Arindam Dutta

Arindam Dutta is Professor of Architectural History at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. He is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), and he also edited A Second Modernism: Architecture, MIT and the "Techno-Social" Momenton the postwar conjuncture of architectural thought and linguistic/systems theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). He is at work on a three-volume study entitled Ancestralite: 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. He is currently finishing a book projected titled Liberal Art Practice in the Liberalized Public Sphere: Sahmat 1989-2019 which is 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. Dutta is a founding member of the architectural historians' collective Aggregate. Aggregate Is 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).