Indy Johar (S02-EP01)

Ask a physicist, and they’ll tell you: the universe is mostly made of something we can’t see. Ordinary matter—everything tangible and visible—makes up less than 5% of reality. The rest? Dark matter. Unseen forces shaping galaxies, bending space, governing possibility.

Now shift that lens to the city. What if the urban realm is also shaped by its own dark matter? Not cosmic, but economic, legal, institutional. Invisible forces that script the city before a single brick is laid.

What happens when we try to make those forces visible? What if architecture wasn’t just about buildings, but about redesigning the systems beneath them? To face today’s challenges - extractive geopolitics, corporate colonialism, economic weaponisation - we may need to move beyond the object and think at the scale of infrastructures, institutions, and planetary systems.

In this episode, we speak with Indy Johar—architect, systems thinker, and founder of Dark Matter Labs. A pioneer in reimagining the civic 'firmware' that underpins our lives, Indy works at the intersection of design, economics, and institutional reform.

From co-founding Architecture00, to initiating open-source platforms like WikiHouse and OpenDesk, Indy’s practice pushes architecture beyond the physical, into the realm of civic and economic code.

Together, we explore what it means to design new agents, new institutions, and new counter-infrastructures for a regenerative future.

‘SUP is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips

This podcast is produced with support from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University School of Architecture & Urban Design.