Invitation to the Rigorosum of Sony Devabhaktuni

The Examination Panel is made up of: Elke Krasny (chair), Angelika Schnell (first supervisor), and Anna-Maria Meister (second appraiser, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).

Abstract

Doreen Massey’s writing on space has been hugely influential in the social sciences, humanities, and creative arts but has been less discussed in architecture. I address this lack of attention by considering the implications of her spatial conception for architecture’s own relationship with space. In recent decades, this relationship has been diminished as 20^th century spatial understandings have been set aside as unable to address architecture’s contemporary complexities: either theoretically as a tool for critique and analysis or creatively as an orientation for design. In turning to Massey’s spatial conception, I argue that it can make space matter again for architecture. 

I locate Massey’s spatial conception in three ideas – a global sense of place, power-geometries and space-time – developed in texts from the early 1990s. Massey expands these ideas in For Space (2006) through what I describe as a discursive figuration that engages the imagination. This figuration comprises a chain of neo-logistic terms that set a relational methodology for space in motion. I read these seminal texts closely and turn as well to less well-known public scholarship on architecture, including a recurring column in the trade journal Building Design. While this occasional writing could be characterized as meagre, I propose that it contributed to the refinement of Massey’s imagination of space while also pointing toward as method for thinking through space in architecture

Short biography

Sony Devabhaktuni’s research focuses on urban infrastructures and collaborative processes in architectural design. His writing considers the political, economic and social intensities that inform imaginations of space and has appeared in Future Anterior, Architectural Theory Review, Public Culture and Global Performance Studies. Shorter works of public scholarship include contributions to the AA Files, Platform, the CCA web-journal and Places. 
Through drawing and writing, his book Curb-scale Hong Kong: Infrastructures of the Street (2023) considers the intersections of policy, labor, economics and design that divide Hong Kong’s street into a contested ground. With John C.F. Lin, he is the co-author of As Found Houses: experiments from self-builders in rural China (2020); the book documents renovations of traditional village house typologies with interviews, photographs and drawings that reframe architecture’s relation to vernacular knowledge. It was the winner of the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Medal for Research.
Since the fall of 2023, he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Swarthmore College in the United States. He has also taught in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong; with Dieter Dietz in the ALICE Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne; at the New School’s Parsons Paris program; and at the Ecole national supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais.
Devabhaktuni received a BA from Stanford University before completing a professional degree in architecture at the Cooper Union for Science and Art, and an MA in Indian Studies at Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. In Paris, he collaborated at several architectural offices including Ateliers John Nouvel and Dorell Ghotmeh Tane.

The rigorosum will be in English and takes place at Schillerplatz 3, room 211, 1010 Vienna.

We are looking forward to welcoming you.