Shaiwanti Gupta

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research-led visual translation of selected oral histories from Women of Vaastukala Archives into layered architectural drawings, timelines, and comparative mappings. By closely listening to the oral history interviews, the project aims to reposition the archive within architectural discourse, bringing forth new narratives. The project begins with the proposition of re-listening in order to draw. It advances listening as method and an act of analytical attention through which memory is translated into spatial form. This project is in collaboration with Women of Vaastuakala Archive. Announced as accessible in 2022, the archive is primarily located on the web and hosts oral histories of 21 women practitioners in architecture, design, planning, and allied disciplines, from across India. Supported by the Graham Foundation, Chicago, this archive has emerged from a research project Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India. The intent is to record conversations with a wide range of women practitioners in varying positions across the built environment industry, map their journeys, and arrive at an alternate narrative about India’s architectural history post-independence. At present, the archive is now supported and hosted by Curating for Culture, a collective focused on making invisible histories visible. Shaiwanti Gupta is the Coordinator of this project.

Shaiwanti Gupta is an architect, urban designer and curator currently based out of Jaipur, Rajasthan. As an architect and researcher, she has been working at the intersection of architectural research and curatorial methodologies. Shaiwanti graduated from The Berlage Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, TU Delft, Netherlands. In her work, she utilises drawing and visualisation as analytical tools to situate questions within broader theoretical and cultural frameworks. She has completed the Berlage Post-master in Architecture & Urban Design TU Delft Netherlands. In her thesis project Non-Stop Landscape, Shaiwanti explored rail-based tourism as a sustainable alternative within Norway’s post-oil future. The project was exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and is currently under publication. In addition, she worked on a project titled On Exhibiting Architecture mentored by Barry Bergdoll, where she recreated exhibition drawings based on curatorial conversations and archival sketches. In addition, in India, Shaiwanti has worked extensively in exhibition design and curatorial production, such as Jaipur Art Week and Jodhpur Art Week 2024, conceived by the Public Arts Trust of India and other organisations. Given her research interest, and practice, Shaiwanti is best suited to be the to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Shaiwanti in her own work in Netherlands and India foregrounded themes of feminism, decolonisation, and public accessibility. Through this Foundation Project, the Project Coordinator seeks to contribute to the ongoing work of the Women of Vaastukala Archive by bridging archival inquiry with spatial interpretation, grounding it within architectural historiography and expanding its public and pedagogical reach. Focusing on a selected group of practitioners across generations from the Women in Vaastukala Archive, the project will develop a series of drawings like timeline diagrams and typological plates. In addition to reinterpreting existing interviews, the research will undertake further inquiry into the projects of the architects in Women of Vaastukala, by focusing on their modes of approaching design, working methods and their associations with other architects. Audio-visual annotations derived from interview transcripts, alongside collected archival drawings of projects will inform these visual studies. As an architect looking into an oral history archive of women architects, the Project Coordinator approaches drawing as a historiographic instrument. A critical medium through which spoken accounts are translated into architectural argument. In shifting the archive from testimonial record to discursive ground, the research situates voice within the domain of spatial inquiry, framing it within a larger architectural narrative that emerges through deeper engagement with the archive.

Through the close listening and drawing, the investigation will deepen the archive by situating practice within networks of collaboration, institutional structures, and material processes. While the selection of the oral history interviews itself will be a longer embodied experience, the final selection of the interviews will also take into account the available materials – drawings, ephemera and other materials that might exist with the archive or contributor of the archive. Through this study, the project asks: How can listening function as an architectural method? What spatial logics are embedded within oral histories of women practitioners? In what ways do institutional affiliations and pedagogical trajectories shape architectural form? How can drawing reframe the archive as architectural historiography rather than documentation? Ultimately, what new architectural knowledge emerges when biography is translated into spatial analysis and narrative testimony is rendered through diagrams and comparative study? By extracting architectural discourse from oral history, the resulting body of drawings will enable its integration into architectural pedagogy and research. In doing so, the project grounds the Women of Vaastukala Archive within spatial analysis, positioning it as a generative site for critical architectural thought.

The project speaks to the vision of the Archives and Museums programme of IFA and responds to the impulse of the collaboration between IFA and Women of Vaastukala Archive. Women in Vaastukala as an archive, is one of its first kind which uses oral history recordings, visual documentation, and storytelling tools to create an open-access archive and contributes to the discourse about the relationships between gender and the built environment in India. The proposed project by Shaiwanti seeks to extend the archive in its meaning-making endeavour.

Shaiwanti has divided the project into five phases.  In the first phase, the Project Coordinator will immerse herself into the archives, closely listening to the interviews and working on transcription of interviews. In this phase she will also attempt to develop the analytical matrix. In the following phase, Shaiwanti will develop layered narratives and work towards the comparative typological plates, timeline diagrams that visualises education, institutional trajectory, geography of the architects. The third phase will be dedicated to the integration of audio-visual annotations into her drawings. The next phase will be towards completion of 8 to 10 resolved drawing plates, writing of  a critical essay, finalising design and layout of the publication, and creating print-ready files for production. The last phase is towards the final production which includes printing of selected large format drawing plates, printing of limited-edition research booklets and digital publication release.  

The outcomes of this project will be eight to ten analytical and narrative drawing plates as digital files, four to five large format physical prints for display, a printed research booklets and a digital publication. The Project Coordinator’s final deliverables to IFA, along with the reports will be copies of the drawing plates, digital or physical copies of the prints, copies of the research booklet and soft-copies of the digital publication.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Tata Trusts.