Best Vaissnavi Shukl Podcasts (2024)

1
On being a Doula by Design / Kim Holden 34:05

2M ago34:05

34:05

In this bonus episode, we speak to Kim Holden, whose change of careers has been unconventional and courageous at the same time. She was a founder, managing principal and architect at the renowned SHoP Architects and decided to become a doula after 20 years of practice. We speak to Kim about her initiative Doula x Design and how she helps people dur…

1
On Architecture + Medicine / Diana Anderson 38:27

4M ago38:27

38:27

For our final episode for this season, we speak to doctor and architect Diana Anderson, who has skillfully carved a unique career path for herself as a “dochitect” – by pioneering a collaborative, evidence-based model for approaching healthcare from the medicine and architecture fields simultaneously. Dr. Diana Anderson is a triple boarded professi…

1
On Medical Tourism along the US-Mexico Border / Viviane Clement 32:51

5M ago32:51

32:51

In our previous episode, we got an overview of medical tourism around the world and the key factors that drive people to travel from one country to another for medical treatments and procedures. Today, we take a closer look at some of the medical tourism hubs along a very specific geographic area, i.e., the US-Mexico border. Viviane Clement is an e…

1
On Medical Tourism / Valorie Crooks 44:22

6M ago44:22

44:22

Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has emerged out of people’s need to travel across country borders to access medical treatments and procedures. In order to understand this global movement, we need to understand the reason for travel, the destinations that attract individuals and the web of factors that shape this global industry. …

1
On Spaces for Mental Health / James Leadbitter 33:21

6M ago33:21

33:21

What is your idea of good mental health? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like to touch? And if you could design your own safe space, what would it look like? What would you have in it? James Leadbitter, also known as The Vacuum Cleaner, is a UK based artist and activist who makes candid, …

1
On the Architecture of Disability / David Gissen 43:19

7M ago43:19

43:19

It has been a while since architects have been attempting to address various forms of disability in the buildings, neighborhoods and cities they design. However, these attempts are most often limited to increasing access for differently abled bodies. Our guest today, David Gissen, argues that a disability critique of architecture is not one that so…

1
On Death in the Digital Age / Oreet Ashery 36:35

7M ago36:35

36:35

We don’t talk about the technical and logistical aspects of death enough. For example: How does one’s economic status affect the conditions in which they die? Do gender identities play a role in how people receive end of life care? Can we choose the memories that we want to leave behind for our loved ones? And how does social media become an archiv…

1
On Menstruation Rooms in the Benin Kingdom / Minne Atairu 26:28

8M ago26:28

26:28

Historically, many communities around the world spatialized the bodily function of menstruation and integrated it within their architecture in the form of menstruation huts – often leading to the isolation and oppression of women as impure beings. Our guest today argues that these spaces in the west African Benin Kingdom were intentionally designed…

1
On Drawing the Bombay Plague / Ranjit Kandalgaonkar 40:26

8M ago40:26

40:26

Over a century ago in 1896, the bubonic plague broke out in colonial Bombay. While the British officials maintained detailed records of the various aspects of the plague, local newspapers reported on the public sentiment towards the disease and its colonial management. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar explored one such archive to draw out a subaltern narrative…

1
On Care Environments / Fiona Kenney 34:41

9M ago34:41

34:41

The discourse on care within the field of architecture has recently been gaining a lot of traction as ideas about health are expanding beyond the limits of traditional hospitals. In this conversation with Fiona Kenney, we discuss the history of long-term care facilities, residential hospices and pediatric respite centers, and how they differ from i…

1
Introducing Season 5: On Care, Health, Medicine 5:41

9M ago5:41

5:41

Ever since the pandemic, questions and concerns over the human body and the public health have heightened. We wanted to ensure that the conversations we would have with our guests went beyond our experience of the last three years. Some of the questions we ask this season are: Can we look at the role of architecture for providing care beyond the de…

1
On The Hunger Museum / Abby Leibman 32:49

1y ago32:49

32:49

We explored the themes of agriculture, food and waste in season 4 but did not get into too much detail about the idea of hunger, which is caused by the lack of food. For this bonus episode, we speak to Abby Leibman, who was at the forefront of conceptualizing The Hunger Museum - a virtual museum that takes a deep dive into the history of hunger and…

1
On Seeds, Soil and Life / Vandana Shiva 41:53

1+ y ago41:53

41:53

For this season’s final episode, we have a candid conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva about the fears, concerns and anxieties of a young architect. Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmentalist, ecofeminist, writer and activist. She is the founder of Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of indigenou…

1
On Grain Silos / Ateya Khorakiwala 45:30

1+ y ago45:30

45:30

Parts of Ateya Khorakiwala’s doctoral research focused on grain silos in India and how they were a post-colonial import - built not just for the purpose of creating food security after witnessing one of the worst famines in the country but also to serve as a currency for exchange. In this conversation, Ateya talks about the history of silos, its co…

1
On Farmers’ Protest in India / Sarover Zaidi 28:19

1+ y ago28:19

28:19

Three farm laws passed by the Parliament of India in 2020 received major pushback from farmers around the country - with many of them mobilizing in Punjab and heading to the capital New Delhi. The protest site at the border village of Singhu outside Delhi turned into a mini-city of sorts with the Sikh farmers operating community kitchens and servin…

1
On Pixel Farming / Lenora Ditzler 48:48

1+ y ago48:48

48:48

A few weeks before the COVID lockdowns began in 2020, Rem Koolhaas’ much awaited exhibition Countryside opened in The Guggenheim museum in New York. It was in the exhibition’s thick but small pocket size handbook that I first came across Lenora Ditzler’s essay on pixel farming; a very innovative method of farming that questions the widespread monoc…

1
On Urban Food Deserts / Jane Battersby 33:01

1+ y ago33:01

33:01

The idea of food deserts was not known to me a few years ago. I recognized my privilege in having access to nutritious fresh food but still had a lot to learn about how certain areas are devoid of that basic necessity because of planning policies, politics and economic factors. Jane Battersby is an urban geographer based at the University of Cape T…

1
On Delhi Agro-City 2050 / Depanshu Gola 37:23

1+ y ago37:23

37:23

The world of speculative design affords us the liberty of approaching urban planning through lenses we would have conventionally disregarded as overly ambitious or impractical. In today’s conversation, we think out loud about unused garden spaces outside malls, the function of terrace gardens and farmers as service providers. Depanshu Gola co-runs …

1
On Food, Fun and Follies / Rory Fraser 42:25

1+ y ago42:25

42:25

The first time I heard the word “folly” was in relation to Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris – the large park with dozens of red structures strategically organized in a grid – each embodying the principles of deconstruction. I had been fascinated with the relevance and functionality of follies and even more amused by the lack of its ty…

1
On Innovating with Food Waste / Rob Nicoll 28:28

1+ y ago28:28

28:28

If you are a fan of eating potato fries, you would have never guessed that the potato waste generated in the process of making those fries could be used to make consumer products! Rob Nicoll is the co-founder of Chip[s] Board, a company previously known for developing a sustainable polymer called Parblex and is currently developing eco conscious la…

1
On Seed Sovereignty in Mexico / Adriana David 50:51

1+ y ago50:51

50:51

How often do we really think about where our food comes from? I don’t mean the supermarket or the vegetable vendor where we buy it from but the place where it is grown or the kind of seeds that are sown and everything that concerns the cycle of crops and the resources that are involved in the production of food. It is not until someone explicitly f…

1
Introducing Season 4: On Agriculture, Food, Waste 4:48

1+ y ago4:48

4:48

Do you know where your food comes from? Is it grown in a farm on the outskirts of your city or flown in from another country? How is food security different from food sovereignty? What happens to the waste that is generated in the process of consumption? And how can cities be planned with a food-sensitive approach? These are some of the questions w…

1
On Building a Museum of Conflict / Avni Sethi 32:09

2y ago32:09

32:09

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I drove eastwards to the old city of Ahmedabad to interview Avni Sethi at the Conflictorium, a museum of conflict housed in a 100-something year old building. We talked about her being a cultural practitioner, who foregrounds the issues of caste, violence and oppression in a city with a painful history of riot…

1
On Designing Out Crime / Lindsay Asquith 30:20

2y ago30:20

30:20

What if we approached urban crime as a design problem and deployed our methods and skills to reframe the questions we have been asking to ameliorate – if not completely obliterate – criminal activities? The team at Designing Out Crime (DOC), a collaboration between the New South Wales Department of Community and Justice, and the University of Techn…

1
On Making Public Spaces Safer / Kalpana Viswanath (Safetipin) 36:54

2y ago36:54

36:54

If you are a young woman, who has grown up in a city or travelled to another, you might have been warned about steering off certain areas of the city because they were deemed ‘not safe’. What lends safety to urban areas is not only a matter of data and statistics, but it is also often subjective – relying heavily on how one ‘feels’ while traversing…

1
On Auschwitz and The Evidence Room (pt. 2) / Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay 1:22:58

2y ago1:22:58

1:22:58

Self-explanatory in its nomenclature, The Evidence Room was first presented at the 2016 Venice Biennale as a room with architectural evidence from Auschwitz to assert the existence of the gas chambers used for committing genocide in the Nazi concentration camp. It presents three monuments – a door, a wall hatch and ladder, and a gas column along wi…

1
On Auschwitz and The Evidence Room (pt. 1) / Robert Jan Van Pelt 55:12

2y ago55:12

55:12

In 1996, British author and Holocaust denier David Irving filed a libel case against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, stating that she had defamed him in her book Denying the Holocaust. In what became the case, David Irving versus Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, architectural historian Robert Jan Van Pelt was brought in as the defense’s exp…

1
On the Smart Prison Project in Finland / Pia Puolakka 31:05

2y ago31:05

31:05

There are splitting views in the design profession on the role of architects in the perpetuation and even existence of prisons, which stems from an ethical and a professional belief that incarceration is not the most optimum solution to crime and that the very design of prisons creates conditions that subject the inmates to inhuman living condition…

1
On Restorative Justice / Shailly Agnihotri 42:41

2y ago42:41

42:41

I had no idea what restorative justice was up until two years ago. It was naïve of me to think that justice was always “served” in the courts of law – buildings with high plinths, long walkways and large rooms with the typical setup that we see on screen. And because I did not think it was possible to create spaces for conflict resolution and recon…

1
On Crime, Design, Storytelling and Walter Gropius / Natascha Meuser 36:12

2+ y ago36:12

36:12

Twenty students at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences developed ideas for crime stories to shed new light on the workers’ estate designed by Walter Gropius in Törten between 1926 and 1928. Led by Professor Natascha Meuser, this unorthodox approach to teaching helped the students gain a deeper understanding of the world-famous row houses and …

1
On a Burglar’s Guide to the City / Geoff Manaugh 41:45

2+ y ago41:45

41:45

While the intentions of architects and burglars are diametrically opposite in nature – with the former designing for safety, and the later breaching it through the very design aimed to protect, the single common thread between the two is how they foreground architecture in their operations. All of a sudden, storm water drains, vaults, staircases, p…

1
Introducing Season 3: On Violence, Crime, Justice 5:26

2+ y ago5:26

5:26

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon got me thinking about the function of design in exercising power and control in society – even though rotundas preceded the panopticon and contemporary prisons have since evolved into newer typologies. I dug deeper and immersed myself in the vast pool of knowledge existing around the themes of violence, punishment, surve…

1
On Havelis of Lahore / Rabeeya Arif 29:50

2+ y ago29:50

29:50

“There is this informal inhabitation of spaces of heritage within the walled city that actually subverted the original intent of the buildings, however, they helped in the social economic development of the spaces that were being inhabited.” The exodus that followed the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 caused one of the largest human migrati…

1
On Monuments and Public Memory / Paul Farber (Monument Lab) 44:18

2+ y ago44:18

44:18

“It's far easier to protest the statue than a statute, which is to say that power that lives through policy institutions embedded into practices made across generations are hard to dive into.” In our effort to question the premise of this season’s three central themes: preservation, restoration and conservation, we often came across the idea of pub…

1
On Architecture and Journalism / Inga Saffron 46:38

2+ y ago46:38

46:38

“It's really hard to preserve the community. Easier to preserve buildings.” Our guest today is a writer and uses the power of the written word to raise awareness, drive change and create accountability. She often writes about preservation – most notably focusing on the African-American history of Philadelphia and how cultural and historic preservat…

1
On Facadism / Clemency Gibbs 39:21

2+ y ago39:21

39:21

“But if all you can see is this frozen façade, that's the period that you're choosing to keep the public appearance of the building as, which doesn't really create any meaningful dialogue between the old and the new.” Facadism or facadism practices, as Clemency Gibbs refers to them, stand for “privileging of the façade above other aspects of the bu…

1
On Pyaavs of Mumbai / Rahul Chemburkar 40:22

2+ y ago40:22

40:22

“Pyaavs today really could be instigators and facilitators mainly as drinking water fountains [but] at the same time also create a cultural connect and socio-cultural tourism.” Not too long before potable water became a commodity that could be bought and sold, its presence in the Indian urban infrastructure as drinking water fountains – or pyaavs a…

1
On Stained Glass Conservation / Brianne Van Vorst 39:45

2+ y ago39:45

39:45

“Rather than restoration, we're not changing the object [in conservation], we're retaining the object, even with all of its marks of age.” I was taught that one of the identifiers of gothic architecture along with the flying buttresses, the pointed arches and the gargoyles – was the stained glass windows. But that was pretty much all I knew and tho…

1
On Culture and Urban Regeneration / Ranajay Chand 30:16

2+ y ago30:16

30:16

“It’s part city beautiful movement, part preservation, part making the city more walkable and just creating like a nice civic space that people can enjoy.” This summer, my friend Ranajay invited me to spend a weekend in Rajpipla and promised to show me some really good buildings – not quite telling me at first that he belonged to the royal family o…

1
On a Counter-monument in London / Elliot Nash 36:08

3y ago36:08

36:08

“I started to design things that might catch passersby or the weather, the things that aren't normally remembered...” The act of building a counter-monument is an oxymoron in itself. Artists and architects around the world have used voids to create these counter-monuments while challenging the notion of physically building spaces to retain public m…

1
Introducing Season 2: On Restoration, Conservation, Preservation 4:25

3y ago4:25

4:25

After a few weeks of restructuring and lots of planning, Season 2 of Architecture Off-Centre is ready to go live! On this season, we are focusing our attention on the ideas of preservation, restoration and conservation in the built environment by posing a simple question: what does it mean to conserve, restore and preserve something in the contempo…

1
On Public Art, Activism and Urbanism / Matthew Mazzotta 44:28

3y ago44:28

44:28

“Let's make it so intriguing, so curious that people have to come into these ideas of their own volition.” Have you ever seen a storefront opening up as a theatre? Or a dilapidated house becoming a community event space? Or ever dined on an unfolding table that serves food from plants on the verge of extinction? What about a lamp post that is lit b…

1
On Revolutionizing the Construction Industry / Acelab (Vardhan and Dries) 31:27

3y ago31:27

31:27

“I was told that you go to the US to learn the more innovative and technologically driven ways of practicing. But that was simply not the case.” If you have ever worked on a construction project and had a hard time searching for and specifying building products, you will be relieved to know that Acelab co-founders Vardhan Mehta and Dries Carmeliet …

1
On National Identity, Architecture and Crisis 13:20

3y ago13:20

13:20

“Projects such as the Central Vista underscore the agency of architecture for ‘those that govern us’—and how, misleading or not, design itself can construe the image of the nation.” The juxtaposition of New Delhi’s Central Vista project over the ongoing public health crisis in India has raised several questions regarding the relationship between po…

1
On Set Design in Hollywood / Tim Croshaw 52:13

3y ago52:13

52:13

“What is the camera? It's a surrogate for the human eye.” If you’ve ever watched a Hollywood super-hero film and wondered what goes on in the making of it or thought about who designs the submarines and the palaces and the spacecrafts or even questioned what it takes to design spaces for a camera, set designer Tim Croshaw will answer all of it as h…

1
On Video Games and Virtual Worlds / Alina Nazmeeva 59:03

3y ago59:03

59:03

“Virtual worlds in a game enable certain things which are harder to make in the physical space, but they also, in many ways, continue the heuristics of physical space like navigation.” Video games today touch upon discourses on virtual economies, the metaverse and the social element in online games. Alina Nazmeeva’s work investigates the relationsh…

1
On Design Diplomacy in Afghanistan / Francisco Brown 50:07

3y ago50:07

50:07

“Understand that your mission was the building… That at the end of the day, your politics or your own sense of values, might never meet the middle point, I sat down to negotiate the existence of our building, [otherwise] they will blow the whole thing up.” In its efforts to build new infrastructure with foreign aid, Afghanistan, as a post-conflict …

1
On Birth Centres, Midwifery and the Female Body / Cristina Alonso 36:27

3+ y ago36:27

36:27

“It really has to do with designing services around women and women's lives… For us as women, we live our lives inside our bodies…” Cristina Alonso is a midwife, who believes that all women can make informed choices about their bodies and lives. She advocates for the design of a healthcare system that serves women where they are and in a way that m…

1
On Reincarnating Indian Cities / Karan Saharya 48:00

3+ y ago48:00

48:00

“The evolution of cities is barely ever linear and gradual. It follows an almost cyclical pattern of development that is highly influenced by political and religious currents.” Karan Saharya recently co-taught a course called Reincarnating Cities with Vaissnavi Shukl, where he took a deep dive into the changing architectural articulations of herita…

1
On the Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures / Rajji Desai 40:26

3+ y ago40:26

40:26

“It's so paradoxical - something which is so big, something which is so huge… It's almost invisible.” Rajji Desai talks about the afterlives of orbital infrastructures and how these objects in the outer space have an influence on everything that spans from the earth’s high orbits to its high seas. Rajji Desai is an Urban Climate Researcher-Designer…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Vaissnavi Shukl Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

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