Historicizing Pune's Architectural Production from the Building Site

This studio complicated linear and universal understandings of modernity by investigating how architectural production occurred on the building site, rather than on the drawing table. Building sites are impermanent and ambivalent places, where sophisticated machinery and archaic muscle work occur simultaneously and divergent socio-professional groups interact. By focusing on the day-to-day realities of (historic) building sites in Pune, students explored the broad range of ‘actants’ (human and non-human) that impact design and construction: from architects and engineers to contractors and building workers; from building materials to construction and bureaucratic tools. In modules 1 and 2 students were acquainted with state-of-the-art research in construction history and diverse research methods to trace practices on the building site: archival analysis, visual analysis (construction photographs) and oral history. In module 3 students explored unconventional text genres and visual media to communicate their individual historiographic interpretations of primary historical evidence.