Joy & The Public Realm: An Interview with Architect and Urbanist Vishaan Chakrabarti

 
Vishaan Chakrabarti recently sat down with the MASSIVart Talks team at the W Times Square. Chakrabarti is a distinguished American architect, urban planner, and professor. As the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), a global architecture firm based in New York, Chakrabarti is renowned for his innovative designs and commitment to sustainable urban development. His work emphasizes creating equitable, attainable, and human-centred urban futures.
 
Chakrabarti has led several high-profile projects, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Hobson College at Princeton, the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, and Ford Motor Company’s Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown. His philosophy aims to address pressing social issues through tangible improvements in urban spaces. He is dedicated to crafting enduring architecture and creating urban environments that connect people with nature, culture, and joy.
 
His portfolio includes the design of cities, buildings, public spaces, infrastructure, and urban technologies, all aimed at enriching the global community. Chakrabarti underscores the importance of urban design, which fosters human interaction and connectivity. His work tackles the challenges of urbanization and climate change while building vibrant, inclusive communities. In doing so, he seeks to create urban environments that promote sustainability and human happiness.
 

Interview Transcript

 
MASSIVart: Why is public space so important to you and your projects?
 
Vishaan: I think public space is basically fundamentally the answer to the problem with social media. When you are in a public space, and you see someone who looks different than you, prays different than you, wears different clothing, or has a different gender expression, whatever it is, you realize that when you’re interacting with that person in real space, that they don’t pose the threat that some algorithm is telling you that they do on your phone.

And so, to me, this is the public glue of the world. Public space is much more than some nice place for an office worker to eat their sandwich. That’s fine. That’s great. But it’s doing something fundamentally different, which is this ability of people of difference to connect eyeball to eyeball.
 
MASSIVart: What’s it like to see people enjoying the spaces you’ve helped create?
 
Vishaan: What I love about this work, especially if you’re working on the right project, is that you must convince people of the unbelievable.

In the early days, there were 20 of us fighting for the High Line, led by this extraordinary nonprofit group, the Friends of the Highline. These two guys, Rod Hammond and Jeff Davis, who met in the community board meeting, heard that the Highline was going to be torn down. Literally, they were sitting next to each other – they didn’t know each other. They sat beside one another and said, “That’s a shame.” Then, one thing led to another, and they formed this advocacy group. And they were infectious.

What ended up happening that was really interesting was that a lot of power structures—you know, big real estate, the city administration—all thought we were crazy. They insisted that people were going to get killed up there. No one would go there. The year before the pandemic, it had six and a half million visitors—more than the Statue of Liberty.

Domino is an incredibly difficult construction project. Again, I think there’s a sense of disbelief. What did that old factory building be? Just because there are groups in town this week, I’ve been giving a lot of tours. There are just the gasps of people in the space. There are trees growing in the gap between the brick and glass.

It’s one of the most unique places in the world, and I love that. I love the idea that you can introduce really fresh concepts to people and that you can really change the way people look at the world.
 
MASSIVart: “Architecture of belonging” – Can you describe that term and its meaning to you?
 
Vishaan: This city is very much about streets, sidewalks, the subway infrastructure, the constantly transforming skyline, the rivers, and parks. I think all of those actually lend us a sense of belonging.

The interesting thing about a place like this is that it’s really big cities like New York or London or Tokyo – people who lived there for decades upon decades. I’m now on decade four, I think. On every street corner holds a memory, every subway station – you know, things happen with friends, with real exes, with just all sorts of professional experiences. Those are things that I think create a sense of public realm – those are things that I think create a sense of belonging.
 
MASSIVart: In your latest book, you explore the concept of architecture for joy. Can you expand on what it means?
 
Vishaan: I love this idea of joy. It means talking about joy and talking openly about it in a way that gives people the… There’s another term I use: civic delight.

Giving people the license to think in those terms and to say, especially the young people, to say it’s okay. I know this whole thing, especially the design world, about being cool. If you’re cool and you’re a hipster, you don’t talk like that. I just think it’s such a nonsense. It’s just a thing. It’s just fuel for all the cynicism in the world. There’s enough of it. You know what I mean? Social media, cable TV, our politicians. There’s enough of it that we don’t need to have to do it as people who are artists, writers, and artists; we’re the source of culture. And what’s culture if it’s all cynical?