Designing the Domestic: Innovation in the Home - Interview with Priya Gupta

27 September 2023 -

Ahead of our ‘Designing the Domestic: Innovation in the Home’ symposium, DHS Ambassador Alexandra Banister interviewed Priya Gupta, a PhD scholar at the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, to further discuss her research analysing the impact of state led regulations on Chandigarh’s private housing.

Don’t forget you can sign up to the talk – taking place on Saturday 7th October, 2-4.30pm BST – for free via Ticket source.

What is your background and how did you develop your interest in design history?

I am an architect-academic-researcher from Chandigarh. After shifting to academics while teaching the history of the built environment and the theory of design, I became interested in the evolution of object design, spaces and buildings, their space use, and changes in ways of using them.

What does your research focus on?

My ongoing Ph.D. research focuses on analysing the evolution of a modern regulated domestic space – the row house of Chandigarh. I am looking at how the row house in the city has evolved in the last 70 years since its inception with the changing regulations, paradigm shifts, and diverse ways of space use.

I want to write about the history of Chandigarh’s private row house, whose DNA comprises a heterogeneous mix of modern aspirations and indigenous cultural ideas, extensive aesthetic and volumetric codification, the tropes of modernism and collective identity, and eventually dissect the transformation of this house and its space use patterns.

Your talk is part of a wider symposium on Designing the Domestic: Innovation in the Home. What has drawn you to research design in the home?

Home is an everyday, individual, private space – a space of refuge, territory, and ownership, as well as a habitation unit within a public realm driven by external forces. My interest has been in forces - the regulatory forces, the social customs, the architect's vision, and the resident's aspirations - that shape the design of a home, its spaces, and components, and how these shape the ways of inhabitation and space use.