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 auxquelles Mayuri Paranthahan participe
Jeudi 26 Mai, 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 auxquelles Mayuri Paranthahan assiste
Mercredi 25 Mai, 2022
Nous vous proposons une soirée inaugurale riche et haute en couleurs, dans un lieu mythique: le Dawson Hall, derrière l'église St James United (1887-1889, Alexanderr Francis Dunlop, arch.), dite "cathédrale méthodiste de Montréal" – avec 2000 sièges, c'était la plus grande église méthodiste du Canada lors de sa construction. Désignée Lieu historique national du Canada en 1996, elle a échappé à la démolition en 1980, lors de son classement au titre de monument historique, puis a échappé à l...
Jeudi 26 Mai, 2022
Les paysages culturels de la migration sont inextricablement liés à l’identité urbaine, sociale et nationale du Canada. Toutefois, les débats récents autour de l’immigration, la diversité, le multiculturalisme et la visibilité des symboles culturels ont soulevé des opinions publiques controversées et souvent polarisées. Au lieu de promouvoir le dialogue, les politiques relatives à la migration ont accentué les interprétations qui divisent et qu...
“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...
Les paysages culturels de la migration sont inextricablement liés à l’identité urbaine, sociale et nationale du Canada. Toutefois, les débats récents autour de l’immigration, la diversité, le multiculturalisme et la visibilité des symboles culturels ont soulevé des opinions publiques controversées et souvent polarisées. Au lieu de promouvoir le dialogue, les politiques relatives à la migration ont accentué les interprétations qui divisent et qu...
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 ...
Les paysages culturels de la migration sont inextricablement liés à l’identité urbaine, sociale et nationale du Canada. Toutefois, les débats récents autour de l’immigration, la diversité, le multiculturalisme et la visibilité des symboles culturels ont soulevé des opinions publiques controversées et souvent polarisées. Au lieu de promouvoir le dialogue, les politiques relatives à la migration ont accentué les interprétations qui divisent et qu...
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 est un des plus importants architectes canadiens du 20e siècle. Élève de Frank Lloyd Wright, il oeuvra toute sa vie à fonder une architecture nordique. Cet artiste rebelle et flamboyant fut une superstar des sixties, puis tomba en disgrâce avant de renaître au crépuscule du siècle. Auteur de deux symboles montréalais, l'hôtel Château Champlain et le Village olympique pour les Jeux de 1976, ses résidences sont des oeuvres d'arts sensuelles et ses églises d’étranges vaisseaux ...
Vendredi 27 Mai, 2022
Un grand nombre de villes et localités canadiennes ont besoin de revitalisation et de renouvellement. Le désinvestissement public, la décentralisation – en plus forte hausse durant la pandémie – l’inoccupation et l‘abandon des friches industrielles et des terrains vagues sont quelques-uns des nombreux défis auxquels elles sont actuellement confrontées.La diminution de l’assiette fiscale et l’épuisement des sources de revenus rendent moins pertinentes les stratégies urbaines formelle...
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...
Alors que l’histoire et le patrimoine architecturaux ont toujours été définis par des superlatifs, les traditions vernaculaires et les histoires locales ont, quant à elles, été sous-estimées ou négligées. Ces espaces et lieux quotidiens sont souvent perçus comme banals et sans intérêt particulier digne de reconnaissance. Toutefois, la pandémie de la COVID-19 a changé notre vie quotidienne et, dans bien des cas, nos valeurs, nous forçant à poser un regard différent sur le quotid...
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...
Découverte à pied de l'habitation ouvrière et des églises Saint-Pierre-Apôtre et Sainte-Brigide-de-Kildare (aujourd'hui Centre culturel et communautaire Sainte-Brigide) dans le quartier centre-sud de Montréal.La visite sera guidée par Luc Noppen.Un départ à pied sera organisé à partir du lieu du colloque; la visite elle-même commencera à 17h à la station de métro Beaudry (une station de métro de Berri-UQAM, site du colloque).
Samedi 28 Mai, 2022
Le « ressenti » est devenu une clé de lecture du monde prépondérante à l’ère numérique, ce qui pourrait expliquer en retour une recrudescence de travaux de recherche s’intéressant à la diversité des ambiances ressenties dans les environnements bâtis. Ces approches qui tantôt donnent un accès privilégié à des visions du monde ou mènent à des modes de conception plus attentifs à l’expérien...
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...
Bien que l’architecture et la communauté soient étroitement liées, les structures bâties des « espaces communautaires » ne se définissent pas par un style, un design ou une typologie de bâtiment particuliers. Tandis que le Canada compte de multiples édifices construits à cette fin, notamment des centres communautaires et récréatifs, des salles de spectacle et des hôtels de ville, de nombreux espaces communautaires prennent forme de façon organi...
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...
Visite en autobus du canal de Soulanges et de ses aménagements (1899-1959), actuellement visés par un vaste projet de mise en valeur. Le premier arrêt se fera à l'entrée ouest du canal, écluse d'entrée à Coteau-Landing (Les Coteaux); de là, on ira à l'écluse no 4 et à l'ancienne Centrale hydroélectrique des Cèdres (dite "Petit Pouvoir"), classée au titre de monument historique depuis 1984 par le gouvernement du Québec, puis à Pointe-des-Cascades où se trouvent les spectaculaires écluses no...
Nous vous proposons une expérience unique pour le dîner de clôture de ce congrès à Montréal, dans l'ancien pavillon des États-Unis de l'Expo'67 – le plus populaire de l'exposition, avec 5,3 millions de visiteurs: le "dôme géodésique" conçu par l'architecte Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) avec la collaboration de Shoji Sadao. La structure alvéolée autoportante en acier, revêtue d'une peau de polymère, a été incendiée en 1976 et réaménagée à compter de 1990, d'après les plans de l'architecte ...