“Abundance not Capital. Anupama Kundoo” at Az W exemplifies a major dilemma of feminist architecture theory and curatorial practice: How to acknowledge contributions without falling into a starchitecture, artistic-genius master narrative?

Anupama Kundoo is an award-winning architect and professor of architecture and design methods at TU Berlin. For the show, her work, though mostly located in Auroville and Pondicherry, India, is taken as a foil for a wider critique of capitalism, extractivism and established methods of architecture history writing. The curators suggest words such as “soothing architecture,” “regeneration,” “abundance,” “generosity,” “maintenance,” “place-based modernism,” and “care” to challenge established and rather generic categories of “modern architecture,” “functional,” “standardized,” “iconic,” and “global.” The former terms characterize Kundoo’s approach, while the latter are “hidden abodes of capital.”

I don’t think it is a sin to curate a retrospective monograph of a woman architect. The Az W focuses on Kundoo’s material and technological innovations. She is without doubt an extremely inventive architect, combining low-key methods with scientific analysis, awareness raising and pedagogy. Her material and color experiments with ferrocement, construction innovation with terracotta pots and cones, and work with irregular achakal bricks were exhibited 1:1 as Wall House (2000), Full Fill Homes (2015) and Easy WC at the Venice architecture biennale in 2012 and 2016. The Az W exhibition displays many 1:1 samples and building elements with the Hut in Petite Ferme (1990) as the central intervention.

But there are ways to bypass the exhibition’s master narrative such as focusing on her personal design approach or teaching experiments. Though a little schematic, the introductory exhibition chapter texts better frame the Az W catalogue. Another option in order to engage Austrian visitors might have been to mirror Kundoo’s work with Eda Schaur’s, a pioneering researcher of bamboo constructions and self-help manuals in India and Austria’s first woman architecture professor, at TU Graz, to highlight the long-lasting impact of women in architecture.

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