Naina Gupta is an architect and she has a B.Arch from Bangalore University in India and a M.Arch and a M.Phil from the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London. She is a registered architect in India and has a decade of experience in total in architectural practices in Bangalore, Bombay, Singapore and Netherlands. In 2010, she participated in the research programme at Strelka in Moscow following which she worked between Strelka and OMA on a research project on the Russian Hinterland. Currently, along with studying a PhD at this school she is teaching a unit and some HTS at the Aarhus School of Architecture in Aarhus, in Denmark.
Beyond Jurisdiction? The Case of the International Criminal Court
Supervisors: Dr Marina Lathouri, Dr Thanos Zartaloudis
The research departs from a debate in international law wherein political scientists and legal theorists are discussing the redefinition of international law to what they want to call a ‘global law’. The decisive change between the two terms hinges on the incorporation of an ‘international community’, in the case of the latter, as direct subjects of international law who are represented by global governance institutions. The thesis analyses these structural transformations using, as examples, two institutions that are located at either end of this redefinition and that are paradigmatic for their time, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) both of which are in The Hague in the Netherlands, and focuses on two moments where the shift is rendered visible in their architecture: (a) In the relationship between the organisations and the host city as read in the architectural and spatial processes in relation to the political processes in their siting and (b) In the interior of the courtroom in the type of law court, its spatial organisation and the relationship it attempts to foster with the international community. The thesis, which is much framed theoretically within the discourse of the inextricability of law and politics, argues that despite the architectural representation and organisation of alternative relations as projected by the ICC, the overarching political makeup of the two institutions are within the same international reasoning and that the architecture is deployed as a device of political artifice.