The Open Workshop

Neeraj Bhatia founded The Open Workshop in 2011 in San Francisco. The studio is dedicated to “reconciling and empowering the role of architecture within the transforming, evolving, fluctuating, and indeterminate conditions of the city, its public sphere, and its ecological context through reevaluation of Umberto Eco’s concept of The Open Work.“

The Open Workshop’s recent projects include Scaffoldia, a installation realized this year in an Oakland, CA park and a 2016 entry to the Varna Public Library and Archive design competition in Varna, Bulgaria. In 2015, the studio was a finalist in Toronto’s Middle City Passages competition with The Right of Way is the Right to the City, and in 2014, it received an Honorable Mention distinction for Stream Stratum, its entry to the Baltic Thermal Pool competition.

In 2012, The Open Workshop was awarded the Oderbrecht Award for Sustainable Development’s First Prize and was recognized as a Runner-Up in the Europan12 competition. In 2011, Bhatia received a Graham Foundation Research Grant, which led to the design of Drift House (2012).

In addition to founding The Open Workshop, Neeraj Bhatia is co-director of InfraNet Lab, a non-profit research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics; and the research director of The Petropolis of Tomorrow, which explores the relationship between urbanism and resource extraction. He is currently an Assistant Professor at The California College of the Arts, where he also he is also co-director of the The Urban Works Agency. Bhatia received his Master of Architecture and Urban Design degree from MIT. Prior to that, he attended the University of Waterloo where he obtained a Bachelor of Environmental Studies degree and a Bachelor of Architecture degree.