Indiabridge

Through the project INDIABRIDGE, Nuno Grancho - architect, historian, and post-doctoral researcher, aims to produce an understanding of the historical notions of privacy in architecture and urbanism since the 17th century as a bilateral mechanism to review relationships between the West and the East.

The research will analyse the border-crossing patterns and relationships in the built environment between Denmark and India. As a starting point, it will claim that Danish colonial architecture in India and the imprint of Indian architecture in metropolitan Denmark represented a larger history of influence on how notions of privacy shape relations between individuals and society across diverse historical contexts.

By combining architecture and urbanism with history, anthropology and area studies, the intention is to map and analyse border-crossing patterns and relationships of privacy between Denmark and India. Accordingly, research will be conducted through systematic, site-based, interdisciplinary spatial analysis of the history, visual rhetoric, and spatial politics of privacy as an epistemological vantage point for Danish architecture and urbanism in Europe (Copenhagen and Altona, a former Danish port city and a present westernmost urban borough of Hamburg) and beyond Europe (Tranquebar and Serampore, former Danish colonial cities in India). It will locate Tranquebar and Serampore within the shifting locations of European architectural narratives in India and it will propose relations with other European colonial case studies to enable comparative analysis between Northern and Southern Europe.

The benefits are two-fold. First, it will establish research on privacy in Danish colonial architecture and urbanism, with the ambition of turning it into a forum for comparative and interdisciplinary enquiry in the field and the host institution. Second, it will re-launch an academic career in specialized collaborative research infrastructure focusing on the built environment.

The dissertation will be a key to documenting and studying the coming into being of Danish architecture and urbanism in Asia as a relevant Northern European case study for historical notions of privacy.

About Nuno Grancho
Nuno Grancho is an architectural historian and theorist who works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, material culture and colonial practices and its relationship with the transatlantic world and (post)colonial Asia. His research examines how architectures and cities of struggle have shaped the modernity of South Asia. He is interested in how architecture and urbanism are conceived as a medium, and how this conception informs the legitimation of architecture and urbanism as social and cultural practices.

Since 2021, he has been a Visiting Researcher at the Royal Danish Academy - School of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Copenhagen. Since 2021, he has been a Postdoctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen.