Fluid Histories of Architecture and Empire

Fluid Histories of Architecture and Empire
Swati Chattopadhyay
University of California, Santa Barbara
James A.D. Cox Lecture in Architectural History

Mon, Nov 17, 5PM
Campbell 153

One of the long-lasting effects of British colonialism in India was the construction of an infrastructural network that fundamentally altered the landscape of the Gangetic plains between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The key instruments of this transformation were not large capital cities or famous monuments, but an ordinary network of provincial towns, roads, embankments, and canals. The delta of the Ganges River in the province of Bengal with its peculiar geomorphology, however, confounded British colonial cartographers, revenue collectors, and engineers in their efforts to map and alter the riverine infrastructure. 

This presentation focuses on the historical representation of this deltaic region to query some basic assumptions of architectural history and practice that conceive land in terms of fixity and property. Analyzing the material and durational parameters of the riverine landscape, architect and architectural historian Swati Chattopadhyay demonstrates how we might rethink infrastructure from the vantage of small spaces that have been accorded little importance in architectural history.

This event will be recorded and made available on the School of Architecture's YouTube Channel.

About the Speaker

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she specializes in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her recent publications include, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture, coedited with Jeremy White (2019). One of her current book projects, The Art of Sovereignty: Making and Unmaking the British Empire, is funded by the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, and another book, Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, is supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. A Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, and former editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, she a founding editor of PLATFORM.
 

Supported by the James A.D. Cox Endowment.