Arindam Dutta

Professor

Arindam Dutta is Professor of Architectural Theory and History in the History Theory Criticism Program in Architectural and Art History. He obtained his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from Princeton University in 2001. He has degrees in architectural design from the Harvard Design School and the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, India, from where he graduated with gold medals. Dutta has been the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Getty Fellowship, in addition to numerous research grants and awards. Dutta's articles have appeared in the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Grey Room, the Journal of Arts and Ideas, Perspecta, and Third Text.

As a “modern” architectural historian and theorist, Dutta’s work seeks to interrogate and query the nature of arguments underlying the production of architecture and the making of territories and cities, whether these are located in terms of the disciplinary training of architects or the profession’s claim for legitimacy in relation to other professions. Dutta’s primary research interest is the study of globalization. His specific interests lie in the study of institutions, or to be more specific, in examining how the internal dynamics of institutional behavior condition these larger themes. Religion, bureaucracies, the law, disciplinary paradigms, government, firms, financial organizations, funding organizations, university departments, and unions: these corporate entities are crucial to mediating and adjudicating various demands upon power, resources, and justice of various kinds. Dutta’s work and teaching on architecture and aesthetics typically seeks out the archive of these intermediary structures to study how decisions of various kinds, most importantly design decisions, are implicated by the subjective dynamics present within them. His research focuses on more structural and institutional dynamics, bringing attention to other kinds of phenomena whose triggers cannot so easily be reduced to singular actors or groups of actors. Particularly highlighted in his work are maps of interests through which a particular aesthetic or form-making complex might come into being. A “thickened” consideration of the State and “economy” remains an ever-present feature in his studies and in his teaching.

Dutta's teaching interests lie in the area of modern architectural theory and history; imperialism, globalization, and third world politics; technology studies and body politics; Marxist and post-structuralist thought. In addition to MIT, Dutta has also taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University.

Dutta directs the MIT Infrastructure Architecture Lab set up to conduct research and propose strategies regarding the relationships between broad, macroeconomic factors driving built infrastructure and the specificities of architectural and urban form. Along with Sai Balakrishnan and other collaborators, he is conducting research on the relationships between the infrastructure and the "real estate turn" in global financial investments and assetization, and their links to political, institutional and ethnic formations in the Global South.

Publications
A selection of Dutta's publications is available here.

Dutta is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. The Bureaucracy of Beauty begins with nineteenth-century Britain's Department of Science and Arts, a venture organized by the Board of Trade, and how the DSA exerted a powerful influence on the growth of museums, design schools, and architecture throughout the British Empire. In the words of one reviewer, the book's intriguing claim is that "empire operates not only through domination, not only through hegemony, but also through beauty." But this is only the book's literal subject: in a remarkable set of chapters, Dutta explores the development of international laws of intellectual property, ideas of design pedagogy, the technological distinction between craft and industry, the relation of colonial tutelage to economic policy, the politics and technology of exhibition, and competing philosophies of aesthetics.

Dutta is the editor of A Second Modernism: Architecture, MIT and the "Techno-Social" Moment, on the postwar conjuncture of architectural thought and linguistic/systems theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). After World War II, a second modernism emerged in architecture -- an attempt, in architectural scholar Joan Ockman's words, "to transform architecture from a 'soft' aesthetic discipline into a 'hard,' objectively verifiable field of design expertise." Architectural thought was influenced by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, cybernetic, and other urban and behavioral models, as well as systems-based and artificial intelligence theories. This nearly 1,000-page book examines the "techno-social" turn in architecture, taking MIT's School of Architecture and Planning as its exemplar.

Dutta is a founding member of the architectural historians’ collective Aggregate. Aggregate’s Governing by Design came out in 2011, comprising of a series of essays on the relationships between architecture, politics and economy (University of Pittsburgh Press). Dutta served as lead editor, along with Ateya Khorakiwala, Ayala Levin, Fabiola López-Durán, and Ijlal Muzaffar, of Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022).

Projects

Ancestralities: Nature, Architecture and the Debt

The research explores the relationship between sovereignty and architecture, the first examined through the modern apparatus of debt, the latter through the history of institutions. It tracks the beginning of a new global worldview - called ‘economic’ - in the eighteenth century and its impact on subjecthood – including the emergence of ‘the subject’ – and studies how this new organizational sensibility recalibrated the texture of dwelling and infrastructure. The research particularly attends to the interrelationships of religion and aesthetics in the emergence of the economic field.

The Liberal Arts after Liberalization: Sahmat 1989-2019

This study comprises an extensive and detailed examination of the political challenges faced by artists in India with the corresponding rise of Hindu religious fundamentalism and neoliberalism in India. The unraveling of state controls over fiscal policy eroded the institutional frameworks – and the sensibilities – through which art had been practiced in the post-independence years, while the opening up of media networks brought sharp challenges to the interrelated norms of censorship and expressive freedom. Using the significant archives of the artists' platform Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat), Dutta looks at the protocols of censorship; the construction of a new "public" by media, government, civil society and political movements; the discursive place of "art" in society as institutional patronage declined and global market mechanisms took hold; as well as the appropriations of civic buildings, archaeological sites and public space by political and/or popular movements.

A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the 'Techno-Social' Moment

After World War II, a second modernism emerged in architecture—an attempt, in architectural scholar Joan Ockman's words, “to transform architecture from a 'soft' aesthetic discipline into a 'hard,' objectively verifiable field of design expertise.” Architectural thought was influenced by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, cybernetic, and other urban and behavioral models, as well as systems-based and artificial intelligence theories. This nearly 1,000-page book examines the “techno-social” turn in architecture, taking MIT's School of Architecture and Planning as its exemplar.

In essays and interviews, prominent architectural historians and educators examine the postwar “research-industrial” complex, its attendant cult of expertise, and its influence on life and letters both in America and abroad. Paying particular attention to the ways that technological thought affected the culture of the humanities, the social sciences, and architectural design, the book traces this shift toward complexity as it unfolded, from classroom practices to committee deliberations, from the challenges of research to the vicissitudes of funding. Looking closely at the ways that funded research drew academics towards a “problem-solving” and relevance-seeking mentality and away from the imported Bauhaus model of intuition and aesthetics, the book reveals how linguistics, information sciences, operations research, computer technology, and systems theory became part of architecture's expanded toolkit.

This is a history not just of a school of architecture but of the research-oriented era itself. It offers a thoroughgoing exploration of the ways that policies, politics, and pedagogy transformed themselves in accord with the exponential growth of institutional power.

Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South

Dutta served as the lead editor for this collaborative volume brought out under the auspices of the Aggregate collective. This extensive text investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of “development” after World War II. Development theory did not manifest itself in tracts of economic and political theory alone. It manifested itself in every sphere of expression where economic predicaments might be seen to impinge on cultural factors. Architecture appears in development discourse as a terrain between culture and economics, in that practitioners took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how, for a brief period, architects, planners, structural engineers, and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life, but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms, development was, to cite Arturo Escobar, an immense design project itself, one that requires radical disassembly and rethinking beyond the umbrella terms of “global modernism” and “colonial modernities,” which risk erasing the sinews of conflict encountered in globalizing and modernizing architecture.

Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Produced by the Aggregate Collaborative, of which Dutta was a founding member, Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, action, identity, and design. They follow design as it functions through the body, in the home, and at the state and international level. Overall, Aggregate views the intersection of architecture with the human need for what Foucault termed “governmentality”: societal rules, structures, repetition, and protocols—as a way to provide security and tame risk. Here, the conjunction of power and the power of design reinforces governmentality and infuses a sense of social permanence despite the exceedingly fluid nature of societies and the disintegration of cultural memory in the modern era.

The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility

The Bureaucracy of Beauty is a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley calls it a "fantastic book," and in many ways this is the best description of it. The Bureaucracy of Beauty begins with nineteenth-century Britain's Department of Science and Arts, a venture organized by the Board of Trade, and how the DSA exerted a powerful influence on the growth of museums, design schools, and architecture throughout the British Empire. But this is only the book's literal subject: in a remarkable set of chapters, Dutta explores the development of international laws of intellectual property, ideas of design pedagogy, the technological distinction between craft and industry, the relation of colonial tutelage to economic policy, the politics and technology of exhibition, and competing philosophies of aesthetics. His thinking across these areas is ignited by engagements with Benjamin, Marx, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Kant, Mill, Ruskin, and Gandhi.

A rich study in the history of ideas, of design and architecture, and of cultural politics, The Bureaucracy of Beauty converges on the issues of present-day globalization. From nineteenth-century Britain to twenty-first century America, The Bureaucracy of Beauty offers a theory of how things - big things -change.

Publications

Arindam Dutta

Incompletion: On More than a Certain Tendency in Postwar Architecture and Planning

Routledge

2022

Aggregate-Architecture in Development-Incompletion_0.pdf

Arindam Dutta

Ateya Khorakiwala, Ayala Levin, Fabiola López-Durán, and Ijlal Muzaffar for Aggregate

Introduction to Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South

Routledge

2022

Aggregate-Architecture in Development-Introduction_0.pdf