Staging Ecologies | Politics of Gender and Memory in Recovery of Kaiserbagh Lucknow

The studio orients toward contemporary conversations and the future of the discipline of architecture. It offers an opportunity to its participants to reframe the scope of architecture and imagine inventive ways of addressing gender, memory, and ecology as central concerns for a socially sustainable Indian city. The studio will have two short exercises [3 week each], and one long one [8 week]. The studio will also have seminar-styled close reading of texts [2 weeks] led by the studio tutor to unpack architectural concerns of gender, memory, and ecology. The studio will conduct a Guest Lecture Series in which specialists will be invited to speak to the students. The site is Kaiserbagh, Lucknow—a historical site constructed in 1840s to empower women, was a site of colonial oppression, and was designed with urban ecological parameters of the time. However, post 1857, the colonial interventions brutally destroyed the site because the British did not understand the gender-inclusive nature. The site is thus potent to address all the three issues of gender, memory, and ecology—as they have historically been intertwined there.