About

Download CV

Amritha Ganapathy is an architect, urban designer and researcher based in Bangalore, India. She is interested in the architectural imaginations and spatial implications of political, social and cultural phenomenon.

She holds a post-masters degree from the Berlage Institute, The Netherlands and a Bachelors degree in Architecture from Bangalore, India.

Publications

Necessarily Eurometropolitan is a publication by The Berlage. It discusses eight architectural projects on the borders between Belgium and France, relating to productivity and the picturesque. It is edited by Salomon Frausto and is part of a series of publications related to Bare Necessities, a program examining the origins, innovations, and legacy of architectural modernism in order to address present-day urgencies in the built environment.

Volume #55 – Intangible Cultural Heritage is an issue that deals with the concept of heritage production and how we treat the material remains of our presence in the past. The establishment of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in 2003 marked a profound shift in the custodial objectives of UNESCO as an organisation and the mechanisms it utilises preserve global culture.

My contribution to the issue titled, the ‘Atlas of the Intangible’, marks the political nature of this shift in thinking. The shift from the nation to community, from preservation of material remains to the safeguarding of culture. Can we consider this to be a redistribution of power and means?

Urbanising Asia and World Knowledge - A set of selected essays published by the CEPT University.

Much of our understanding of cities relies on models of urban history and urban experience defined by the study of West European and North American urban experiences and scholarship. The editors called for essays that explore a particular urban condition from anywhere in Asia to understand the nature of networked knowledge production.

My contribution called 'Knowledge of the Periphery ', looks at the specific case of Whitefield, a neighbourhood at the periphery of Bangalore. This essay aims to delve examples of knowledge production and to expand on their role in the formation of the twenty first century Indian city. The periphery of a fast growing city, especially known for its growth in the information technology sector is a perfect base to begin to understand how contemporary knowledge production is helping to redefine the relationship between previously opposing concepts such as urban and rural, global and local, city and village, history and the future, centre and the periphery, and private and public, among many others.

Volume is an independent magazine that sets the agenda for architecture and design. With going beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’ it reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture.

Volume #54 – On Biennials is an issue that focusses on the format and phenomenon of the architecture biennial. What can a format that has been declared dead time and again have to offer? Treading on the tension between expectation and pretension, agency and result, this issue of volume discusses the biennial; who pulls the strings, who is it made for and what effect does it have?