The South Asian monsoon is more than an annual atmospheric phenomenon. It is a principle that organises territory and seeps into almost every aspect of life on the Indian subcontinent – its politics, economics, infrastructure, food, sex, culture, religion and daily life. The ambition of Monsoon Assemblages is to (i) develop an understanding of the […]
Resilient Urban Edges: Adaptive and Mitigative Strategies in Chennai This blog entry is a summary of the presentation held during the 2nd Monsoon Assemblages seminar, written by the guest presenter Vaishali Enos. In the second Monsoon Assemblages seminar, I presented excerpts from my design-based dissertation for the Master of Science in Architecture and Environmental Design […]
On Thursday 29th September, Cath Hassell of ech2o Environmental Consultancy ran a fantastic workshop for students in DS18 on urban rain water management and harvesting. This was framed by a discussion of water politics in Tamil Nadu and traditional ways of retaining rainwater in South India. Her presentation covered problems that arise from combined storm […]
Monsoon Assemblages (MONASS) was officially launched on Tuesday evening at an event hosted by the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (FABE) at the University of Westminster. The launch was a joint celebration of two grant funded research projects: Monsoon Assemblages and Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao […]
Having joined the Monsoon Assemblages team in mid-August, I find myself one month in to the project and time has flown. Over the past weeks we have started the process of ‘finding the field’ and locating ourselves within the project. As most of the team have not worked in Chennai before, we have begun by […]
Imploding the Post-Disaster Information Vacuum: Crowd-sourcing a real-time flood map for Indonesia For the launch of our Monsoon Assemblages seminar series, on the 23rd of September, 2016, Dr. Tomas Holderness, research associate at MIT, Cambridge, MA, presented the PetaJakarta open source flood map, for Jakarta. The project is already in the course of its third year […]
As part of the Monsoon Assemblages research project, the MONASS team are organising a series of public seminars. These seminars have been conceived with at least two objectives in mind. On one hand, the seminars will assist and inspire the research team in following and tracing the many rivulets of associations that flow through and […]
The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment invites you to the launch of two grant funded research projects: Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and São Paulo | Professor Susannah Hagan This Anglo-Brazilian research project examines the often neglected role of the architect in the production of public space in London and […]
After a long summer of frustrating interactions with University finance, procurement, IT and hiring procedures and protocols, Monsoon Assemblages is finally up and running! Our first assemblage is taking shape, around grant funding, a spacious office furnished with long black working desk, a round meeting table, chairs, fans, a kettle, computers, telephones, books; an administrator and three researchers beginning to use post-it notes, coffee, conversations, Mendeley, Nvivo, office 365, google chrome and so on to give shape to the project.