Common Ground: Life on the Veranda
Alec Rovensky
We are a research collaborative operating in the ‘Veranda’: a site for daily activity, spontaneous interaction, and community gathering. Our shared work empowers people to speculate the decommodification of land and resources and to reevaluate our existing systems of governance using tools of narrative and acts of making. We curate a database of interdisciplinary works and facilitate experiential and site-specific workshops related to our natural and built environments for the public.
Alec Rovensky is a first generation Ukrainian architectural designer. He is based in Berlin where he is pursuing a M.Sc. in Architecture Typology at the Technische Universität Berlin. Previously he was the Residency Director at the Institute for Public Architecture where he oversaw the creation of a new overnight residency program for designers on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Alec has worked with Jenny Peysin Architecture, a Ukrainian-led design firm based in Brooklyn, and was a member of the Next Generation Council at Madame Architect. Previously, he has worked as an engineering aide at the World Trade Center site with the Port Authority of NY & NJ. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from Syracuse University.
Vasundhra Aggarwal is an architectural designer and writer based in Delhi, where she is a Program Manager at India Design ID, and a Content & Communications Manager at Ogaan Media. She has also lived in Duesseldorf, Frankfurt, Mumbai, New York, London, Florence, and Syracuse. She has previously collaborated on global design projects from the scales of single-family residential to larger institutional and recreational urban projects at SHoP Architects, Lea Architecture, r+d studio, and more. She was a 2024 Spring Fellow at the Institute for Public Architecture where she pursued research on material practices and circular design economies. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University.
We’re a research collaborative that operates in what we call the ‘Veranda’, a shared word and concept in our Indian and Ukrainian cultures. The Veranda is a versatile semi-outdoor space that blends indoor comfort with outdoor ambiance; a site for daily activity, spontaneous interaction, and community gathering. As data and evidence have repeatedly failed to spur climate action and legislation, we seek alternative knowledges and practices in climate research. Our goal is to reframe and rebuild our relationship with land, from that of ownership to stewardship through narrative and making. It can be difficult to comprehend what a centimeter of sea level rise or an increased degree of surface temperature really means. We develop tools for people to experience and connect to our natural and built environments through ways that metrics are unable to effectively communicate. We approach this in two ways: Firstly, we curate a database of canonical and contemporary projects across art, architecture, agriculture, material science, and film that radicalize how we think about land. These works are focused on deconstructing our existing systems of living or speculating entirely new possibilities. Secondly, we host, facilitate, and collaborate with designers, writers, material scientists, horticulturalists, landworkers, and food artists to create experiential and site-specific workshops for the public. These include tactile material processes such as: sculpting with found clay, forming cyanotypes, composting, cooking together, and more. We believe communal action creates engaged experiences with the land that we occupy beyond simply conversing. Through these acts of caretaking and placemaking, our proposal aims to dismantle our environment from its colonial histories and ecological negligence, serving as a platform to provide people with agency and community to reimagine the current systems that govern our land and resources in hopes of creating a climate-resilient future.