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This article is part of our series profiling the Architectural League of New York’s 2024 Emerging Voices laureates and appears in the March/April issue of The Architectural League of New York. one. The full list of winners can be found here.
Neeraj Bhatia’s architectural practice draws on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. “My work is consistent with her definition of power: power arises from people’s consistent words and actions, and disappears when they choose not to do so,” he told me one. For Bhatia, this attitude towards power offers hope to architects practicing under the pressures and crises of our time, but it also allows his studio Open Studio to create a new powers.
Bhatia has become synonymous with the collective design movement. From projects at the Chicago and Venice Biennales to a recent book, New surveys in collective form, The Open Workshop proposed a “framework” and “orchestration” that represent today’s institutions and values. “The benefits go beyond just sharing resources,” he said. Collective living strategies must not only address the impacts of the housing, climate and affordability crises, but also deliver stronger systems of care, solidarity and social resilience.
While the ideals of the Open Workshop may seem quite lofty, the incredibly rigorous (and beautiful) work that takes place there lays the foundation for these goals in accessible language. Inspired by radical newspapers, the studio created a series of broadsheets to spread information about support groups in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, as well as an installation that placed the viewer within a bug-eye drawing, suspended from the ceiling. But more recently, Bhatia has also been working on an architectural drawing level, drawing inspiration from his own backyard in San Francisco to create Lots Will Tear Us Apart, a proposal to transform historically working-class urban housing into Collective forms and future communities.
Still, architects like Bhatia learned a lesson from our mid-century predecessors: “We cannot Give Institutions,” he asserted. “Our choreography is simply about redefining the role of the architect.”
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