If we follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – what are the needs of a human being? What do we need from our buildings? What are the most basic things we all need from our buildings? We need a shelter, we need protection, we need stability and we need utilities like water, electricity, roads, infrastructure. These are our basic necessities. Once these necessities are met, what do we need from our Buildings After our necessities are met, we need comfort. We want visual comfort, we

Imagine waking up with the dawn chorus of bulbuls and koels orchestrating a melody. Tree leaves whistling with the morning breeze. The rising Sun painting the eastern sky deep orange Imagine leaning over your balcony to smell the fragrance of fresh earth and seeing your children plucking flavourful tomatoes and pulling out juicy carrots from your organic Kitchen garden below – harvesting the day’s fruits and vegetables while playing with colourful butterflies. Imagine wat

Anyone who understands architecture, even slightly, knows how difficult it is. To be faced with a blank three-dimensional canvas with an infinite array of forms, colours, textures and materials on your palette. And to paint such that only the painting exists, not the painter. To know that every dot, line and plane that comes out of our hands will stand on the face of the earth for decades, perhaps centuries. This is a massive responsibility – towards the people it serves and

I read several philosophers as a child. In particular, I was drawn to the Indian poet Sri Aurobindo through one of his poems where he talks about bridging the polarities between Matter and Spirit. The Spirit’s tops and Nature’s base shall draw Near to the secret of their separate truth And know each other as one deity. The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face. To me, this line felt like the final frontier of Science. That scien

“I was 20 years old, sitting in a Humanities class, in my Architecture school in home-town Mumbai when my teacher introduced us to the catastrophic levels of the social and ecological devastation that happens in our country in the name of economic growth. I remember feeling so pained on that day that nothing that I was pursuing made any sense – being trained as a professional architect seemed like I was to join the bandwagon of mindless construction and to be part of an indus

Golconde…the name brings to us the grandiose fort anchored in the sylvan suburbs of Hyderabad, to the east of the Indian peninsula. For us, modern architects of post–independent India, it is a synonym; for the first high strength reinforced concrete building of India which, in the words of architect Jefferey Cook, “has the reputation of being the most comfortable building in Pondicherry.” The experience at Golconde was a strangely beautiful one. Strange, at first, due to two

One of our childhood inspirations was the Late Architect Vanu Bhuta – the architect of Mahatma Gandhi’s Samadhi at ‘Rajghat’ – our maternal grand uncle. Perhaps on seeing his crazy schedules and demanding working routine, no one in our parent’s generation dared to profess architecture. But when we heard the following story, we decided to pick up the gauntlet. Vanu kaka (as we called him) was invited by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister, to desi