecture and urban design projects.
ABOUT
Hemang Mistry is an architect and urban designer with an experience of 16 years in designing with mud and bamboo at varying scales from architectural to urban. He completed his architecture from SCET, Surat in 2006 and Urban Design from CEPT University, Ahmedabad in 2011. Hemang has won many national design competitions within his pursuit of ecological design. He is a bamboo enthusiast, as well as a member of IIA and the working committee of Bamboo Society of India.
Reclaiming our lost natural building practices
By Biju Bhaskar
This lecture offers an insight into various native natural building techniques that frame the orientation of Thannal – a natural building awareness group. It discusses ways in which these techniques can be integrated within the present-day construction practice including wall systems, roofing, surface finishes and allied aspects.
ABOUT
Born in Kerala, India, to a farmer’s family, Biju Bhaskar stopped his studies at a conventional architecture college and travelled extensively in different parts of Indian villages. For one and a half years he worked under a tribal master making driftwood sculptures in Khajuraho. He founded Thannal Natural Homes in 2011, a natural building awareness group and is still continuing his inner journey in the self-study and earthen shelter movement in India. In the last decade, he has spent his time in research & documentation of indigenous shelters, spreading awareness through taking classes, workshops and publishing articles, books and videos on natural buildings.
Maharashtra Stepwells Campaign
by Rohan Kale
This lecture offers an insight into various native natural building techniques that frame the orientation of Thannal – a natural building awareness group. It discusses ways in which these techniques can be integrated within the present-day construction practice including wall systems, roofing, surface finishes and allied aspects.
ABOUT
Rohan Kale studied at the Welingkar Institute of Management and has worked in the field of human resources. He is the pioneer of the Maharashtra Stepwells Campaign.
How could animals and architects co-design?
by Ignacio Farías
This presentation offers a story of collective experimenting and learning based on a question: what if we sought to relearn how to practice architecture from animals? By exploring this question and by telling this story, Ignacio Farias aims at circumventing two conventional gestures: helping out animals survive in our contemporary urban environments or treating animals as ‘food for thought’ about architectural practice. Following STS (Science and Technology Studies) and environmental humanities multispecies concerns, Farias approaches urban animals as epistemic partners for rethinking architectural practice, thus engaging their capacities in attempts at designing with (rather than ‘for’ or ‘from’) them.
ABOUT
Ignacio Farias is Professor of Urban Anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin. His research interests concern current ecological and infrastructural transformations of cities and the associated epistemo-political challenges to the democratization of city-making. His most recent work explores the politics of environmental disruptions, from tsunamis over heat to noise. He is also interested in doing urban ethnography as a mode of city making performed with others (designers, initiatives, concerned groups, policy makers) and by other means (moving from textual to material productions).
Acts of Agencies
by Maksud Ali Mondal
In this presentation, Maksud Ali Mondal explicates the relationship between organisms vis-a-vis our place within the environment that brings us to closely consider the discourse of non-human agencies. Through his work the ‘Fungal Garden’, Mondal accounts for the role of non-humans such as microorganisms, mycelium, fungi, insects and plants in the creation of the environment. Such an approach may offer fresh perspectives towards the idea of controlled environments, neglected and contaminated spaces and possibilities of working spatially with particular materials.
ABOUT
Maksud Ali Mondal was born in Bankura, West Bengal, India. His practice includes facilitating experiential understanding of organisms in a durational, built microcosm, using sculpture, painting, installation and photography. His work studies microbial contamination, transformations and decomposition of organic matter by bacteria, fungi, creatures, fermentation, oxidation, rotting and with the organic, manmade found objects and everyday discarded materials, thereby generating reflections on how we understand ourselves in relation to each other including other species, in the transforming environment.