Book Chapters

Stacks, Mui Ho Fine Arts Library, Cornell University

2024

“Against the Grain: Women Architects Rereading and Reimagining the Archive and Monograph,” in Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now, ed. Dana Arnold (London: Routledge, 2024) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003224662/women-architectural-history-dana-arnold

Women are far more likely to be keepers and guardians of archives rather than subjects of these collections. To highlight such absences, architectural historian Samia Henni says we must ‘learn to read the archives against the grain’, alert to what is erased as well as preserved. Reading against the grain also means finding and preserving documents to retrieve lost histories. To tell their stories Minnette De Silva, Brinda Somaya, and Chitra Vishwanath reread their personal archives to reimagine architectural monographs they published. Challenging narratives constructed around a singular, heroic architectural figure, these South Asian women architects subvert the canonical and hagiographical ends architectural archives and monographs typically serve. Instead they emphasize the subjective, collaborative and representative in the stories they tell of themselves, their practices, and their families and collaborators.

2021

“The City Has Memory: Images of Ruin and Reclamation in Bombay/Mumbai” Candide, eds., Axel Sowa and Ela Kacel 21 (January 2021)

https://www.hatjecantz.de/candide-journal-for-architectural-knowledge-7946-1.html

Still and moving images give cities memories of urban pasts as constructed, destroyed, and redeveloped. But they are also projections into promised yet often elusive futures that speak about idealism and ambition as well as erasure and suppression. As a city created and restricted by the reclamation and conjunction of seven islands, the urbanity of Bombay (known as Mumbai since 1995) has always been about intensive cycles of excavation and construction, ruin and redevelopment. These urban memories speak to the new Indian nation’s idealism and heroicism after 1947 and the neoliberal state’s ambitions since 1991.

2021

Afterword, “Emergence,” Biome Diaries 03: Ecological Architecture from India, eds. Chitra Vishwanath, Sharath Nayak, Anurag Tamhankar, and Ishita Shah (Bangalore: Biome Environmental Solutions, Pvt. Ltd, 2021).

https://www.biome-solutions.com/biomediaries/

Primarily alluding to the art and design community, Biome Diaries are meant for all kinds of readers and enthusiasts of ecology and environment. Writing style varies to suit the individual author and reflect the chosen topic or a certain period in time, but all of them are intended to tell stories. Storytelling here has been interpreted in many forms, ranging from narrating a design process to illustrating lived experiences, mapping the transition of societal changes to building contextual inquiries and even picturisation of key intangible values of design and construction. Designed as a set of three, the diaries are titled as ‘now’, ‘then’ and ‘emergence’ and they continuously defy the conventional notion of time and context in an architectural practice.

2020

“Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes: Artists and Artist Communities in Postindustrial Buffalo and New York City,” Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism, ed. Peter H. Christensen. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2020): https://cornell.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7591/cornell/9781501749766.001.0001/upso-9781501749766

Buffalo and New York City struggled with white flight to the suburbs, misguided urban renewal programs, and widespread deindustrialization during the 1960s and 1970s. Each city contended with economic collapse, impoverished communities, and social and political unrest. Amidst the ruin artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Charles Clough, and Cindy Sherman saw another future for derelict factories and neighborhoods. Funded by innovative government programs, they repurposed abandoned industrial buildings as studios, galleries, and performance venues run by and for artists. This chapter explores the cultural Erie Canal these artists constructed between upstate and downstate avant-gardes and how it challenged traditional institutions and transformed communities. It is a legacy still shaping development and displacement today.

2018

“An Empathetic Architect,” Brinda Somaya: Works and Continuities, eds. Ruturaj Parikh and Nandini Somaya Sompat (Mapin: Ahmedabad, 2018)

“Dialogues: Kumar Iyer and Brinda Somaya,” Brinda Somaya: Works and Continuities, eds. Ruturaj Parikh and Nandini Somaya Sompat (Mapin: Ahmedabad, 2018)

2015

“Illuminating First Bombay and Then Mumbai: Urbs Prima in Indus from 1800s to 2000s,” Cities of Light, eds. Sandy Isenstadt, Dietrich Neumann, and Margaret Petty. London and New York: Routledge

2014

“Pravina Mehta: A Woman Architect in Post-Independence India,”
Making Art and Architecture in Modern India: Woman’s Eye, Woman’s Hand. Ed., D. Fairchild Ruggles. New Delhi: Zubaan Press

2004

2012

“Our Man in Havana: Walker Evans’s Photographs for The Crime of Cuba,” Camera/Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City. Eds., Timothy Wray and Andrew Higgott. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Press

2009

“A Passage to India: Luc Durand,” Luc Durand: Itinéraires d’un Architecte, ed. Etienne Desrosiers, P7V, Montréal

2008

“Migrants, Tourists, and Millionaires: Marion Post Wolcott’s Photographs of a Changing Miami and South Florida,” The New Deal in South Florida: Design, Policy, and Community Building. Eds. John A. Stuart and John F. Stack, Jr. Gainesville: University Press of Florida

“The First Professional: Benjamin Henry Latrobe,”American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader. Ed., Keith L. Eggener, London and New York: Routledge

2003

“After-Images of the ‘New’ New York and the Alfred Stieglitz Circle,” After-Images of the City. Eds., Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press

2002

“The Photography of the Night,” The Architecture of the Night. Ed., Dietrich Neumann.Munich: Prestel Press

2001

“In the Camera’s Eye: The Woolworth Building, Alfred Stieglitz, and Avant-Garde Photography,” Cass Gilbert: Life and Work, eds. Steven Flanders and Barbara Christensen (W. W. Norton)

Papers

2019

“The Architecte Parlant in Modern India: Communicating the Politics of Identity, National Pride, and Global Aspiration,” Political Communication in India: Actors, Structures, and Processes, ed. Lion Koenig (under review at Oxford University Press)

“Upstate and Downstate Avant-Gardes: Artists and Artist Communities of Buffalo and New York City in the 1970s” Currents: Buffalo at the Crossroads, ed., Peter Christensen (Cornell University Press, 2019)