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Dr Anuradha Chatterjee is an Indian-born Australian academic practitioner in architecture and design based in Australia and India. She has over twenty years of experience in research, teaching and administration gained through various academic positions in Australia (University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of Tasmania, University of South Australia), China (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), and India (Manipal University Jaipur, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology, Pearl Academy and Sushant School of Architecture), where her focus has been on developing critical and research-based pedagogies in studio and history and theory subjects. She has held prominent academic leadership roles in India as Dean, Faculty of Design, Manipal University Jaipur; Dean Academics, Avani Institute of Design; and Head, Research and Innovation, Pearl Academy where she was responsible for institution building, establishing cultures of academic excellence, enhancing internationalisation initiatives and research outputs, and driving a high-performance culture based on inclusive and embodied leadership. Dr Chatterjee has also worked in professional practice in Australia, as Senior Research Executive at PTW Architects; Senior Architectural Researcher and Heritage Advisor at Cracknell and Lonergan Architects; and Guest Curator, Customs House, Sydney. She has an active and diverse research record, and her publications speak to an expansive field of research inquiry. Dr Chatterjee is Regional Editor Asia Pacific, TEXTILES: Cloth and Culture; a Registered Architect at the Council of Architecture, India; and an Associate of Australian Institute of Architects.
Dr Anuradha Chatterjee: Transnational academic leadership in architecture and design
"To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries, the barriers that may or may not be erected by race, gender, class, professional standing, and a host of other differences" - bell hooks
My PhD (published as journal articles and a peer reviewed book John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, Routledge, 2017) reveals and constructs Ruskin’s ‘theory’ of the adorned wall veil, which positioned architecture as a dressed female body. To this end, the adornment was a low-relief polychromatic ornamental veneer that followed the principle of composition observable in draped figures and woven and knitted fabrics, and it was always disconnected from that which it concealed, physically as well as symbolically. In architectural theory, the analogy between architecture, body, and dress is a well traversed terrain. Ruskin added to this a spiritual dimension, as he argued that good dress evoked the soul, by subduing the contours of the body through its taut lines and seamless surface, and through vivid colours that created a luminous counterpart to the blushing colour and tonal variations of the female skin. These ideas could be seen echoed in the planar walls sheathed with polychromatic, low relief inlaid work in key Gothic and Byzantine buildings in Venice. Not only does Ruskin advance a different disciplinary definition of architecture as surface (going against spatial and structural ontologies of the discipline), but he also provides a unique and competitive alternative to existing theories of architectural polychromy (Hittorf, Labrouste, Semper, Jones) and textile analogy (Semper, Viollet-le-Duc). Ruskin’s advancement of architecture’s disciplinary definition of architecture as surface, along with the ‘surface turn’ in critical theory and design practice, prompts a parallel track of inquiry. Surface and Deep Histories and my other publications have explored the varied articulations of architectural surfaces, arguing that surfaces are simultaneously superficial and pervasive, symbol and space, meaningful and functional, static, and transitory, and object and envelope.
https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/550000b8-ec05-49be-bd8c-0ed30359e0ac/fullFeminist philosophy was at the centre of my graduate design project on housing for migrant mine workers, which proposed a distinctive hybrid organization of row housing and cluster as an argument against the separation of public and private realms. Extending this to the reading of architectural texts, my master’s dissertation, in the tradition of the feminist architectural theorists like Diana Agrest and Jennifer Bloomer amongst others, mounted a feminist critique of Adolf Loos’s attack on Art Nouveau, using Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, and Elizabeth Grosz’s incisive reading of Irigaray. My PhD (and associated journal articles and book, John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture) took this line of thinking further as it engaged in a poststructuralist inter and intratextual feminist readings of Ruskin’s texts across the different volumes in his oeuvre, saying that which Ruskin and his text were not willing to say, demonstrating the debt that his architectural theory owed to the female body. Furthermore, the parallel track of research on surface that the PhD/book generates is deeply feminist. Considering the act of looking past, looking through, or not looking at surface at all, constitutes it as a blindspot—an architectural unconscious. Thinking of this through Irigaray, and Walter Benjamin, surface is not just a threatening presence but it also has potentiality—in its ability to narrate other histories, provoke alternative spatial possibilities, and allow new knowledges and practices to prevail.
https://www.routledge.com/John-Ruskin-and-the-Fabric-of-Architecture/Chatterjee/p/book/9780367207359Moving beyond re-readings of texts to gendered histories, I contributed as the sole Area Editor for Asia with Chief Editors Karen Burns and Lori Brown on The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015 (April 2022). This project has allowed me to be part of a critical reference publication that focuses on intersectional and transnational feminist histories of women in architecture, which provides insights into the role of women pioneers, and the significance of institutional changes, organizations, awards, events, and critical theoretical research in increasing women’s participation and recognition in the field of architectural practice and academia. In challenging the canon, my work on the Encyclopedia has highlighted how women architects in Asia have played an important role in shaping key ethical, political, and contextual projects in the region. Building on this— in the context of institution building in Asia and the urgent regional need of capacity building, self-determination, research, and epistemic decolonisation—I led and co-convened the Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India symposium (with Madhavi Desai and Kush Patel, 2020). The symposium examined the engagement of women and persons of minoritized genders and sexualities in the construction of the academy, architectural knowledge, professional identity, and academic practice, looking for alternatives to patriarchal conventions of leadership, as well as positions of power sanctified by institutional designations that may be mobilized and inhabited differently.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bloomsbury-global-encyclopedia-of-women-in-architecture-1960-2015-lori-brown/1143848467Building on Ruskinian ideas of textile tectonic, creative labour, and my knowledge of intangible textile heritage of India, I have guest edited a special issue titled “Life, after Life: Textile Crafts in India and Communities of Practice" for TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture. The issue looks at the effects disasters (including the ongoing pandemic, as well as systemic stresses as a result of colonisation, industrialisation, and modernity) have had on traditional communities of practice. These inquiries are also relevant to the built environment as they speak in a timely manner to the emerging discourse around migrancy and politics of production in South Asia, and decolonising labour relations. Building on the urgent need of decolonising the curriculum, my essay for Seminar Magazine (2022) issues a call to action, consisting of six points–feminist paths to decolonization; climate change, environmental degradation, and ethical practice; liberatory thinking; imagine new pasts, new futures; challenge the canon, generate new knowledge; and dismantle architectural representational histories. This is highlighted further in Responsible Pedagogies in Architecture: Combating Climate Change edited by Madhura Yadav, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023 (to which I was co-editor till 2021, and in charge of the writing the proposal), which seeks to point out systemic gaps in curricula with respect to integration of sustainability and ecological literacy, as well as document a micro-history of climate leadership undertaken by a higher education located in the hinterland of Jaipur, Rajasthan.
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rftx20/20/3?nav=tocListMy scholarship in architectural history, theory and humanities, and interest in feminist and anti-patriarchal approaches to design epistemologies, undergirds my scholarship of teaching and learning. This current field of inquiry is indicated by two recent book chapters for Routledge collections, “Ungraspable Criticality: Surface in Architecture," in The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, edited by Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen; and “In between Fiction and Space: Feminist Studio Pedagogy (of Letting Go)," in Space and Language in Architectural Education: Catalysts and Tensions, edited by Kasia Nawratek (2022). The attention is on undoing dominant knowledges, hegemonic structures, and the orthographic gaze; discovering other ways of arriving at, inhabiting a project; and deferring quick, comprehensive solutions in favour of pleasures of meandering, celebrating the unfinished. While the (Re)thinking and (Re)making the Threshold: Red Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney (discussed in “Ungraspable Criticality") built upon my surface scholarship to unpack the potentialities of deep surface into a new organizational order, the Narrative, Sense and Space: Cultural Interpretation Centre, Mahé studio (discussed in “In between Fiction and Space") used a historical-political fiction as a point of entry into site and context. In search of other temporalities, beyond the sequential progressions deployed in design studios, we progressed through overlapping literary, graphic, and tectonic terrains; and uneasy synthesis of fragments, architectonic assemblages that captured the essence of key moments, and stories within stories, from the novel.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Criticality-in-Art-Architecture-and-Design/Brisbin-Thiessen/p/book/9780367659813
https://www.routledge.com/Space-and-Language-in-Architectural-Education-Catalysts-and-Tensions/Nawratek/p/book/9781032193823
In addition to the five strands of research inquiry that I have been pursuing for the last two decades-John Ruskin and Architectural Theory; Feminist Readings in Architectural History and Theory; Architecture in Asia: Gendered Histories and Agencies; Practices of Resilience and Decolonization; Critical Studio Pedagogies-I also research and write on the ontological questions of the discipline; and search for alternative forms of practice in textiles as well as literature.
AMPS Routledge Pedagogy Award, 2023 https://amps-research.com/routledge-pedagogy-award/
Funding for Appointment of Research Associate, The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, 2020
ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellowship Mentoring Scheme (for outstanding women researchers in the humanities) The University, 2019
Architecture Theory Criticism History Research Centre, University of Queensland Travel Grant 2018
Visiting Academic, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, 23-27 September 2018
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art: Research Support Grant, 2013
Research Development Fund, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, 2013
David Saunders Founders Grant, Society of Architectural Historians Australia, and New Zealand, 2008
Education Arts and Social Science Early Career Researcher Support Program, University of South Australia, 2000 AUD, 2008, two awarded per year
