How can we read a city when parts of its built fabric have disappeared, and its history survives through partial, contradictory, and often biased records?
Drawing from the book, A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive: Lucknow Queerscapes, this session explores methods of working with maps, photographs, paintings, written accounts, and surviving architectural traces to understand and reconstruct lost urban spaces in Lucknow.
The session will focus on two precincts: Machhi Bhavan and Qaiserbagh. Through these cases, we will discuss how archival materials produced at different moments and for different purposes can be placed alongside one another, reoriented, superimposed, and read against the grain to recover obscured spatial relationships and histories.
The event will combine short presentations with participatory exercises. Maps of the precincts will be projected onto the floor, and members of the audience will be invited to locate themselves within them and connect archival images to particular positions and viewpoints. Corresponding photographs, paintings, and other visual fragments will be shown on the wall projection. Through this movement between map, image, text, and reconstruction, the audience will engage with the archive as a field of clues, contradictions, and possibilities through which the city can be read anew.
About the Authors
Sonal Mithal (she/her) is an architect, artist, and educator. She is co-founder of research and conservation studio, People for Heritage Concern. She serves as Chair of the Masters in Conservation and Regeneration program at CEPT University. Her practice, teaching, and writing transects architecture, landscape, queer studies, history, and conservation. She is invested in research-based artistic practice informed by systematic archival inquiry, political critiques, and design environments integrating contemporary ecological factors.
Arul Paul (he/they) is an architectural historian and educator. He is Associate Professor at the Nitte Institute of Architecture, Mangalore, and a Doctoral Candidate in Art, Design and Transdisciplinary Studies at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. His research and teaching explore the intersections of architecture, urbanism, queer studies, media, archives, and cultural memory.