Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian and is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Her current book project Famine Architecture, is an infrastructural and architectural history of famine set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book explores post war architectural and infrastructural aesthetics as formed between colonial famine policies and Cold War techno-scientific thinking. Among other works, a recent essay in Grey Room, “A Black Carpet of Bitumen,” explores the materiality and iconography of bitumen (aka asphalt) to recast the technological object as also an aesthetic one. She recently co-edited an aggregate volume called Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South which also features her essay, “Floors and Ceilings: The Architectonics of Accumulation in the Green Revolution.” The essay shows how development economics substitutes an aesthetic of itself in place of the structural change that it promises but can never deliver.