A talk by Dr. Priya Jain from the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

Based on primary archival research in India, Zurich and London, this talk will chart the history of designing the IIT-Kharagpur campus—the early administrative workings, preliminary designs by the Indian Public Works Department, the involvement of Swiss architects Werner Moser and Walter Custer, and the tangled process of adapting global ideas to the Indian scenario. The talk will briefly address the four subsequent IITs--Mumbai (1958), Chennai (1960), Kanpur (1962) and New Delhi (1965), that too were built through international collaborations with the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and West Germany. The unique historical context of the IITs with multiple countries embroiled in a web of complex geopolitical agreements over twenty years, allows new understandings of the role of architecture amidst this tumultuous time in global history (post WWII alliances, emergence of Cold War).

About the speaker: Priya Jain is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University. An architect licensed both in India and the US, she has worked on the restoration and reuse of a diverse range of buildings. Her research focuses on the histories of twentieth-century South Asian architecture in a transnational context, as it relates to technology, materials, race and climate.