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Architectural Practice In India: A Millennial Archaeology
monsoon 2025-26
At the threshold of the first quarter of the millennium, which also marks a generation since India’s economic liberalization, architectural practice in India is ripe for a critical re-evaluation. In this period, the country has gradually, yet starkly shifted from a socialist framework to a neoliberal state, where developmental politics has ramified architectural production into new directions and logics. Existing scholarship on the built environment in India has often focused narrowly on the aesthetics of form, the evolving identity of the architect, or the reception of modernism as inherited from the West. Architectural discourse has largely taken one of two paths: either documenting work deemed academically significant, or framing emerging practices in terms of identity—often measured against binaries such as modern versus indigenous/vernacular. Such approaches tend to posit the architect as a servant of academic canons or fixed ideals.
Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.
‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.
The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.
sessions
Aug 08 Organisational Restructurings
Aug 22 Urban Periphery as Experimental Field
Sep 05 Multinational Dispositions
Sep 19 Designing Interiorscapes
Sep 26 Sustainability & Green Building Environmental Practices
Oct 03 Heritage Conservation Practices
Oct 10 The Urban Turn / Urbanistic Impulse
Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.
‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.
The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.
sessions
Aug 08 Organisational Restructurings
Aug 22 Urban Periphery as Experimental Field
Sep 05 Multinational Dispositions
Sep 19 Designing Interiorscapes
Sep 26 Sustainability & Green Building Environmental Practices
Oct 03 Heritage Conservation Practices
Oct 10 The Urban Turn / Urbanistic Impulse
session 1
Organisational Restructurings
Friday, August 08, 2025 at 6:00 PM IST
Economic liberalization of the 1990s in India promoted market-oriented reforms, privatization, and moderated the control of state over developmental processes. Such conditions triggered an infrastructure boom, with the private sectors initiating large-scale projects across urban landscapes in India. Amidst the proliferation of special economic zones, BPOs, five star hotels, airports, malls and townships, architectural practice in India began to assume a managerial impetus, focusing upon the logics of functional efficiency in large scale project delivery and building serviceability. International capital came to fundamentally rescript architectural practice in its outlook and operations. In this panel, we bring three representative practices to open up: how have architectural firms transitioned into the delivery of megaprojects? How does the architect’s office reconfigure and organise itself to the shift in scale? What new protocols get put in place and how does it impact the relationship between the architect and the field?
discussants
Ravi Sarangan (Edifice Consultants)
Brinda Somaya (Somaya+Sampat)
Ratan Batliboi (RJB-CPL)
moderated by Ravindra Punde (SEA, Design Cell)
venue
School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091
The event is partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
It is free and open to everyone across the world.
discussants
Ravi Sarangan (Edifice Consultants)
Brinda Somaya (Somaya+Sampat)
Ratan Batliboi (RJB-CPL)
moderated by Ravindra Punde (SEA, Design Cell)
venue
School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091
The event is partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
It is free and open to everyone across the world.
