SRITOMA BHATTACHARJEE

Portrait courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee.

Sritoma realized early on that people were at the center of what she was doing. She worked with social housing labs in India to understand who she was building for and to find the best ways to involve them in building for them. She designed through community participation, gathering on-ground data and resolving conflicts.

While working at architectural firms in Vietnam and China, she started exploring ideas around platform housing and computational design. She is now on a journey to bring people into the design automation process and believes that it is the means to bringing equity in building design.

Since graduating from Columbia GSAPP, she has been working at a software company that operates at the edge of architecture. She enjoys making short films and was also the host and editor for the podcast GSAPP Conversations.

Design Automation and the Crises

What inspired you to pursue architecture?

The interest in architecture came through questions of people’s movement in space. Why do people walk a certain path and turn the way they turn? I had an intense faith in architectural determinism and was in awe of the power that an architectural space had over the people it contained. Without knowing, a huge part of our daily lives revolves around how we as humans have organized space, whether at the scale of the city or a building or even a chair. Fascinated by the idea of being able to manipulate people’s movement and possibly their emotions, I took up architecture in undergraduate school.

I was most attentive of subjects like sociology and psychology. However, the more you learn, the more you question. I am more skeptical now and critical of the one to one relationship between architecture and its people. The idea nevertheless still interests me to no end and is a driver in much of my work. People always take center stage and ideas of equity, autonomy and participation of the people in the design process stem from there. Movement, path and experience have been important in what I design. My undergraduate dissertation studied intuitive wayfinding as a means to reduce transfer time in transport hubs, using the heavily crowded metro stations of New Delhi as the sites. I was greatly influenced by Bill Hillier’s work on space syntax theory and Carlo Ratti’s work at MIT Sensable City Lab.

Carbon Collective done in collaboration with Neuy Buranasiri at GSAPP. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

What is the most important thing that you learned in the past year?

Crisis deepens the cracks in our society. Being thrown into the pandemic in the middle of my semester had us scrambling to adapt to study from home. It was quite a struggle after graduation to recognize the new world that we are living in, and to realize that it is going to continue this way for quite some time in the future.

The initial anger and disappointment at not being able to be in the studio physically with my peers, subsided, as I started looking outside my own bubble. There are people struggling to make ends meet, parents juggling childcare while working multiple jobs and people lacking access to sanitary environments. Living through this crisis has exacerbated the existing differences in the society. Claiming that the coronavirus doesn't spare anybody, rich or poor, is not the whole truth. Being able to be mentally & economically resilient in these times is a privilege that cannot be discounted.

Presenting Engineering Consent during the Mid-Term at GSAPP. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

Working on a prototype of a structure to be built using leftover materials from the Ek Shelter Project at mHS City Lab, New Delhi. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

What are some architectural organizations (or specific person/role model) that helped you learn to overcome an obstacle? How did they?

Working at Hunnarshala Foundation in Bhuj taught me that there are ways of usurping the power if your intentions are at the right place. Your framework, base grid, start point doesn't have to be that which is set by the authority. One must always question the framework that we operate in and work with the best of intentions. That is what creates good, effective and relevant architecture.

Hunnarshala made sure to push for better policies for the community. It showed me ways of overcoming bureaucratic hurdles by finding loopholes in the policies to be able to give better homes to the rehabilitees and ensuring that the needs of the communities are met even if it requires a change in the standard processes.

These same principles can be applied when we look at the problem of design automation. When people talk about design automation, they think about a rigid mechanical system that would carry within it all biases that currently exist in the society. Which is absolutely true. What I see in it is a platform for equality, the possibility of open work and an opportunity to manipulate the framework, to imbue it with new and better intentions provided by the stakeholders. One needs to strive to provide these qualities in the platforms we create and not accept it as a rigid framework that one needs to operate under.

The potential of this lies, for example, in tackling the climate crisis that faces us today. Reorganizing our resources and using what we have is an act of design system thinking and a crucial first step in reducing our carbon footprint. A good system would allow us to choose who the primary stakeholders of our design are and weigh all our decisions as an effect on their lives instead of going through standard building processes.

Thesis Project at USAP on designing housing system. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

Engineering Consent Design of the US Embassy in Vietnam done at GSAPP. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

If you were given the opportunity to repeat the year, what is one thing you’d do differently?

The challenge in the past year has been to look beyond what is going wrong and recognize the need for change. Acknowledging that we are privileged enough to have the resources to demonstrate resilience in times of crisis was step one. We were so consumed in our own personal crisis; it was hard to reach out to people who were not in a position to perform or sustain themselves. It was important to support our peers and create an environment of understanding.

2020 has been momentous in getting us closer to some ideals and realizing how much further away we are from certain other basic necessities. I would have been more assertive and taken a more active role in ensuring equity, acting not only in my professional capacity, but in my personal life as well, raging every day to improve the next, if only by a little. There is a long way to go from here. There is always more to be done.

Final Review of Studio Cultural Agents Orange. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

As you reflect on the past year, what did you discover as your biggest strengths?

The COVID crisis has had deep spatial implications. Six feet apart. Maintain distance. Stay home. Droplet spread radius. Contact tracing. Number of people infected per zip code area. Work space. Living space. Open space. Pop up hospitals. Converting schools and warehouses to treatment spaces. Mass graves.

The public realm that we have been banished from and the private realm that we are confined to are all spatial constructs that could adapt and behave differently. This difference is not just something that needs to exist till the vaccine comes out, but this ability to adapt to any kind of situation is going to always be a strength of a space.

This past year was a period of connecting with people, getting to know their stories. It was about understanding how they, their work and their workplaces have coped with the pandemic. These conversations led me to find an overlap between the situation out in the world and my skills.

Being one who thinks logically about space, these hard-spatial parameters that the pandemic has made necessary are actually rules that can be manifested through design automation. I started mapping public spaces in NYC to identify COVID hot spots and designed work spaces using behavioral simulations. Adapting to the situation and being flexible to what the world needs right now has been pivotal.

Sritoma with her MSAAD cohort Aayushi Joshi, Benjamin Gomez, Victoria Macchi, Jinish Gadhiya and Oscar Caballero. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

In terms of rising concerns and problems (in the architectural profession) over the past year, what is one change that you wished would happen and it did not? This can be in an educational or work atmosphere.

In the transition between the educational and work atmosphere, somewhere the climate zeal gets lost. The climate ideals and techniques that we are taught in schools take a back seat when put into actual practice. Sustainability of our buildings becomes almost an afterthought, which is a dangerous outlook to have.

One of the biggest concerns in the industry right now is the value of time and the equivalent/ reflected compensation. It is a fact that I have heard right from when I made the decision to take up architecture. Unfortunately, it is an accepted phenomena without any movement towards any change. A good strong management of an architecture firm is extremely important in this scenario to ensure that their team is fairly compensated for it. The worship of firms which produce great architecture with unpaid/lowly paid labor has to stop. If the firm is building great things, they ought to be compensated. I almost wonder if there can be an accountability of a building through a payment to the effect of a royalty that is paid to the architect depending on the success/market price of the building. Until this happens, architecture will always be the profession of the elite.

Group Housing Project done in collaboration with Mukul Gupta at USAP. - Photo courtesy of Sritoma Bhattacharjee

SRITOMA BHATTACHARJEE

Design Automation and the Crises

JACQUELINE LAI

AFNAN AL-RASHID