Architects’ Roundtable

SOUNDINGS

11th February 2023
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm


Participants

Bandra Collective / Samir D’monte, Zameer Basrai Community Design Agency / Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, Bhawna Jaimini
Jaadughar / Pratik Modi, Anjali Tewari, Sahej Rahal CityLabs / Vaibhavi Dave
moderated by School of Environment and Architecture (Rupali Gupte, Anuj Daga)



Sounding is a process of using sound waves to measure the undulating depths of ocean beds so that heavy ships can navigate waters safely. Sounding lines created by ships over multiple routes effectively map the terrain hidden beneath the constantly changing surface of the sea. Ancient mariners used sounding-weights, the oldest known marine navigational instrument, not only to determine the depth of water, but also to bring up samples of the bottom, comparing the result with their knowledge of coastal geography and river behavior. Although charts were rudimentary by modern standards, Greek and Roman navigators had a surprisingly effective knowledge of the seas. Much like these navigators of the sea, American artist-architect and educator John Hejduk uses the concept of ‘Soundings’ to string together fragments of imaginations in the form of drawings, texts or poems, to lay out the speculative fundamentals of his discipline as well as suggest propositional dimensions for architectural practice.


Several urgent questions that may be buried under the waters of institutional debris have attracted interrogation and reorientation in recent times. Contemporary architectural and artistic spheres have been undergoing a steady disintegration of traditional models of practice.  The emerging complexities in urban conditions, the changing political economies of practice, the new dynamics of caste and class, the debates around spatial justice have necessitated new formations outside the atelier or corporate models. While standard forms of practice are built around economic impetus, what sustains solidarities that are oriented through spatial concerns? What potential do such organizational formations have towards redefining the ethics and politics of spatial practice? What challenges do they work with and what futures do they promise?


Soundings aims to investigate the impulses that drive spatial practitioners to reorganize themselves into new collectives and collaborations in order to address the politics of the contemporary culture of the built environment. Within the larger rubric of SEA’s annual conference ‘Noise-fields’, this roundtable discussion harnesses the metaphor of soundings - to reevaluate the contours of practice as well as mapping the instrumentality of discursivity that results into new solidarities - in turn excavating a new ground over which spatial practice may sprout. Soundings then, is a way of finding new ways to swim through the waters of architecture as a socio-political and cultural practice. It offers a framework within which the unseen may be sensed and sailed.