Sony Devabhaktuni

Notes on Drawing | Writing 03/11/23 - 20:40 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Amarillo Press
  • title_3: in the book: Go Field and Towers by Guillaume Othenin-Girard and Nigel Peake
  • category: 3
  • year: 2017
  • content_0_paragraph: This text was a small contribution to the book <strong><em><a href="https://secondstreet.bigcartel.com/product/go-field-and-towers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Go Field & Towers</a></em></strong>, written by <strong><a href="https://www.arch.hku.hk/staff/arch/othenin-girard-guillaume-l/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Guillaume Othenin-Girard</a></strong> and <strong><a href="https://www.nigelpeake.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nigel Peake</a></strong> as a reflection on teaching in the first year architecture program at the <strong><a href="https://www.epfl.ch/labs/alice/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ALICE Lab</a></strong> at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne). I had the pleasure to share that experience with them, and the text is a product, in many ways, of that time together. Download the pdf <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pdnBSveZxPsThAdvawjmM4IOE8lb1kHO/view?usp=share_link" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>here</em>...</a>
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Rumsey Street Flyover 05/11/23 - 20:04 Sony Devabhaktuni Teaching
  • title_2: University of Hong Kong
  • title_3: BAAS4_Spring Semester Students Cheung Hoi Ching Minia Choi Chung Hei Vincent Chun Bing Tsun Lester Shivangi Das Fong Lixin Leon Lai Hiu Lam Natalie Park Ji Eun Szeto Wai Ching Regina So Cheuk Lam Jonathan Soo Kwan Yau April Sun Yue Rong Wang Xiangning
  • category: 4
  • year: 2019
  • content_0_paragraph: <p style="font-weight: 400;">On January 20th, 2019, Hong Kong inaugurated the Central-Wan Chai Bypass, one of a number of large-scale infrastructure projects that transformed the territory. The bypass promised to cut travel times between the eastern and western half of Hong Kong Island and also to liberate heavily trafficked arteries and roads, opening the possibility of rethinking districts. These possibilities continue to make their way through various stages of negotiation, design and implementation reflecting the government's priorities for civic life, the environment and mobility.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">One of the complex knots of infrastructure that was loosened by the Central-Wan Chai Bypass is found east of Shun Tak Centre. This confluence of roads, overpasses and elevated walk-ways was slated to be rethought when one of its major branches – the Rumsey Street Flyover – was scheduled demolished. Although the flyover represents no more than 100 metres of elevated autoroute, the consequences of its demolition could be exponentially significant -- activating the street, rethinking transportation networks, linking to the water or new programs for the site -- could all be envisioned through a careful analysis of the issues and concentric areas of impact  implicated by the flyover’s demolition.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">In the first semester (<a href="https://sonydevabhaktuni.net/street-as-negotiated-infrastructure/">The Street as Negotiated Infrastructure</a>), students developed a methodology for studying the street as an object of investigation, using photographic documentation, plan drawing and model to identify modes of intervention and initial design ideas. One of the underlying questions guiding the studio, was whether architecture could find a specific agency or method of work for the street, considering that nearly every discipline within the built environment (from landscape to urban planning to real estate) claims some authority (design or otherwise). Very often the street in Hong Kong is understood as a techno-bureaucratic infrastructure where human occupation is a veneer of design; the appropriation of streets and their civic role, while manifest through determined acts of domestic resistance, are relegated to the literal left-over spaces of the urban environment.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">In the second semester, students used the expertise they developed to look at the demolition of the Rumsey Street Flyover as a catalyst for rethinking the street and surrounding neighborhood. The site of study offered each student or group of students the opportunity to develop their own position towards the future of Hong Kong and the possibilities opened up by the Central Wan Chai bypass.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Key questions: What role is there for architecture within the complex, negotiated decisions (political, economic, planning, etc.) that determine the street as an element of urban experience? How does the street work as a technical, structural, environmental and social infrastructure for the functioning of the city? What do we mean by street in the context of Hong Kong, where limits between publicly accessible and privately delimited spaces are ambiguous and where programmatic distinctions (between, for example, plaza, sidewalk, park, etc.) also call into question the nature and extent of the street? How do we consider the scalar and spatial diversity of streets in Hong Kong; is a street distinct from a highway, a footpath or an elevated walkway? How do vertical surfaces that delimit the space of the street act to qualify it? What are the limits of drawing and model to describe the street?</p> Cheung Hoi Ching Minia and Choi Chung Hei Vincent looked at the historical infill development of the neighbourhood and proposed a pedestrian highway and a negative port to reclaim the harbor. Chun Bing Tsun Lester and So Cheuk Lam Jonathan discovered an abandon rail station under the site through research on buried infrastructural networks. The station and platform becomes part of a loop of civic infrastructure that gives ties together car-oriented elements that could soon become obsolete. Shivangi Das and Park Ji Eun studied the ground under the overpass, cataloguing the columns that held up the highway. They redesigning the passage between city and harbor by transforming the existing streets into a shared realm for people and cars. Fong Lixin Leon and Lai Hiu Lam Natalie began by looking at the underside of ceiling and underpasses that are often unremarked elements of the urban realm. Leon developed a green ceiling for the underpass and Natalie carved into the ground to create a connection to the harbor. Szeto Wai Ching Regina and Soo Kwan Yau April studied the small scale elements around the flyover and imagined its demolition and reconstruction into a new ground that connected existing pedestrian networks while offering a place to stay and gather. Sun Yue Rong Rayna and Wang Xiangning reimagined an existing refuse center to create a space to rest and stay. University of Hong Kong // <a href="https://www.arch.hku.hk/programmes_/arch/">Department of Architecture</a> // BAAS4_Spring 2019  
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The Street as Negotiated Infrastructure 02/11/23 - 21:24 Sony Devabhaktuni Teaching
  • title_2: University of Hong Kong
  • title_3: BAAS4_Fall Semester Students Chan Shu Man Amanda Cheung Hoi Ching Minia Cheung Ngai Yan Sherrry Choi Chung Hei Vincent Shivangi Das Li Sue Chen Coral Munot Szeto Wai Ching Regina Soo Kwan Yau April Wong Ka Lam Katherine
  • category: 4
  • year: 2018
  • content_0_paragraph: <p style="font-weight: 400;">While Hong Kong is well known for the complex network of large-scale infrastructural projects that make the functioning of the city possible, the studio looked into the material conditions of everyday infrastructure: streets, sidewalks, footpaths, alleys and walkways. While the street is the site of countless social exchanges, events and happenings, the studio looked specifically at the accumulation of small and large-scale design decisions that together condition our experience of moving through the city. These decisions can either result in a street that is open to diverse, unexpected forms of appropriation or closes off such possibilities.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">As a site of constant negotiation, the street becomes ever more important as cities around the world begin to question the late 20th century prioritization of vehicular traffic over other ways of occupying urban space. These questions are, for Hong Kong, ever more challenging due to the extreme diversity of the street: in spatial and programmatic terms.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Key questions: What role can typology play in ordering our understanding of the street as an everyday infrastructure? What role is there for architecture within the complex, negotiated decisions (political, economic, planning, etc.) that determine the street as an element of urban experience? How does the street work as a technical, structural, environmental and social infrastructure for the functioning of the city? What do we mean by street in the context of Hong Kong, where limits between publicly accessible and privately delimited spaces are ambiguous and where programmatic distinctions (between, for example, plaza, sidewalk, park, etc.) also call into question the nature and extent of the street? How do we consider the scalar and spatial diversity of streets in Hong Kong; is a street distinct from a highway, a footpath or an elevated walkway? How do vertical surfaces that delimit the space of the street act to qualify it?</p> Chan Shu Man Amanda and Choi Chung Hei Vincent used an analysis of code to develop new street front typologies for the Tai Hang neighbourhood Cheung Hoi Ching Minia and Soo Kwan Yau April redesigned a traffic island after studying the appropriation of small scale infrastructural elements. Cheung Ngai Yan Sherry and Li Sue Chen cut into a Kowloon tower podium to create connections between this upper ground and an interior. Shivangi Das and Coral Munot looked at the movements of water, people and traffic in Causeway Bay to propose new curb typologies. Szeto Wai Ching Regina and Wong Ka Lam Katherine remodeled the slopes of Central and its stairs. University of Hong Kong // <a href="https://www.arch.hku.hk/programmes_/arch/">Department of Architecture</a> // BAAS4_Fall 2018  
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The Opening of Space and Fixed-Frame Film 17/01/23 - 11:05 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: CCA Web-journal
  • title_3: my thanks to Alexandra Pereira-Edwards CCA Ng Ka Lung Kal Fan Xinkai
  • category: 3
  • year: 2023
  • content_0_title: Hong Kong / the opening of space and fixed-frame film
  • content_1_paragraph: As Hong Kong continues through a period in which the future is enforced as a stable and enclosed realm of action, fixed-frame film, as a practice of the city, attends to the contingent present. It calls forth an attunement toward the uncertainty of becoming: where doubt and questioning are necessary qualities of a future still held close as potential. Film moves images through time to figure space. In films of cities, this moving of images can function as a series of quick cuts or else at speeds that create a sinuous continuity. Both ways of figuring the city–as staccato or never-ceasing–obscure the image itself, allowing the operative sensibility to take hold. I am thinking, for example, of Godfrey Reggio’s <em>Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance</em> (1982) or of Jessica Kingdon’s more recent observations of contemporary China in <em>Ascension</em> (2021). These films solicit a way of looking that depend less on an attuned gaze, than on an awestruckedness that renders the <em>image itself </em>undemanding. <a href="https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/31/figuring-territory/88615/hong-kong-the-opening-of-space-and-fixed-frame-film"><em>more...</em></a>
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Common/Central/Ground 31/10/23 - 21:25 Sony Devabhaktuni Teaching
  • title_2: University of Hong Kong
  • title_3: BAAS4_Fall Semester Students Au Chun Hung Donald Alexandra Bedin Cheung Chun Hin Alex Akshara Khaitan Milan Aleksandrov Ushev Wu Yi-en Yu Ka Long Keith Zhu Jiqi Tod
  • category: 4
  • year: 2017
  • content_0_paragraph: <p style="font-weight: 400;">The studio considered how territorial, regional and global forces -- both material and immaterial -- shape architecture's role in the city. Students began by looking at Hong Kong Central, the financial and commercial heart of the the city.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Common / Central / Ground.</strong> We took each of these terms to be contentious; even more so when their multiple meanings are juxtaposed in relation to each other or in relation to Hong Kong.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Geography / Landscape / Infrastructure. </strong>These fields of inquiry may seem uncomfortably outside the domain of architecture. Students tested architecture’s capacity to interrogate the city using these territorial scales of thinking, reading, observing and drawing. They worked between the ambiguities that each of these categories presents as a way of ordering territory.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Economics / Politics / History. </strong>Students developed a position drawn from a specific, personal and discursive reading of the political economy that drives (or has driven) the development of Central, a political economy rooted both in the spaces of the district and in regional, transnational and global forms of exchange.</p> Au Chun Hung Donal and Wu Yi-en Ina considered the history of Admiralty, and the "islands" of block by block development that made the district's ground a no-person's land. Their proposal reclaims the street as an in-between of free play. Alexandra Bedin measured the water body between Central and Kowloon. Her proposal develops typologies for the water's edge that brings people in contact with the bay. Cheung Chun Hin Alex and Yu Ka Long Keith pedestrianize the infrastructure that separates Hong Kong Park from the city. They argue that the infrastructural knot of roads and elevated paths that surround the park are the remnants of a historical past that no longer serves the needs of the city's people. Akshara Khaitan maps the water infrastructures of the city, looking at the relation between the reservoirs that stock water and the network of pipes and outlets that carry rain to the ocean. Milan Ushev and Zhu Jiqi Tod study the historical development of the land in front of the HSBC Tower. Through a layering of historical plans and sections they develop a new program for the existing undeveloped (in 2017) land, proposing playing fields and public grounds that offer a provisional civic realm. University of Hong Kong // <a href="https://www.arch.hku.hk/programmes_/arch/">Department of Architecture</a> // BAAS4_Spring 2017  
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Hong Kong Nation 02/11/23 - 18:02 Sony Devabhaktuni Teaching
  • title_2: University of Hong Kong
  • title_3: BAAS4_Spring Semester Students Chun Ka Ming Bobby Chung Kim Him Obed Lau Kok Yi Joey Leung Verena Liu Tsz Shing Jason Liu Kaixuan Tsui Wing Yee Verdi So Cheuk Ying Sharon Yim Chi Chung Tim
  • category: 4
  • year: 2018
  • content_0_paragraph: <p style="font-weight: 400;">The studio considered architecture’s capacity to frame and address territorial scale issues that implicate political, social and economic forces by asking the question:</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;"><em>Between the present day and 2047, what transformations to Hong Kong’s political-geography are necessary for the territory to legitimate an identity as: part of the People’s Republic of China; part of the Pearl River Delta region; as an independent nation?</em></p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">Political geography is understood as the system of spatial structures (geography, landscape, infrastructure) that underlie and impact political processes.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The studio: developed methodologies for reading, describing and interpreting the territory of Hong Kong; problematized a specific issues relevant to the studio question; identified a site or sites where these issues are manifest; identified programs that respond to both this problematization of issues and the chosen sites; made speculative proposals at relevant scales that enact these programs.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">The seemingly linear process described above was, in practice, a back and forth between scales, between sites, between modes of thinking and modes of production. The ultimate objective was  to articulate and support a position through drawing, model and text. Students were encouraged to work simultaneously at multiple scales, using encounters between tectonic, urban and territorial considerations as a way to test the limits of their position.</p> Chun Ka Ming Bobby and Liu Tsz Shing Bobby densified New Town districts, occupying streets with residential and commercial ribbons of development. Chung Kim Him Obed analyzed the future of Hong Kong's container port imagining a district of mechanized housing. Lau Kok Yi Joey developed a floating city as an alternative to conventional land-fill projects between Hong Kong and Shenzen. Leung Verena and So Cheek Ying Sharon speculated on a future in which the MTR system becomes a continuous, self-contained city of clean, breathable air that protects citizens from the a degraded external environment. Liu Kaixuan projected a continuous MTR network for the Pearl River Delta, with civic nodes for exchange. Tsui Wing Yee Verdi speculated on the future of the Hong Kong Express Rail Link Station when de-bordering takes place in 2046. Yim Chi Chung Tim develops a new land-fill district in Aberdeen that connects land with island. University of Hong Kong // <a href="https://www.arch.hku.hk/programmes_/arch/">Department of Architecture</a> // BAAS4_Spring 2018  
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Collaboration and Practice 26/10/23 - 22:25 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Routledge
  • title_3: with Min Kyung Lee in the edited collection: All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture: Towards a Future of Social Change Farhana Ferrous and Bryan Bell editors
  • category: 3
  • year: 2021
  • content_0_paragraph: <div> <p class="Body">The role of collaboration in architecture has become increasingly visible in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis as long-standing models of work have been revealed to be unsustainable. In <i>Architecture: the story of practice, </i>Dana Cuff describes how architects negotiate the contradictory pulls of professional life and their ambivalent relationship to the diverse collaborative forms that characterize the profession: “There is a general belief, evident among artists, architects, critics, and even scholars, that the quality of a work of art decreases in proportion to the number of people involved in its creation,” and that this certainty insures that the “small office remains the ideal of architectural practice.”<a title="" href="applewebdata://478A2F69-E96C-4CFF-9B7F-32FEF244A093#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> This ambivalence towards collaboration can be understood as a trait that manifests itself in attitudes toward the nature of practice and the ways in which collaboration is taught in schools of architecture. The meaning of collaboration in this historical moment—still unwinding the impact of austerity, increasing income inequality, outsourcing and automation—has taken on a political resonance beyond the exigencies of the profession.</p> <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780367341985/inclusive-engagement-architecture-bryan-bell-farhana-ferdous"><em>more...</em></a> </div> <div> <div>   <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> <div id="ftn1"> <p class="Footnote"><a title="" href="applewebdata://478A2F69-E96C-4CFF-9B7F-32FEF244A093#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><sup><span lang="EN-HK">[1]</span></sup></a> Dana Cuff, <em>Architecture:</em> <em>The Story of Practice</em> (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 73.</p> </div> </div> </div>
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Merceinspace 26/10/23 - 22:08 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: AA Files 62
  • title_3: my thanks to Tom Weaver Patricia Lent James Klosky
  • category: 3
  • year: 2011
  • content_0_paragraph: <div class="page" title="Page 3"> <div class="section"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> In 1948 the choreographer Merce Cunningham found himself at Black Mountain College with the composer John Cage, the sculptor Richard Lippold, the artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, the filmmaker Arthur Penn and the engineer Buckminster Fuller. Like the others, Fuller was then relatively unknown. The rest of the group admired him for his loquacious- ness and ability to move between architecture, politics and science. Cunningham later recalled an exchange where Fuller said 'something about space', echoing his own ideas on dance, while Cage was enthralled by Fuller's grasp of the 'world situation'. Elaine de Kooning fell in love when Fuller pulled out a geometrical figure during a lecture ('and here's our old friend, the tetrahedron'). The summer culminated with a production of the Eric Satie play <em>Le Piège de Méduse</em>. The effort was collaborative: M С Richards, the writing instructor at the school, did the translation; the de Koonings worked on the set; and Cunningham choreo- graphed a piece called The Monkey Dances and wore a tail designed by Lippold. Cage provided the music and Elaine de Kooning and Fuller starred - Fuller as 'Baron Medusa, a very rich rentier '. The production prefigured the 1952 'happening' that would become mythically connected with Black Mountain, but this earlier production, although less well known, was not without its qualities. There was optimistic talk of transporting it to New York. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41378379"><em>more...</em></a> </div> </div> </div> </div>
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The Futures of Architecture 21/10/23 - 21:05 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Places
  • title_3: my thanks to, Nancy Levinson Nick Gamso Frances Richard
  • category: 3
  • year: 2022
  • content_0_title: Field Notes on Design Activism 4
  • content_1_paragraph: For the past five years, I have been tracking the development of Amaravati, a new capital city for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. In 2019, following the appropriation of thousands of hectares of land and three years of expedited construction, elections and the resulting change in leadership brought the project to a halt. Since then, Covid, weak governance, and legal volleys have meant that little has been done for farmers whose livelihoods were devastated. Architects and planners played a part in this mess. They dutifully imagined a singular future for the new capital and ignored the instability of political, economic, and environmental alignments buttressing the scheme. When the future asserted its unknowability and plans fell apart, architecture’s wager on certainty collapsed. <a href="https://placesjournal.org/article/field-notes-on-design-activism-4/?cn-reloaded=1"><em>more...</em></a>
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Building Cultures Valparaiso 21/10/23 - 20:42 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Routledge // EPFL Press
  • title_3: co-editor with Patricia Guaita and Cornelia Taparelli
  • category: 3
  • year: 2015
  • content_0_title: Pedagogy, Practice and Poetry at the Valparaiso School of Architecture and Design
  • content_1_paragraph: <em>Building Cultures Valparaiso</em> takes a critical look at pedagogy, practice and poetry at one of the most influential schools of architecture of the past 50 years: the School of Architecture and Design of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile. The edited collection brings together research on the origins of the school, on the role that poetry plays in teaching and practice, and on the school's larger historical place in the context of a global out-break of radical architectural teaching in the late 1960's. Contributors come from both within and outside of the school and include <i>Beatriz Colomina</i>, <i>David Jolly Monge</i> and <i>Gerald Wildgruber</i>. In addition to original research, <i>Building Cultures Valparaiso</i> includes a collection of student drawings from the early years of the Valparaiso School's Open City, a 270 hectare stretch of land along the Pacific Ocean that serves as a laboratory for living and working together. These drawings provide an insight into how the philosophy of the school translates into the making of architecture. Through its exploration of the Valparaiso School's radical approach to teaching and making, <i>Building Cultures Valparaiso</i> serves as a guide for all those interested in an experimental vision of architecture. <a href="https://www.epflpress.org/produit/739/9782940222902/building-cultures-valparaiso#:~:text=With%20newly%20commissioned%20essays%20from,in%20alternative%20visions%20of%20architecture."><em>more...</em></a>
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From Crisis to Crisis 20/10/23 - 21:38 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Actar Publishers
  • title_3: co-editor with Nasrin Seraji and Lu Xiaoxuan
  • category: 3
  • year: 2019
  • content_0_title: Debates on why architecture criticism matters today
  • content_1_paragraph: <em>From Crisis to Crisis</em> examines how reading, writing and criticism can address the urgent issues faced by architecture today, including: the role of the architect in the era of specialization; the function of criticism in diverse political, economic and cultural contexts; and, the possibility of architectural education to take on history, theory, civic engagement and political participation. Drawn from an international public symposium organized in the spring of 2017 by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Department of Architecture, the book is comprised in equal parts of focused essays and transcripts of the wide-ranging discussions. With contributions from: Anthony Acciavatti, Chris Brisbin, Sony Devabhaktuni, Françoise Fromonot, Seng Kuan, Lu Xiaoxuan, Jonathan Massey, Graham Brenton Mckay, Kamran Afshar Naderi, Angelika Schnell, Eunice Seng, Nasrine Seraji, Zhi Wenjun and Zhu Tao.
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A Little Place Called Space 26/10/23 - 22:13 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: AA Files 58
  • title_3: my thanks to Tom Weaver
  • category: 3
  • year: 2009
  • content_0_paragraph: <div class="page" title="Page 2"> <div class="section"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> In his 1961 essay for The Architectural Review, 'Dominican Monastery of LaTourette, Eveux sur-Arbresle, Lyon', Colin Rowe leads the reader up a reasonably remote hillside to confront one of Le Corbusier's last works of architecture. His description of this ascent hinges on an elision whereby a 'casual visitor* stands in for the author. This visitor experiences La Tourette first as an image: a blank facade perched atop a hill? side. Hiking up the path, attention then moves from gashes along this facade to light canons at its base. As the march continues, the architec? tural tourist is drawn rightward to a valley that opens before the viewer. Here Rowe abandons the visitor's body and becomes his 'eye', follow? ing the sweep of the horizon. The empty wall is transformed from a facade into a framing device for the landscape as the disembodied gaze tracks along the valley. At this moment the mysterious beast lying in wait on the hillside pounces - La Tourette pummels the visitor, dragging them from the initial dismay of finding a blank facade to a more profoundly divided consciousness as this wall reveals itself to be both more and less than what they originally imagined. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/29544719"><em>more...</em></a> </div> </div> </div> </div>
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As Found Houses 20/10/23 - 21:13 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Applied Research & Design
  • title_3: with John Lin 2021 RIBA President's Medal for Research
  • category: 3
  • year: 2020
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  • content_0_title: Experiments from self-builders in rural China
  • content_1_paragraph: In rural China, an informal wave of building jump-started by economic and social transformations over the past 40 years has rendered some villages unrecognizable. The resulting building boom, taking place in a context with very few regulations, has created densities more often found in urban areas. At the same time, the sudden availability of new materials and industrial methods of construction have enabled some remarkable hybrid experiments where rural self-builders adapt, modify, graft, cleave, and wrap traditional building types. Unconstrained by notions of good taste or formal considerations, these unexpected and innovative solutions are reflections on some of the most pertinent issues of contemporary dwelling, whether building sustainably or negotiating tradition. As Found Houses argues that the manifold evolution of the vernacular is part of the everyday practice of the villagers’ lives. The book documents surprising design decisions in the domestic architecture of rural China and is a resource for thinking about new ways of living together. <a href="https://www.appliedresearchanddesign.com/product/as-found-houses/"><em>more...</em></a>
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Curb-Scale Hong Kong 20/10/23 - 20:28 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Applied Research & Design
  • title_3: my thanks to, Manuela Otamendi Otamendi Studio Jake Anderson Gordon Goff AR&D Fan Xinkai April Soo
  • category: 3
  • year: 2023
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  • content_0_title: Infrastructures of the Street
  • content_1_paragraph: Curb-scale Hong Kong is about the infrastructural objects that constitute the street in Hong Kong. Through drawing and text, the book renders these objects visible and argues for their relevance as story tellers and civic protagonists. The book opens an alternative imagination of infrastructure and asserts the importance of the ground to Hong Kong’s urban realm. The book is structured around measured plan drawings of five streets in Hong. The drawings represent stopping points in a desire to draw everything. This impossible task resulted in documents suspended between narrative and a stilled, abstract distance. Details of growth, error, decay, undoing, and repair provide a register of happenings and becomings. Each drawing speaks to an entanglement between the objects and agencies of Hong Kong’s urban realm. A second axonometric index names and examines these objects, registering more closely the material and technical decisions that give them their qualities. Texts that accompany the drawings are coincident descriptions; they thicken the street plans and index. Longer-form opening and closing essays situate the curb-scale within architecture’s contemporary engagement with infrastructure and with the practice of architectural drawing. <a href="https://appliedresearchanddesign.com/product/curb-scale-hong-kong"><em>more...</em></a>
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When Zoom Roomed the World 20/10/23 - 19:47 Sony Devabhaktuni Writing
  • title_2: Global Performance Studies 4
  • title_3: with Joanna Mansbridge and Susan Sentler
  • category: 3
  • year: 2021
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  • content_0_title: Performing Network Culture’s Enclosures
  • content_1_paragraph: The COVID-19 pandemic intervened at a moment that was nearly synchronous with protests in cities around the world. Diverse publics in Hong Kong, Santiago, Beirut, Barcelona, Baghdad, London, and across the United States demanded policing reforms, climate action and the safeguarding of democratic governance. Lockdowns, social distancing, and quarantining were not in themselves responses to these movements, but they conveniently dampened unrest, highlighting the volatility of bodies gathering in public space and technology’s role in governing individual subjects. As governments struggled to respond to virus trend lines, millions found themselves jobless, the stock market soared, Google search terms mapped viral spread, and scientists analyzed data samples. The spread of the virus also redrew ambiguous boundaries between material and immaterial labor into starker distinctions between essential and non-essential workers. Non-essential workers took refuge at home, while essential labor continued in-person work as the “living infrastructure” (Jackson) of a globalized economy. The upheaval highlighted the instability — and interdependence — of social, technological, and economic networks, as well as the global economy’s reliance on their uninterrupted functioning. As (some) humans sought to protect themselves from a biological threat, digital communication technologies came into full view as a lifeline keeping people safe, connected, and productive. With so many relying on stable internet connections and personal computers for their lives and livelihoods, the virus showed how uneven access to digital infrastructures was a question of economic and political equity. <a href="https://gps.psi-web.org/article/view/88/91/"><em>more...</em></a>
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