Architecture as Gift Exchange

By Peter Rich - 3 March 2025

For the past 13 years, I have had the good fortune of engaging with what Rahul Mehrotra describes as “the architectural jungle of India”. I have made countless friendships over the years. In exchange for my teaching and mentoring, the profession has not only hosted me superbly on every visit, but enriched my life through the Indian practice of gift exchange, something uniquely Indian in which ideas, knowledge, and values are shared. I soon discovered a level of creative discourse that, in my experience, I had found no equal of anywhere in the world.

On my first trip to India in 2012, I visited Trivandrum on the southern tip of India, on a pilgrimage to see Laurie Baker’s work. While I was sketching, a young undergraduate architectural student approached me and asked, “Sir, please give us your eyes, so that through drawing, we can learn to see”. The following day was a Sunday. Seventy-five students arrived at my hotel to take me on a sketching workshop, as they wanted to learn from me and share the outcome on social media. Little did I know, my love affair with India had just begun. And what a wonderful 13 years it has been. My creative spirit has, beyond my expectations, been repeatedly fulfilled with boundless wisdom and enlightenment. There have been many highlights but the one that most readily springs to mind is the privilege my wife and I had of spending a day with Balkrishna Doshi in his garden, talking about the journey of an architect’s life.

The purpose of this issue of THE PLAN is to reveal to a broader international audience the depth and breadth of lesser-known Indian architectural talent not previously showcased in an international publication.

The idea came while visiting Girish Doshi in Pune in March 2024. Girish is 67 years of age. He trained under Balkrishna Doshi; although they share the same surname, they are not relatives. It was he who introduced me to a handful of extraordinary young architects, whose work inspired this publication.

The main focus is on an age group in their forties. The youngest is aged 36: Avinash Ankalge of A Threshold, a recent recipient of Architectural Review’s Emerging Award.

To widen my web in search of creative talent, I asked a few practicing architects and academics in the States of India I had visited to recommend the names of 50 good, young practitioners. My travels have mostly taken me to India’s southern and central parts; there are many, many places and architecture schools in India I am yet to visit.

Why target younger, smaller practices? Mausami and Uday Andhare of indigo architects perfectly sum up the answer: “The future of the profession is not going to be defined by the top few practices whose works are good at shaping larger political or other decisions. The future will be defined by these little practices that will go and make somebody’s home better than it used to be, or fix something that was broken. These are the things that matter”.

We present 32 architectural practices from India, seven of which are explored in greater detail. RMA Architects’ latest work may seem out of context in this publication, but Mehrotra, Rajeev Kathpalia, Tony Joseph, Kamal Malik and Bijoy Jain are the post-Correa and Doshi generation of architects, now in their 60s, upon whose shoulders youth stands.

There is a solid middle ground of architects who have been published extensively – Nandan Durganand Balsavar, Rajeev Kathpalia, Anupama Kundoo, Bijoy Ramachandran, Quaid Doongerwala, Shilpa Ranade, Sameep Padora, Arjun Malik, and Kukke Subramanya to name just a few. Their story deserves to be shared in a more in-depth publication.

As part of the ethos that underpins the generation of architects presented here and their predecessors, I would like to briefly contextualize the values that apply to successive post-independence generations of architects in India. These include philosophical and craft-making mindsets, which regardless of cultural or religious affiliation account for a remarkably deep dive in what it means to be both human and Indian within the complexity that is India.The festival of Guru Purnima celebrates the importance of teachers and gurus and their roles guiding learners on their creative and spiritual paths. The acquisition of knowledge is celebrated; learners are encouraged to break free from and step out of their comfort zone – an often prescribed prerequisite to being creative. As such, the festival is both a thanksgiving and a provocation to strive harder and attain creative fulfillment. Architects have shown remarkable generosity encouraging previous interns with their early-stage start-up practices.

Balkrishna Doshi claimed the developed world’s pursuit of certainty and perfection to be a false construct. In contrast, Indians see uncertainty as the reality of life, allowing for mistakes as part of learning, which in turn is part of the process of change. The construct of embracing uncertainty as an enabling mindset is an important part of the Indian identity. Doshi pointed out that so often, “the clues are waiting for you, to be discovered in any given situation. Freehand drawing, as an observation tool that works with one’s intuition and autobiography of spatial knowledge, can allow one to discover the clues”.

There is a considerable diversity of mother tongues among any given student group. Requesting them to ask their parents and grandparents about their home language descriptions of gate, front door, entrance threshold, courtyard, etc., adds considerable nuanced insight, providing additional meaning over and above the standard use of English terminology. People feel pride in the importance of language as part of their culture, and this includes the potential to express things architecturally.

Doshi and Charles Correa both demonstrated the human values that can be learned from studying village conditions. They concurred on the good-mannered lessons of human place-making, the ensuing sense of belonging, identity, materiality and sustainability that one observes in the villages of India as they adapt to ever-changing circumstances.

An experience common to successive generations of Indian architects is, during their formative undergraduate years, early exposure to learning from on-site documentation of whole, living neighborhoods in existing village situations. Housing typologies in many of the older villages can in some instances be traced back thousands of years, endorsing India’s legacy of urbanity. These same villages, however, also demonstrate evolution and adaptation to changing socioeconomic and environmental circumstances.

In every school of architecture where I have taught in India, urban design is central to undergraduate architectural syllabi. This contrasts with Western syllabi, where architectural students are only exposed to urban design during their more senior years.

In consequence, Indian architecture students explore fundamental concepts at undergraduate level such as public space, the street, gathering places, and transitions from the public to private domain. They are encouraged to document villages’ furniture and fittings as telling signs of occupancy, revealing how homes are used in everyday life. Concepts like incremental growth are discussed, alongside adaptation to change. Another prerequisite for undergraduate architectural studies is understanding a building’s response to climate. Le Corbusier built his first buildings in India in Ahmedabad, where he facilitated the free movement of air in the humid climate. Indian architects have learned from this, aspiring to design for air movement, especially in the warmer southern states.

The advantage Indian architecture students have is knowing how to negotiate cultural complexity in all of its nuances as part of their everyday life. As part of students’ formative architectural training, this set of human values provides a hands-on approach to what, first and foremost, constitutes being Indian. This foundation and grounding provide an antidote to assessing the relevance of the multitude of de-contextual imagery and abstractions that come from the international architectural establishment.

Many of the good middle-ground architects in their 50s and 60s studied postgraduate degrees abroad, mainly in the U.S. They returned with new perspectives on what was appropriate for their career in India: to endorse the value of the human lessons they learned when they were young.

The group of emerging Indian architects showcased in this publication seeks to resist consumerist uniformity associated with modern technological advancement. They engage critically with contemporary building methods to deliberately create buildings rooted in culture and place.

The notion of uncertainty as an agent of change, coupled with a hands-on approach to nuanced cultural complexity, is core to life in India. A generation of young Indian architects is embracing this head-on and in a constructive, meaningful way in terms of adaptation.

The human factor manifest in architecture is the gift exchange Indian architects value as their contribution to a better environment. Born out of necessity, the unpredictable emerges out of the construct of uncertainty.