Neeraj Bhatia is an architect, urban designer, and educator whose work resides at the intersection of politics, housing, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he also serves as Director of the Urban Design Program.
Neeraj is principal of THE OPEN WORKSHOP, a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award (2024), Canadian Professional Prix de Rome (2019), the Architectural League Young Architects Prize (2016), Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence (2016), Graham Foundation Grants, The Lawrence B. Anderson Award, Shell Center for Sustainability Grant, ACSA Faculty Design Awards, ACSA Creative Achievement Award, and ACSA Housing Design Education Award. THE OPEN WORKSHOP's design-research has been commissioned by the Seoul Biennale, Venice Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues.
Bhatia is co-editor of books Architecture Beyond Extraction (JAE 79:1), Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and author of New Investigations in Collective Form and Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling — Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.
What project will you be embarking upon during your time at the Academy?
I will be looking at three different periods in Rome's history of housing, each of which explored different notions of scale/scaling through design. The first is the insula typology, which housed roughly 90 percent of Rome's inhabitants during the Imperial period. Some of the best-preserved examples can be found in the Roman Forum and Ostia. This typology later influenced the work of Rome's public housing authority, the Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari (IACP), under the leadership of architect Innocenzo Sabbatini. Between roughly 1925 and 1931, Sabbatini oversaw the construction of four to five thousand dwelling units across neighborhoods including Garbatella, Tiburtino, Testaccio, and Trionfale. His central idea was that social housing should provide dignity through what he called the "Palazzo" for the People. These were not simply isolated buildings but coordinated urban systems—housing conceived as civic infrastructure. By 1930, approximately 60,000 of the city's 900,000 inhabitants were living in these buildings. The third period is postwar Rome, particularly from 1949 to 1963. During these years, the IACP participated in the INA-Casa plan, which produced more than 350,000 housing units across Italy, including homes for roughly 88,000 people in Rome. Architects such as Mario Ridolfi, Ludovico Quaroni, Mario Fiorentino, and Adalberto Libera experimented with low-rise row houses, courtyard blocks, linear slabs, and clustered layouts, integrating schools, shops, and green spaces to foster community life.
I'm interested in these projects because they were fundamentally typological. Typology is a key tool that allows architects to consider the relationship between individual dwellings and the larger city through a simplified vocabulary of architectural forms. In essence, type allows architecture to scale to the city. These projects, particularly those of the last century, produced high-quality housing at remarkable speed and, over time, were further "tuned" by their users. This process of what I call typological tuning—the ways in which inhabitants adapt, modify, and transform architectural types through everyday use—is central to my research at the Academy.
What aspects of the city and Academy life are you most interested in exploring?
My work over the past ten years has focused on different forms of collective housing—from communes to co-living and cohousing projects. In many ways, the Academy itself is a collective living project. It reorganizes the relationship between private and public space in ways that create the conditions for community to emerge. By minimizing the private realm and bringing people together in shared spaces, the Academy encourages a remarkable range of encounters, conversations, and collaborations. I'm especially drawn to how these informal interactions can shape a community and generate new ideas, often in ways that cannot be anticipated. This also gives me an opportunity to experience some of the questions I have been researching through my own daily life. Rather than simply studying collective housing as an architectural or social model, I can observe how a community forms through shared spaces, routines, meals, conversations, and unexpected encounters.
More broadly, I'm excited to get to know Rome through running and walking its streets, as well as through slow observation and photography. I want to experience the city at the scale of everyday life—to pay attention to its spaces, rhythms, edges, and the ways people inhabit and adapt them. Moving through the city on foot or by running offers a different kind of architectural knowledge, one that comes from repetition, observation, and gradually becoming familiar with a place. I hope this slower way of seeing Rome will reveal connections between its historic housing, contemporary life, and the many ways the city continues to evolve.
What encounters, experiences, or moments in your first days at the Academy have inspired, surprised, or encouraged you thus far?
I had heard before coming to Rome that the Academy was a special place, but being here and meeting and learning from this community has made clear just how remarkable it is. So much of that happens through the everyday: conversations over lunch and dinner, walks through the park, and learning from the range of ways the fellows are approaching and thinking about their projects. There is a generosity of exchange here that I've found particularly encouraging.
I've also been surprised by how much overlap there is between my interests and the work of the fellows in Ancient Studies. Conversations about security and household slavery, neighborliness in Republican Rome, property models, and systems of financing have opened up unexpected connections to my own research. They have made me think about how many of the infrastructures and social relationships that shape contemporary housing have roots in a much longer lineage of history. It's been a reminder that housing is never simply about buildings. It is also about systems of ownership, forms of social organization, relationships between neighbors, and the ways communities structure everyday life.