Peter Scriver, Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture (CAMEA), University of Adelaide

Chair: Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design

In Jawaharlal Nehru’s strategic vision for India’s postcolonial modernization and development, the architecture and urbanism of Chandigarh, the new Punjab State Capital, was of ‘enormous importance’. ‘It hits you on the head, and makes you think’, he famously argued. ‘You may squirm at the impact but it has made you think and imbibe new ideas…’  Though rarely invoked with such a clear and critical purpose, architecture has entered in and out of political consciousness over the course of India’s long march from colonial to global modernity, with its potential both to project change and to recruit resistance to it.

Peter Scriver is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory in the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His books include After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture (Mapin, 1990),Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon(Routledge, 2007), and India: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2015)