Forum Lecture: Architecture as Gift

Monday, March 16, 2026 from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

• In-person event
• The Pit, Architecture Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

2025-2026 Forum Lecture Series

Speaker: Vyjayanthi Rao, anthropologist, writer, artist, and curator, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Yale University

Free and open to the public

About Vyjayanthi Rao

Vyjayanthi V. Rao is an anthropologist, writer, artist and curator, currently teaching at the Yale School of Architecture.  Her work focuses on the built environment and urbanism in India and the United States.  She has published essays and edited volumes on these subjects and currently serves as an Editor in Chief of the journal Public Culture (Duke University Press).  She is the chief curator of the third edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2026).  Other curatorial projects include the exhibition Multiplicity as part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2022) and Seeking Refuge and Making Home at the Center for Architecture in New York (2023).  Vyjayanthi has participated as an artist in the Kochi Biennale (2016), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2023) and in the Berlinale Film Festival (2025).  Her artistic work comprises a suite of film installations and lecture performances titled Beneath the Placid Lake, produced in collaboration with Australian film-maker, Kush Badhwar.  

Architecture as a Gift

The Ruin and the Gift – Architecture as Shelter, Aperture, Circuit 

Vyjayanthi V. Rao

The 21st century so far is a century of total war, following the routes and circuits of global capitalist expansion, one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe, of the Babri Masjid in India and the Twin Towers in North America, and that continues to annihilate and rebuild spaces across the globe. In a world of incessant motion and displacement, in the ocean of ever expanding diasporas, all place-making could be rendered as nostalgic or uncanny, depending on which side of the divide one sits. As Carbon continues to govern and the thirst for oil joins the planet through the spilling of blood and guts, the skies darken, obscuring our models and calculations for universal equity, autonomy and fair justice. In a universe where utility signs morality, and design serves utilty, what happens to law and regulation, what ethic guides the limits of the useful? In their seminal ruminations on the “spirit of the gift” and the accursed share, Marcel Mauss and George Bataille lay down some thoughts for an economy beyond scarcity and utility, one based on an invitation to endless play and sacrificial practice to keep the channels open, the juices flowing and the circuits expanding. What is the place of the ruin in this economy of the gift? How is space to be conceived within these circulations? Can Architecture’s speculative fictions project such spaces as experience, not abstraction? Can we dream of untethering speculation from its financialization to reposition it as imaginative, ethical practice in a world produced through these circulations? Drawing on numerous examples from fieldwork and secondary research, this talk will offer a series of parables for our collective consideration.