Lecture by Venugopal Maddipati on ‘Gandhi and Architecture as Weak Thought’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram.
When one embraces weak thinking, particularly in the field of textual analysis, one moves endlessly within a space of immense fluidity, as there are multiple certitudes, or multiple, weak interpretations of any given text. How, then, is one to interpret buildings, which are often markers for certitude, reliability and strength, in terms of weak thought? The manner in which Gandhi himself relegated household architecture to the margins of his thinking ensures that his remains, at best, a weak architectural imagination. Does Gandhian architecture then represent weak ontology? This lecture draws from my recent book to address these questions.
Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian teaching in the School of Design at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He graduated in 2001 from the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and is the author of Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-cost Housing (Routledge 2021) and the co-editor of The Materiality of Liquescence (Routledge 2019). He is currently writing a book on ecological aesthetics and the social imaginary in South Asia. This book is centred around the theme of mimesis.
Ravi Sundaram is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 26 March 2021, 4 pm, Zoom http://bit.ly/3cF1f35
