Leon Morenas; India, USA

Leon Morenas is a doctoral candidate at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York. He is from India, where he has worked and trained as an urban designer and architect. His dissertation, entitled, “Planning the City of Djinns: Exorcizing the Ghosts in Delhi’s Post-Colonial Development Machine,” is the first systematic study of the Master Plan of India’s capital, Delhi. Leon’s research on design practice and theory draws from the nexus between political systems and cybernetics. He is critical of the typical focus cyberneticians place on the functioning of systems, rather than their political instrumentalities. For “a ship at sea may well require, as Plato and Engels insisted, a single captain and obedient crew. But a ship out of service, parked at the dock, needs only a caretaker.” Leon has taught graduate and undergraduate architectural design studios, theory courses, and thesis seminars at the Urban Design and Urban Planning Departments at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and the Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Gurgaon. At RPI, he has taught undergraduate architectural studios as well as political and cultural theory.