Sanjana Lahiri
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art School of Architecture
“Housing as an Infrastructure of Care.” This housing project proposes a mode of living in which residents participate in a decentralized system of food cultivation through which rituals of growing, harvesting, and congregation intersect with those of domesticity. An infrastructure of care emerges. The three blocks correspond to three housing groups: children and their guardians, adults and found families, and elderly with caretakers. The ground level of each block contains habitation for plants: a germination space, a growing/harvesting space, and a cooking/eating space. Each resident takes on the role of caretaker or steward, whether this is through caring for humans, for nonhumans, or for common spaces. © Sanjana Lahiri.
Jury
Danei Cesario
Chris Cornelius
Joyce Hwang
María Villalobos Hernandez
Robert L. Wesley (Chair)
Sanjana is not only a brilliant, talented, and prolific designer, but is also an active, relentless, and astute organizer of her peers and public discourse, helping to shape discussions around labor and the ethics of practice. As a member of the architectural profession, Sanjana practices what her projects preach, and I foresee her having a long, lasting, and important impact on the field.
Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cornell University
“Garden, Gardener, Wanderer.” The community gardens of the Lower East Side that started as spaces of grassroots resistance have since transformed into an aesthetic and symbolic device co-opted by the very systems of real estate they were attempting to counter. The material value of a beautiful garden, created through the free labor of volunteer gardeners, and the symbolic value of the gardener figure and their conspicuous labor—no more a signal of rebellion but one of the virtue, hygiene, and order of the urban working class—are tools that participate in the forced displacement of this very class. The Liz Christy Garden on Houston and Bowery, the first community garden in the city by the Green Guerrillas, now offers attractive views to the wealthy residents of Avalon Bowery Place in the adjacent lot. The visible leisure of the garden’s wanderers (i.e., those who can afford the luxury of free time) is a marker of class privilege that positions the garden as a respite from the city while concealing its tensions. © Sanjana Lahiri.
I am grateful for the support of the Robert L. Wesley Award and hope to use it to facilitate initiatives around climate action in spaces of higher education.
Sanjana Lahiri
“The Genealogy of a Plate.” At the hyperlocal scale of our engagement with the environment, I was interested in studying the practice of companion planting, an idea that originated from the Indigenous Iroquois group. The Iroquois story of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash), spoke of how certain plants could be grown together to create a microecosystem for mutual benefit. My project cuts a section through a system of five plants grown using the companion method and engages with the social implications of human/nonhuman relations. © Sanjana Lahiri.
In my fifteen years of teaching studio and seminars at all levels, Sanjana’s project, “Kashmir: Images of Sovereignty, Projections of Desire” is one of the most brilliant projects I have seen. Even more so for a project developed by a student at this earlier point in her career, and during the challenging conditions brought on by the pandemic. It is immensely intelligent, richly visualized, thoroughly detailed, and a rally for the discipline of architecture to imagine more justly. At a time in which we are all thinking about structural inequalities and histories of violence, Sanjana’s project reckons with our discipline’s colonial legacies and starts to speculate and offer new and more equitable forms of practice.
Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cornell University
“Kashmir: Images of Sovereignty, Projections of Desire.” Occupation is not a passive, unchanging state of existence, but rather something that is actively, and incessantly, enacted upon both the landscapes and the bodies of the territory in question. Drawing from the language of artificial islands that were built on Kashmir’s Dal Lake during the Mughal empire, as well as the neoliberal fantasies entrenched in India’s real estate operations in the region, the project feeds the fictions of nationhood, borders, and sovereignty, and seeks to push these fictions to their inevitable limits through image-producing infrastructures that are imposed on the landscape. © Sanjana Lahiri.
Sanjana Lahiri
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
School of Architecture
Sanjana Lahiri
is an Indian architecture student from Singapore, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City. She is the cofounder of Cooper Union’s Architecture Lobby Chapter and a member of the Cooper Climate Coalition, a student-led group advocating for climate action across the institution. She has also previously curated Cooper’s Student Lecture Series. Lahiri’s in-progress thesis project engages with New York City’s community gardens as simultaneous sites of resistance and tools of the real estate economy.