Ateya A Khorakiwala

Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian and is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Her research focuses on India’s development decades. The work examines the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book shows how infrastructures of the developmental decades can be traced back to colonial famine policies, physiocratic theories of land management, and utilitarian theories of governance, even as these architectural interventions emerge in a contested field of cold war techno-scientific thinking. Other research projects include the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo, and plastic.

Khorakiwala’s teaching focuses on the spatial and bodily politics of food; on architectural histories of technocracy and development; and on colonial and postcolonial histories of nature and the environment.

Khorakiwala’s essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She co-edited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University; her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at KRVIA in Mumbai, India.