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Sony Devabhaktuni

Assistant Professor

Art

Contact

  1. Email:sdevabh1@swarthmore.edu
  2. Phone: (610) 328-8069
  3. Beardsley Hall 217
  4. Office Hours: Mondays from 4:15 - 5:45pm.  Students can schedule meeting times via Calendly.
  1. Website
Assistant Professor of Art Sony Devabhaktuni

Education

MA, Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle
BArch, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
BA, Stanford University

Specialization

Architecture, urban infrastructures, collaborative design

Courses

ARTT006F. Architecture Design Studio: Dwelling and Inhabitation 
ARTT006G. Architecture Design Studio: Collective Living
ARTT006I. Architecture Design Studio: Civic Realm/Public Home
ARTT 006D. Architecture Design Studio: Cities, Territories, Infrastructure 
ARTT 006C. Architecture 3D Workshop: The Analytical Model
ARTT006J. Architecture 3D Workshop: Full Scale Fabrication
ARTT006E. Architecture 2D Workshop: Experiments in Drawing
ARTT006H. Architecture 2D Workshop: Mapping and GIS 

Biography

Sony Devabhaktuni is an architect and writer. His research focuses on urban infrastructures and collaborative processes in design with a particular concern for how economic, social and political intensities overlap with imaginations of space. His writing has appeared in the Architectural Theory Review, Public Culture, Global Performance Studies, and the AA Files. His book Curb-scale Hong Kong: infrastructures of the street uses drawing and writing to describe the social and material relations that articulate the street as a shared realm. With John C.F. Lin, he is the author of As Found Houses: Experiments from self-builders in rural China –– the winner of the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Medal for Research.

Publications

Curb-scale Hong Kong: Infrastructures of the street. San Francisco: Applied Research & Design, 2023. 

‘Speculation’s spatial terms: Imminence and Inevitability in Amaravati.’ Architectural Theory Review 26, no. 1 (2022): 147-168. 

w/ Joanna Mansbridge. ‘Democracy’s dislocations: Spaces of protest and the people of Hong Kong.’ Public Culture 34, no. 1 (2022): 98-121. 

w/ Joanna Mansbridge* and Susan Sentler. ‘When Zoom Roomed the World: Performing the enclosures of network culture.’ Global Performance Studies 4, no.2 (2021). 

w/ John Lin. As Found Houses: experiments from self-builders in rural China. San Francisco: Applied Research & Design, 2020.  

w/ Nasrin Seraji and Lu Xiaoxuan (eds.). From Crisis to Crisis: Debates on why architecture criticism matters today. Barcelona: Actar Press, 2019.  

w/ Patricia Guaita and Cornelia Taparelli (eds.). Building Cultures Valparaiso: Pedagogy, practice and poetry at the Valparaiso School of Architecture and Design. London: Routledge, 2015.