Mayuri Paranthahan
Mayuri Paranthahan is a second-generation Tamil Sri Lankan-Canadian designer, researcher, writer, and curator. She is a Master of Architecture candidate at the University of Waterloo in Canada where she also completed her Bachelor of Architectural Studies in 2019. She is currently pursuing a federally funded thesis on the spatial organization of housework in her family’s displacement from a Jaffna, Sri Lanka village to the suburban Greater Toronto Area in Canada in the mid-1980s. Previously, Mayuri has worked as a curatorial intern at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the Department of Architecture and Design, and as an intern architect at WXY Studio in New York City, KWY Studio in Lisbon, and Bovenbouw Architectuur in Antwerp. Mayuri has published papers in Chutney Magazine, galt publication, and Ground Up Journal, and is one of three 2022 Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference Student Diversity fellows.
Sessions in which Mayuri Paranthahan participates
Thursday 26 May, 2022
Displacement, describing a sense of uprootedness, is seemingly irreconcilable with the grounding quality of domestic space. However, the practice of housework and homemaking allows forcibly displaced people to reconstruct home elsewhere. While historical feminist movements in the West have advocated for a radical socialization of housework in an effort to value its labour and extend its visibility to the public realm, these views fail to address the importance of homemaking as private plac...
Sessions in which Mayuri Paranthahan attends
Wednesday 25 May, 2022
We propose a rich and colorful inaugural evening, in a mythical place: Dawson Hall, behind St James United Church (1887-1889, Alexander Francis Dunlop, arch.), known as the "Montreal Methodist Cathedral" - with 2000 seats, it was the largest Methodist church in Canada when it was built. Designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1996, it escaped demolition in 1980 when it was classified as a historic monument, and then escaped extinction thanks to an ambitious restoration project, in...
Thursday 26 May, 2022
The cultural landscapes of migration are an inextricable part of Canada’s urban, social and national identity. However, recent debates about immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and the visibility of cultural symbolisms raise controversial, often polarized public opinions. Policies of migration have accentuated divisive interpretations and legitimized isolation among multiple cultural communities, instead of promoting dialogue. This session...
“Migrations are made, they don’t just happen. There are conditions which cause them” (Saskia Sassen)Although urban populations are becoming increasingly diverse, the built environment is not designed to accommodate these differences. Rather, throughout the 20th century in the Western world, the standard subject that has guided design has been the experiences of white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male populations. In contrast, Statistics Canada estimates that nearly one-third of Canad...
My recent book, For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers: Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870-1930 (McGill-Queen’s, 2021), investigates spatial stories at moments of arrival in Dominion government immigration buildings. Driven as much as possible by narratives derived from immigrant memoirs, and from archival documents read against the grain for spatial practices, the book’s research seems a pertinent fit with this session’s theme. For this presentation, I propos...
Home is a deceptively simple term connecting a vast network of people, places, objects, and emotions. As people move from place to place, home manifests through inhabitations of built form. These spatial identities are records of movement which reinforce the importance of home as an architectural research site to learn about diverse diasporas in a rapidly globalizing world.This research explores a process for understanding diasporic spatial identity through how people remember, inha...
The cultural landscapes of migration are an inextricable part of Canada’s urban, social and national identity. However, recent debates about immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and the visibility of cultural symbolisms raise controversial, often polarized public opinions. Policies of migration have accentuated divisive interpretations and legitimized isolation among multiple cultural communities, instead of promoting dialogue. This session...
Food offers a means of examining spatial stories of migration. As a set of heritage activities, the preparation, storage, and consumption of food offer multisensorial and evocative ways of exploring cultural identity and a sense of belonging, particularly for members of diasporic communities. Immigrants and their descendants often have to modify traditional recipes and make do with different domestic technologies and spatial configurations. They become everyday designers, active agents in ...
The cultural landscapes of migration are an inextricable part of Canada’s urban, social and national identity. However, recent debates about immigration, diversity, multiculturalism and the visibility of cultural symbolisms raise controversial, often polarized public opinions. Policies of migration have accentuated divisive interpretations and legitimized isolation among multiple cultural communities, instead of promoting dialogue. This session...
I discuss a narrative “zine”, Home Smart Home, which I created in 2021 as a commission for UKAI Projects and the Goethe-Institut Toronto as part of the Goethe-Institut’s Algorithmic Culture project. The zine consists of a series of observations sited within my family’s suburban home in Scarborough, Ontario, in a neighbourhood made up primarily of first- and second-generation South Asian and Southeast Asian immigrants. The goal of the commissioning institution was to seek what Neta B...
Architecture has the agency to either perpetuate social exclusion or initiate a social change that can offset the continuing forms of hostile architecture in Canadian public spaces. Designing public spaces must intentionally reflect the needs of the whole community, including marginalized people who are often kept on the periphery of an architect's visualization of a public building. As a person who is a Syrian refugee and formerly held a precarious immigration status as an asylum seeker, ...
Roger D'Astous is one of the most important Canadian architects of the 20th century. A student of Frank Lloyd Wright, he worked all his life to establish a northern architecture. This rebellious and flamboyant artist was a superstar of the sixties, then fell into disgrace before being reborn in the twilight of the century. Author of two Montreal icons, the Château Champlain Hotel and the Olympic Village for the 1976 Games, his residences are sensual works of art and his churches are strang...
Friday 27 May, 2022
Many of our Canadian cities and towns currently find themselves in need of revival and renewal. Disinvestment in the public realm, decentralization – exacerbated during the COVID 19 Pandemic – vacancies and abandonment - including brownfields and grayfields – are some of the many challenges which they currently face. Both dwindling tax bases, and depleted revenue streams, make more formal and top-down urban strategies less tenable. Prevailing Modernist paradigms such as urban ...
This paper discusses the pedagogical strategies and outcomes of a recent seminar, conducted at the McGill school of architecture in 2022, which aimed to recover underrepresented actors, sites, and design theories during the pivotal period from roughly 1945 to 1980. Students were asked to prepare a visual storyboard based on an extant public building in the city of Montreal, dating from the postwar period, and using the conventions of the graphic novel. Drawing on archival imagery and texts...
To speak of participatory conservation typically brings to mind cases where citizens mobilise to protect threatened forms of material heritage in ‘downtown’ contexts or ‘natural’ spaces at the rural-urban fringe, which in turn is a locus for efforts toward ecological recovery. Less commonly do we think of participation, conservation, and ecological recovery in the everyday (post)suburban landscapes found across Canada. In this paper we explore how densification, diversification, and co...
Oromocto, NB was known as “Canada’s Model Town” in 1959. This New Town was a collaborative design between Central Mortgage and Housing’s Architecture & Planning Division and the Department of National Defense’ s consultant, McGill Professor Harold Spence-Sales. Oromocto offered utility as a New Town and well-designed neighbourhoods servicing the needs of Canadian Forces Base Gagetown’s soldiers and their families. Oromocto was a CMHC showcase for inexpensive Modern homes and good neigh...
Architectural history and heritage have historically been defined by superlatives. Vernacular traditions and local histories, on the other hand, have often been pushed to the margins or overlooked. These everyday spaces and places are often relegated to the quotidian, and perceived as unworthy of recognition. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has changed our daily lives, and in many cases, our values. Now, we have been forced to see the everyday in a new light. What might this n...
The importance of parks became starkly apparent as we pivoted to new ways of socializing, exercising, eating, and all aspects of living during the pandemic. We can learn a lot about park planning from formal and informal park innovations and usage during this crisis, as well as adaptations from previous moments of instability, such as wartime. Innovations that responded to these pandemic years can help us understand our planning challenges.This paper looks at the iconic Allan Garden...
Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian, at the International YMCA College in Massachusetts. As a student, Lyman Archibald (a native of Nova Scotia) played on this first basketball team. Soonafter, Archibald moved to St. Stephen, New Brunswick to oversee the town’s YMCA. He introduced the new sport, and the first game in Canada was played here on October 17, 1893. Undoubtedly, the participants who lodged a leather ball into peach baskets that day would have neve...
Walking tour of the working-class housing and churches of Saint-Pierre-Apôtre and Sainte-Brigide-de-Kildare (now the Sainte-Brigide Cultural and Community Centre) in the south-central district of Montreal.The tour will be guided by Luc Noppen.A departure (by foot) will be organized from the conference site; the tour itself will begin at 5:00 pm at the Beaudry metro station (a metro station of Berri-UQAM, site of the conference).
Saturday 28 May, 2022
“Felt experiences” have become key components of our understanding of the world in the digital age, which could explain the increase in research on the diversity of the ambiences experienced in built environments. These approaches, which sometimes give privileged access to worldviews or lead to design modes that are more attentive to the experience of users, shed new light on previ...
Through an investigation of the Citadel Theatre of Edmonton, one of the largest North American theatres, I investigate works of architecture as physical indices of colonial violence. This investigation is made through a postcolonial and ecomaterial framework that enables me to focus on the materials used in the building of the Citadel Theatre: both their geographical origin (Medicine Hat, Alberta, and California) and the labor that has gone into its extraction. Labor and extraction tie bui...
Through twenty-eight encounters, site history is explored differently; colour becomes a lens of site analysis that traces social, economic, and environmental accounts of materials, while challenging the familiarity of linear narratives and the perception of time and space. Traces of colour are stripped from written, verbal, and spiritual histories of industrial ruins. Extracting this spectrum of pigments creates material ambiguity where constructed divisions between what is human versus wh...
While the relationship between architecture and community are intrinsically intertwined, the built form of “community spaces” is not easily defined by any specific style, design, or building typology. Though there are many purpose-built community buildings across Canada, including community and recreation centres, performance venues, and town halls, many community spaces often evolve organically and informally from the community itself in a div...
La ville extraordinaire is a three-year Partnership Development oral history research-creation project that aims to understand the ways in which diverse communities have shaped the city of Montreal over time. To this end, for the past year, our team has been interviewing older (broadly defined) residents of the city, including members of the Filipino-, Haitian-, and Chinese-Montreal communities, as well as less clearly delineated groups, such as older sex workers and older adults who face ...
The future of development in peri-urban/rural areas and our cities depends on how we respond to the challenges of today. Due to population growth and migration pressure, two of the most pressing problems of urbanization in rural communities are poverty and environmental degradation (Marshall et al., 2009). To counteract the problems of urbanization, community planning and co-creation through value-inclusive design are proposed as essential to developing healthy and sustainable towns and ci...
The talk explores the Adaptive Reuse and Revitalization of Christian Religious Architecture by diverse faiths. These heritage spaces are transformed layer by layer and are adapted to the religious practices of the new inhabitants. The “original,” however, is largely evident and co-exists symbiotically with the “altered.” Interventions are made mostly to the interior of these spaces and the new occupants grapple with a form that does not necessarily align with their religious practices. Exp...
Bus tour of the Soulanges Canal and its facilities (1899-1959), currently undergoing a major enhancement project. The first stop will be at the west entrance of the canal, the Coteau-Landing (Les Coteaux) entrance lock; from there, we will go to lock no. 4 and to the old Cedars hydroelectric power station (called "Petit Pouvoir"), classified as a historic monument since 1984 by the Quebec government, then to Pointe-des-Cascades where the spectacular locks no. 1, 2 and 3 are located. The vi...
We offer a unique experience for the closing dinner of this conference in Montreal, in the former U.S. pavilion of Expo'67 - the most popular of the exhibition, with 5.3 million visitors: the "geodesic dome" designed by architect Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) with the collaboration of Shoji Sadao. The self-supporting steel honeycomb structure, covered with a polymer skin, was burned down in 1976 and redeveloped in the 1990s, according to the plans of architect Éric Gauthier, into an envir...