Theaster Gates grew up on the South Side of Chicago, helping his father with the family roofing business, hauling buckets of tar and learning early that almost anything broken can…
Some architecture books exist mainly to record drawings and dimensions. Others record intent, and Madhu Shankar’s Design Story of Namaste Dwaar belongs firmly in the second group. Rather than simply…
Walk through an unauthorised colony on the edge of any Indian city, and you are looking at decades of decisions made without a single architect in the room. Walls get…
Cities can be described as moulded on what can be seen. Streets, facades, people, skylines. However, there are forces that influence urban life that are not exactly visual. They come…
Waiting is one of the most recognizable spatial experiences in cities, which are not defined by buildings or streets. The queue is a vernacular kind of urban form, which scants…
Postmodernism did not arrive in India as a declared movement. It filtered in quietly, settling into campuses, housing colonies, cultural centres, and the expanding edges of cities. In Indian Architecture,…
Cities speak constantly. By flickering lighting, reverberant corridors, honking streets, pavements, and cluttered doorways, the constructed environment sends surging waves of sensory data. This background noise is familiar to many…
Urban design used to be influenced by visible aspects. The urban imaginary is dominated by plans, sections, skylines and street grids that dominate the assessment and imagining of cities. But…
Urban Theory often arrives in abstraction, diagrams of flows, arrows of capital, and density compressed in numbers. Cities are not systems; they are lived stories. Critical imagination is a practice…
I grew up in Delhi, surrounded largely by plain concrete buildings. Whenever I visited Rajasthan to see my grandparents, it felt as though I had stepped into another world altogether.…
When raging waters tear through towns during flash floods, what determines survival is not just nature’s fury but how we choose to build against it. Flash floods devastate hundreds of…
I first noticed it while waiting. Not the kind of waiting filled with phone-checking and restless shifting, but the kind where your body gives up trying to be elsewhere. The…