Kadambari Baxi

Kadambari Baxi, Professor of Practice in Architecture, joined Barnard’s faculty, where she teaches design studios and seminars, in 2009.

Baxi's practice creates design, media, and spatial projects. Currently, she is working on projects addressing concerns for climate justice, fair labor, and reproductive rights. Forming interdisciplinary teams on a project basis most often, she works collaboratively with artists, curators, scientists, academics, and students. 

Recent projects include Climate Justice WTF, a filmic montage pairing news clips of protests at the U.N. Climate Summits and court footage from a youth climate lawsuit; Trigger Planting and Found (abortion) Monument, two installations on reproductive freedom; Air Drifts, an exhibition and short film that explores how local pollutants drift beyond national air space, change global climate, and establish new toxic zones of responsibility; and WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?), a series of exhibitions that examine challenges faced by migrant construction workers on architectural sites worldwide and advocate for fair labor practices. Using diverse representational techniques to connect dispersed sites and unseen problematics, her projects offer ways to view architecture from within many other domains and highlight what is often outside its frame. Conversely, her projects mobilize art, design, and architectural concepts for diverse yet specific ways of seeing the world, and reflect on potentials to change it.

Baxi’s work circulates widely. Her latest solo and collaborative projects were exhibited at Architekturmuseum TU Berlin; Frieze New York; Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism; Boston Art College; Oslo Architecture Triennale; and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Her most recent initiatives include co-founding the advocacy group WBYA? (Who Builds Your Architecture?); co-organizing the A-B-C (Architecture Beyond Capitalism) School; serving on the board of the Architecture Lobby; and co-curating the exhibition Building Information. These initiatives are devoted to her interests in setting new agendas connecting arts, design, ethics, culture, and politics in architecture, arts, and education.

Baxi maintains a research-based architectural practice in partnership with Reinhold Martin. Their work, co-authored as Martin / Baxi Architects, is excerpted in two books: Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar, Spain, 2007) and Entropia (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2001). Formerly, she led a new media design firm, imageMachine, that worked with large nonprofits, including Vera Institute for Justice, Center for Court Innovation, and the Architectural League.

At Barnard and Columbia College’s architecture department, Professor Baxi has spearheaded senior design studios that traveled to China, Germany, and Jordan for research on architecture, diplomacy, climate, and cultural exchange. Her other teaching initiatives have focused on innovative pedagogical methodologies for incorporating multimedia technologies in architecture courses. She has collaborated with interdisciplinary faculty across campus in anthropology, astronomy, film studies, science, and graduate architecture departments. Her teaching and research activities were awarded grants from Barnard Teaches: Real Place + Digital Access, Mellon Foundation Grant, and the Barnard Presidential Research Award.   

She was born in New Delhi. She votes in New York.