Anuradha Chatterjee

I am an Indian origin Australian academic, author, and designer based in Sydney, Australia. After completing a professional degree in Architecture from the TVB School of Habitat Studies, I completed Masters in Architectural History and Theory and a PhD in Built Environment from the University of New South Wales. My PhD thesis is on John Ruskin and walls, and it presents a competing theory of textile analogy in architecture based on morality and gender to counter Gottfried Semper’s historicist perspective. The PhD also positions this debate within the emerging field of surface studies. I have continued to develop this through the frames of surface as potentiality and a generative force, which I have explored through critical readings of contemporary Australian buildings, as well as collaborative design research studios at postgraduate level.

I have authored three books–John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture, Routledge, 2017; Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney, COPAL Publishing, New Delhi, 2014, which aimed to reveal the expanded field of architecture in the city; and edited collection, Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2013, which demonstrated that the practice of surface is simultaneously superficial and pervasive, symbol and space, meaningful and functional, static and transitory, and object and envelope. I have authored essays on potentialities of surface as urban, and surface as a critical turn, in forthcoming Routledge anthologies like Surfaces: Transformations of Body, Materials and Earth edited by Mike Anusas and Cris Simonetti (2017); and The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture and Design, edited by Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen (2017). My scholarship has received endorsements from leading authorities in the field like Andrew Ballantyne, Stephen Kite, Andrew Crompton, and Lars Spuybroek.

I have won a number of prestigious grants like the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art: Publication Grant (Author) and Research Support Grant; Stones of Venice Grant, Ruskin Library, Lancaster University as well as the David Saunders Grant Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand. Broadly, my expertise and interest spans the areas of architectural theory, history, design, humanities, and criticism, as well as integrating theoretical approaches and paradigms in design studios. I am currently working as Senior Architectural Researcher & Heritage Advisor at Cracknell & Lonergan Architects P/L where I am involved in preparing heritage studies, conservation management plans, and statement of heritage impact for items of local and state significance. I am also involved in identifying and applying for publication grants and coordinating publications for the practice.