Professor Anuradha Chatterjee, PhD | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Professor Anuradha Chatterjee is an Indian-born Australian feminist academic practitioner in architecture and design based in Australia and India. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Design, Manipal University Jaipur. She has Dip. Arch from TVB School of Habitat Studies (1998), Master of Architecture (History and Theory of Architecture, 2000), and PhD in Built Environment (2008) from the University of New South Wales.
For close to two decades, Dr. Chatterjee has taught at and has held leadership positions in premier higher education institutions in Australia (University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of Tasmania, and University of South Australia); China (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University); and India (Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, and Pearl Academy). She was the first Dean Academics at Avani Institute of Design, where she was responsible for institution building and establishing culture and systems for academic excellence.
Dr Chatterjee is an internationally known scholar who has published three books - Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design; Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney; and John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture - and is the Area Editor (Asia) for fourth publication, The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015 edited by Karen Burns and Lori Brown (forthcoming).
Her recent prestigious appointments include 1) Member of Board of Review for CEPT University’s M Arch / MA in Architectural History and Theory Programme; 2) Elected Companion to The Guild of St George, an organisation founded in 1871 by British social critic John Ruskin; 3) Member of Editorial Board for Architecture, Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 4) Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland; 5) Regional Editor (Asia Pacific), Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture.
She is a registered architect with the Council of Architecture, India; International Associate Member, American Institute of Architects; Affiliate Level 1 Member, Australian Institute of Architects; and Affiliate Member, Royal Institute of British Architects.
For more information, see: https://anuradhachatterjee.wixsite.com/architecture
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Books by Professor Anuradha Chatterjee, PhD
Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium, 2020
Anuradha Chatterjee and Kush Patel eds., Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in A... more Anuradha Chatterjee and Kush Patel eds., Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium. Calicut: Avani Institute of Design, https://avani.edu.in/assets/Instant-Proceedings.pdf
- Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature... more 6) Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature and Heritage: The 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ). Launceston: University of Tasmania, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-86295-658-2.
Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume... more Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume analyses the impact John Ruskin has had on architecture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores Ruskin’s different ideologies, such as the adorned wall veil, which were instrumental in bringing focus to structures that were previously unconsidered.
John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture examines the ways in which Ruskin perceives the evolution of architecture through the idea that architecture is surface. The creative act in architecture, analogous to the divine act of creation, was viewed as a form of dressing. By adding highly aesthetic features to designs, taking inspiration from the 'veil' of women’s clothing, Ruskin believed that buildings could be transformed into meaningful architecture. This volume discusses the importance of Ruskin’s surface theory and the myth of feminine architecture, and additionally presents a competing theory of textile analogy in architecture based on morality and gender to counter Gottfried Semper’s historicist perspective.
This book would be beneficial to students and academics of architectural history and theory, gender studies and visual studies who wish to delve into Ruskin’s theories and to further understand his capacity for thinking beyond the historical methods. The book will also be of interest to architectural practitioners, particularly Ruskin’s theory of surface architecture.
Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt wo... more Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional.
The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice.
The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No 5 2011
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 7 2012
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 9 2014
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 10
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No 8 2013
Folio of Works: Research, Teaching and External Activities
XJTLU's Design Research Institute (DRI) is a new transdisciplinary initiative aimed at fostering ... more XJTLU's Design Research Institute (DRI) is a new transdisciplinary initiative aimed at fostering design research as a speculative and rigorous projectbased form of enquiry that offers the sciences, the arts, the humanities, engineering and society at large valuable insights into processes that lead to desirable futures. Within China and internationally, the DRI sets out to establish itself as a centre of design research excellence, with emphases on advanced practices in developing contexts and on the dynamics of creative processes. It is one of a small number of high priority, thematically focused, research institutes at XJTLU, in recognition of design as a transdisciplinary area of strategic importance. The DRI welcomes people, ideas and initiatives related to design research from XJTLU faculty and students, as well as from academia and industry at large. The Shared Territories exhibition is the Design Research Institute's inaugural event. Its contributions were solicited internationally by invitation, and by an open call across the XJTLU campus. The result is a broad variety of design research areas, methods and media, of local, regional and international projects, from academic and industrial contributors. We envision this variety to stimulate design research interest and discourse across our campus and beyond in the intellectual territories shared between all who rigorously engage in open-ended, creative enquiry.
Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney, COPAL Publishing, New Delhi, 2014, which unpacks the creativ... more Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney, COPAL Publishing, New Delhi, 2014, which unpacks the creative DNA of Sydney, contained in an expanded field of architectural ‘practice’ across studios, lectures, talks, exhibitions, installations
Papers by Professor Anuradha Chatterjee, PhD
Space and Language in Architectural Education
John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, 2017
Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium, 2020
Anuradha Chatterjee and Kush Patel eds., Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in A... more Anuradha Chatterjee and Kush Patel eds., Instant Proceedings: Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium. Calicut: Avani Institute of Design, https://avani.edu.in/assets/Instant-Proceedings.pdf
- Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature... more 6) Anuradha Chatterjee, Stuart King, and Stephen Loo, eds. Proceedings of Fabulation: Myth Nature and Heritage: The 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ). Launceston: University of Tasmania, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-86295-658-2.
Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume... more Through the theoretical lenses of dress studies, gender, science, and visual studies, this volume analyses the impact John Ruskin has had on architecture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores Ruskin’s different ideologies, such as the adorned wall veil, which were instrumental in bringing focus to structures that were previously unconsidered.
John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture examines the ways in which Ruskin perceives the evolution of architecture through the idea that architecture is surface. The creative act in architecture, analogous to the divine act of creation, was viewed as a form of dressing. By adding highly aesthetic features to designs, taking inspiration from the 'veil' of women’s clothing, Ruskin believed that buildings could be transformed into meaningful architecture. This volume discusses the importance of Ruskin’s surface theory and the myth of feminine architecture, and additionally presents a competing theory of textile analogy in architecture based on morality and gender to counter Gottfried Semper’s historicist perspective.
This book would be beneficial to students and academics of architectural history and theory, gender studies and visual studies who wish to delve into Ruskin’s theories and to further understand his capacity for thinking beyond the historical methods. The book will also be of interest to architectural practitioners, particularly Ruskin’s theory of surface architecture.
Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt wo... more Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney is a humble collection of essays based on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) of interest in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original not the ordinary and the functional.
The purpose of this is to reveal the expanded field of architecture, and that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. The emphasis is placed on practice as an intellectual activity and on contemporary practice of architecture as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The book reveals that all or most architects either adopt as their own or have an interest in an(other) field, such as visual art, urbanism and landscape, virtual reality and three dimensional imaging, installation art and lighting design, and so on. The book aims to reveal therefore the multidisciplinary, urban orientations, and fluid forms of practice.
The essay format as opposed to a monograph or historical survey on a place or period in Australian architecture is deliberate. The aim is to capture not the formal outcome of the architectural practice but to capture the vitality and intensity of architectural thought behind it all. The collection will pick out the creative DNA of the city, as it represents a snapshot of the intensity that marks the critical and creative culture and enterprise informing the architectural scene in Sydney.
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No 5 2011
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 7 2012
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 9 2014
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No. 10
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today No 8 2013
Folio of Works: Research, Teaching and External Activities
XJTLU's Design Research Institute (DRI) is a new transdisciplinary initiative aimed at fostering ... more XJTLU's Design Research Institute (DRI) is a new transdisciplinary initiative aimed at fostering design research as a speculative and rigorous projectbased form of enquiry that offers the sciences, the arts, the humanities, engineering and society at large valuable insights into processes that lead to desirable futures. Within China and internationally, the DRI sets out to establish itself as a centre of design research excellence, with emphases on advanced practices in developing contexts and on the dynamics of creative processes. It is one of a small number of high priority, thematically focused, research institutes at XJTLU, in recognition of design as a transdisciplinary area of strategic importance. The DRI welcomes people, ideas and initiatives related to design research from XJTLU faculty and students, as well as from academia and industry at large. The Shared Territories exhibition is the Design Research Institute's inaugural event. Its contributions were solicited internationally by invitation, and by an open call across the XJTLU campus. The result is a broad variety of design research areas, methods and media, of local, regional and international projects, from academic and industrial contributors. We envision this variety to stimulate design research interest and discourse across our campus and beyond in the intellectual territories shared between all who rigorously engage in open-ended, creative enquiry.
Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney, COPAL Publishing, New Delhi, 2014, which unpacks the creativ... more Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney, COPAL Publishing, New Delhi, 2014, which unpacks the creative DNA of Sydney, contained in an expanded field of architectural ‘practice’ across studios, lectures, talks, exhibitions, installations
Space and Language in Architectural Education
John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, 2017
Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 2017
John Ruskin offered an alternative paradigm to the debates on constructional polychromy in Victor... more John Ruskin offered an alternative paradigm to the debates on constructional polychromy in Victorian Britain. The paper considers the larger context of the debate and Ruskin’s place within it, which is that he favoured the decorative use of innate colour of materials to achieve concealment of the building’s structure. However, even then Ruskin’s theory of polychromy, especially his attitudes to colour and pattern, remains far from obvious. The paper offers an original insight into this, as it explores Ruskin’s approach to architecture and colour through the lenses of gender, body, soul and dress, presenting his triadic theory of architecture that asserted: a) architecture is a combination of painting and sculpture; b) it is feminine; and c) it analogous to a dressed body. The paper then deploys this understanding to revisit the ambivalence between colour as pattern, and colour as effect, and to argue that for Ruskin the visual field is characterized essentially by simultaneity and v...
Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 2012
The emergence of the practice of restoration in eighteenth-century France and Britain was a respo... more The emergence of the practice of restoration in eighteenth-century France and Britain was a response to the destruction of buildings due to fire, war, revolutions, and neglect, complemented by the desire to consolidate cultural heritage, and thus national identity. John Ruskin (1819-1900) responded to the erosion of the historical fabric in European cities, particularly in Venice, which suffered significant damage to its built fabric during the six-month siege and aerial bombardment of the city by Austrian forces in 1848 (Mallgrave 2005: 121). It is well known that whilst Ruskin vehemently rejected restoration, he advocated preservation; in this his influential diatribe was simultaneously radical and conservative. Development of this approach can be found in his earlier writings on art, for example in Modern Painters (1843), as prefaced in the five dense pages of "Lamp of Memory" fronting The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and followed up in his 1854 pamphlet titled "The Opening of the Crystal Palace". The following passage from The Seven Lamps of Architecture is indicative: Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place. And look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may prevent it … Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them … Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation … bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb.
Audience: The 28th Annual Conference of the …, 2011
... Objective Division: Expanding Knowledge. Objective Group: Expanding Knowledge. Objective Fiel... more ... Objective Division: Expanding Knowledge. Objective Group: Expanding Knowledge. Objective Field: Expanding Knowledge in Built Environment and Design. Creator: Chatterjee, A (Dr AnuChatterjee). ID Code: 72938. Year Published: 2011. Deposited By: Architecture. ...
John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, 2017
Fabrications: the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2011
Review(s) of: Post-traumatic Urbanism Special Issue: Architectural Design 80, no. 5 (2010), by Ad... more Review(s) of: Post-traumatic Urbanism Special Issue: Architectural Design 80, no. 5 (2010), by Adrian Lahoud, Charles Rice, and Anthony Burke, guest editors 136 pages.
The paper presents John Ruskin’s theory of architecture as assemblage. It is now well known that ... more The paper presents John Ruskin’s theory of architecture as assemblage. It is now well known that Ruskin’s writings on medieval architecture focused almost exclusively on (surface) fragments, on quotations severed from their architectural contexts, and pasted and re-presented, as in the plates used to illustrate the Seven Lamps. This was one of the reasons Ruskin’s modernist critics refused to qualify his writings as sufficiently architectural, as they shifted focus from the wholeness and seamlessness of buildings. Instead, they were concerned with the surficial and the fragmentary. Ruskin’s ideal consisted in planar undisrupted walls, veneered surfaces, constructional polychromy, low relief and inlaid ornament, and layering of relief and polychromatic ornament, all variously sourced from Pisan Romanesque, the Gothic of Western Italy, and the Venetian Gothic among others. The architectural quotations were not merely copied and pasted: they were repositioned and repurposed, like the t...
TEXTILE, 2020
In light of the global pandemic that has overturned the equilibrium of lives and livelihoods in e... more In light of the global pandemic that has overturned the equilibrium of lives and livelihoods in every community in the world, we are thinking closer to home about textile traditions and crafts (wea...
TEXTILE, 2021
Anuradha Chatterjee (Guest Editor) (2020): Call for Papers, Special Issue: Life, after Life: Text... more Anuradha Chatterjee (Guest Editor) (2020): Call for Papers, Special
Issue: Life, after Life: Textile Crafts in India and Communities of Practice, TEXTILE, DOI:
10.1080/14759756.2020.1814552
Veranda: Journal of Sushant School of Art and Architecture, 2020
Anuradha Chatterjee, “Putting Her in Her Place (Not!),” Veranda: Journal of Sushant School of Art... more Anuradha Chatterjee, “Putting Her in Her Place (Not!),” Veranda: Journal of Sushant School of Art and Architecture, vol. 2 (2020): 85-94
Responsible Pedagogies: School of Architecture and Design, Manipal University Jaipur, 2022
Responsible Pedagogies: School of Architecture and Design, Manipal University Jaipur
John Ruskin offered an alternative paradigm to the debates on constructional polychromy in Victor... more John Ruskin offered an alternative paradigm to the debates on constructional polychromy in Victorian Britain. The paper considers the larger context of the debate and Ruskin’s place within it, which is that he favoured the decorative use of innate colour of materials to achieve concealment of the building’s structure. However, even then Ruskin’s theory of polychromy, especially his attitudes to colour and pattern, remains far from obvious. The paper offers an original insight into this, as it explores Ruskin’s approach to architecture and colour through the lenses of gender, body, soul and dress, presenting his triadic theory of architecture that asserted: a) architecture is a combination of painting and sculpture; b) it is feminine; and c) it analogous to a dressed body. The paper then deploys this understanding to revisit the ambivalence between colour as pattern, and colour as effect, and to argue that for Ruskin the visual field is characterized essentially by simultaneity and vacillation, not singularity and stability. It is argued that Ruskin’s writings complexified as well as undermined polarities prevalent in the dominant paradigms of polychromy, as his writings refused to resolve the difference between pattern and effect, to the same extent that they also refused to the settle the difference between sculpture and painting; canvas and textile; and flatness and texture.
The Chapter mounts an argument against the conceptual and physical thinness of surface, in ninete... more The Chapter mounts an argument against the conceptual and physical thinness of surface, in nineteenth and early twentieth century architectural theory and imagination, and charts a return to surface as space, and as substance. John Ruskin's writings on building fragments and surfaces are rescued from the dissonance between nineteenth century visual culture's surface orientation and architectural theory's emphasis on structure and space. They are reframed as the theory of buildings as dressed bodies. Ruskin's view of architecture as pure surfaceness, a point of discursive rupture, opens up the spatial field, such that it becomes possible to imagine surface as the 'building block' of architecture. The Chapter presents additional surface typologies, and explores the agency of urban surfaces through a study of three Melbourne
The chapter advocates surface as the new site of architecture’s criticality. It presents surface ... more The chapter advocates surface as the new site of architecture’s criticality. It presents surface as a new epistemological and creative terrain, proposing four new typologies: urban surface; surface as an integrated element; surface as optically and physically transient; and as design method, in addition to representational surface. It contends that allowing the nascent history of surface to bear upon the debates on criticality is significant, because it reveals assumptions concerning the disciplinary limits of architecture. It argues that the acts of looking past, looking through, or not looking at surface at all constitutes it as a disciplinary blindspot, and hence the architectural unconscious. Due to the physical and conceptual in-betweenness of surface, and because it is neither completely repressed nor fully materialized, it is capable of sustaining a critical dis-stance. The sighting of the architectural conscious is not just a critical turn: it is also a creative turn. This is explored in my scholarly reflections on the experimental studio at University of New South Wales, where the students interrogated the limits of the plan, and the ‘orthographic gaze’ that impedes the social possibilities of the spatial, and they speculatively explored the potentialities of surface in generating alternative spatial organizations.
Smart Vagueness: Alternative Urbanities of the Global South
Anuradha Chatterjee, PhD | Statement of Teaching
Course Abstract: The course is based on Dr Chatterjee’s original research which has argued that s... more Course Abstract: The course is based on Dr Chatterjee’s original research which has argued that surface in architecture has had a deeper and a more pervasive presence in the practice and theory of the discipline than is commonly supposed. Surface is both superficial and pervasive, symbol and space; meaningful and functional; static and transitory, object and envelope. Despite being a key part of the discipline, it occupies the interstice or the space of the unconscious in architectural discourse, from where it defends its legitimacy as architecturally valuable. The aim of the course is to present a brief theoretical history of the architectural surface, and adopt an alternative pedagogic lens of enabling a parallel reading of architectural history. The seminars will explore the historical condition of architecture’s investment into the constructive and the spatial; the eighteenth and nineteenth-century crisis of architectural representation, and perspectives on ornament emerging from Germany, France, and Britain; and architectural modernism’s anti-representational claims and the denial of the surface, exploring specifically the whitewash and the curtain wall, and presenting critiques which demonstrate that these positions are untenable. The course will present the more recent ‘surface turn,’ by presenting current perspectives emerging out of a new interdisciplinary field of ‘surface studies.’ This is considered in parallel with shifts in architectural thinking organized around emerging alignments between Deleuzian metaphysics, topological surface, and digital design. The seminar also presents a set of surface typologies in architecture through the study of buildings. The course is assessed through a written essay and an architectural study of an Edinburgh building (historic or contemporary).
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 2019
Gagné, Ann. 2019. "John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture by Anuradha Chatterjee". Journal of... more Gagné, Ann. 2019. "John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture by Anuradha Chatterjee". Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. 28 (1): 102-105.
Future Anterior, 2018
Kennedy, T. B. Review of John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, by Anuradha Chatterjee. Futu... more Kennedy, T. B. Review of John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, by Anuradha Chatterjee. Future Anterior 15, no. 2 (2018): 155-156. muse.jhu.edu/article/758756.