Keynote Speaker



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Swati Chattopadhyay


Small Spaces and Fluid Histories This presentation focuses on the riverine infrastructure of the Ganges River delta and its historical representation to query some basic assumptions of architectural history and practice that conceive land in terms of fixity and property. Analyzing the material and durational parameters of the riverine landscape, Swati Chattopadhyay demonstrates how we might rethink infrastructure from the vantage of small spaces that have been accorded little importance in architectural history. Such micro-histories of architecture and infrastructure may be commensurate with the fluvial landscape itself—open to change and multiple uses, significations, and framing. In such telling, the vantage itself changes character, becoming a shifting edge between land and water, a new threshold, an ephemeral design, and a fold in the spatial fabric.
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she specializes in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her publications include Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (2023); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012); Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005) and the co-edited volumes with Jeremy White: City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014), and Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019). Her current book project, Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, is supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, she is working on two digital humanities projects, Mapping the Ephemeral and Bookscapes. A Fellow of the SAH and former editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, she is also a founding editor of PLATFORM.