Amit Ittyerah

Amit’s research engages the interacting fields of 20th and 21st-century architecture and urbanization in international and postcolonial geographies such as South Asia. His current research examines architectural assemblies and typologies of the rapidly urbanizing countryside along infrastructure like highway corridors beyond metropolitan space in post-economic liberalization India.

In this context, Amit’s dissertation shows how visually charged extraordinary commercial wedding venues have emerged along highways around Delhi and its surrounding smaller cities, towns, and villages, representing a form of urbanization, industrialization, and economic growth entangling metropole and countryside. Tracing these sites’ assemblies reveals that they include permanent and semi-permanent structures imitating a montage of local and internationally circulating images of iconic architecture and other destinations like European Palaces, famous international cities, and Bollywood mise en scène using flexible materials like cloth steel bamboo and fiberglass along with more convention brick and mortar construction. These wedding venues also reveal the vital role of the wedding home and local and regional culture closer to the Postcolonial subject.

While Colonial and later Postcolonial modern State have traditionally marginalized these sites closer to the subject, these venues have persisted as popular sites of consumption. In fact, these venues have proliferated in size and scale, especially after economic liberalization as the State withdraws from conventional modes of physical planning and deploys biopolitical infrastructures that mobilize the subject and its caste and religious identity-based social infrastructures associated with the private realm and home that play crucial roles in manifesting these wedding venues. The marginalized sites of the home and its extended communities in villages or more urban community neighborhoods manifest displaced and consequently, highly flexible and scalable wedding networks and communities engaging the metropolis and its class-based world. These are networks mediated through complimentary venue materials like tents and assembled food and furniture that also mobilize networks of highly flexible and scalable migrant labor guilds from the countryside. These materially potent migrant guilds also emerge through family and caste-based wedding networks. These caste formations are, therefore, present both in the metropolis and the countryside, representing a hierarchy of consuming and producing castes communities operating across these spaces that under-grid processes of urbanization and industrialization manifesting the highly potent hybrid urban form of the wedding venue. The ubiquity of such caste-based practices across human settlement scales means the wedding venue is also an influential typology and window into the morphology of urbanization and industrialization in smaller towns and villages in the countryside—especially those along highway corridors engaging metropolitan and other international worlds.

Amit is also a registered Architect in India, having practiced with notable firms for over 6 years in various Indian cities and in the city of Seattle in the United States. He teaches surveys and seminars in architecture and urban studies and their history and theory. He is an avid reviewer at Undergraduate, Graduate and Thesis Design Studios. He received his B.Arch from M.S. University Baroda, India, and M.Arch and M.S. in the History and Theory of Architecture from the University of Washington. Amit has participated in award-winning design competitions at national (India), international, professional, and academic venues. He has also been invited by design and research groups to participate in international urban design charettes and academic research groups engaging in architecture and urbanization. He continues to dabble with partners on projects and competitions, developing his keen interests in design as a methodological interface between critical urban, architectural, and postcolonial practices.

Selected Public Presentations

• Deruralization between Delhi and Chandigarh: Association for Asian Studies Conference, Seattle. April 6, 2016
• Commodity Architecture, the City, and Beyond: Emerging Urban Morphologies between Delhi & Chandigarh along National Highway1: Center for South Asia Studies, University of Michigan. January 27, 2018
• Parallel highways, the virtual and real: Algorithmic montage in the Post Periphery: The Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley graduate student conference: After Effects: Architectural Histories of the Present, November 9th-11th 2018.
• Enclave urbanization along post liberalization highway landscapes of the “Global South”: History Theory Long Table Discussion, University of Washington, May 14, 2019.
• Liberalization’s Urbanism at the “Periphery”: The case of the Indian Wedding industry and COVID times: Urban Planning and Policy Ph.D. Colloquium Virginia Tech, Oct 13, 2020

Awards

• Rackham International Research Award (U of M), 2021
• C.K. Prahalad Award, Ross School of Business (U of M), 2020.
• Rackham International Students Fellowship/ Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship (U of M), 2018
• Paraskevopoulos Memorial Fellowship (U of M), 2017.
• Myer R. Wolfe Scholarship in Urban Design (University of Washington (UW),2015)
• Seattle Architectural Foundation Fellowship (UW,2014)
• M. Arch Thesis Prize (UW,2011)
• Department of Architecture Faculty Medal (UW, 2010)
• Rupal K Engineering Gold Medal for Final Year Undergraduate Design Thesis (M.S University Baroda, 2005)