Yale Architecture Forum
Kadambari Baxi
Architectural Collaterals: Three Collaborative Projects
Architectural Collaterals will discuss brief excerpts from three ongoing projects where concerns for human rights, uncounted war victims, and global toxic atmospheres spur different forms of architectural activism. The first project, Carbon Decarbon, illustrates differential north-south climate optics and internationalist manifestoes on pollutant emissions and climate futures. The second project, Counter-Memorial, redesigns the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero to account for all victims of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The third project, WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?), examines challenges faced by migrant construction workers on architectural sites worldwide and advocates for fair labor practices. Connecting dispersed sites and unseen problematics, these projects offer ways to view architecture from within many other domains and highlight what is often outside its frame. By assembling issues of labor exploitation on construction sites, indefinite wars and memorial architecture, and toxic emissions in upper atmospheres as Collaterals, the projects collectively outline a new agenda for activism in architecture.
Kadambari Baxi is an architect and professor of practice at Barnard + Columbia Architecture. Her projects focus on architectural engagements with contemporary globalization. She works collaboratively forming teams or initiating partnerships on project basis. Most recently, she and her interdisciplinary team of designers, filmmakers, and scientists, created the multimedia project Air Drifts on global air pollution, exhibited at the Oslo Architectural Triennale; she co-founded an advocacy group WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?), and the group’s work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and Istanbul Design Biennial. She maintains a research practice with her partner Reinhold Martin that has produced projects documented in publications Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries and Entropia.