The project focuses on New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan (“Progress Grounds”), an International Trade Fair site undergoing extensive architectural transformations. Newly built carbon-intensive convention halls replace the architecturally iconic “Hall of Nations” (circa 1972) senselessly demolished by the Indian Government in 2017. Six times larger, the new convention halls with ultra-air-conditioned artificially lit spaces are a climate disaster. Regressively, they embody outdated forms of “modernization.” Critical to over six decades of New Delhi’s sociocultural imaginaries, Pragati Maidan manifested an unusual mandate: one that catalyzed art, craft, architecture, and technology toward assembling “progressive” exhibitions and inventive buildings. Resourcing Pragati Maidan’s cultural history, and documenting the ongoing construction in progress, the project creates a visual dossier. As New Delhi confronts a changing climate, and as India rises to the third largest emitter of greenhouses in the world, the project poses how Pragati Maidan can model climate-progressive futures.

Kadambari Baxi is an architect and educator based in New York. Her current work focuses on issues of climate change, activism and advocacy in architecture. She works collaboratively, forming teams or initiating partnerships on a project basis. Most recently, she and her interdisciplinary team of designers, filmmakers, and scientists, created the multimedia project Air Drifts on global air pollution, exhibited at the Oslo Architectural Triennale; she cofounded an advocacy group WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?), and the group’s work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and Istanbul Design Biennial. Her architectural work is documented in two publications (coauthored with Reinhold Martin): Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar Publishers, 2007) and Entropia (Black Dog Publishing, 2000). She is a professor of professional practice in architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University.