“What is the role of an architect?” Many a time, before beginning my formal architectural journey, this question was conversed by my father (civil engineer) with his peers before what I understood that time was something to build, and through that poignant yet elusive question, I would remain lost in my muddle of thoughts. Although I was never a ‘greeny’ and had a tough time in memorizing scientific names during landscape lectures, I enjoyed those lectures and was enthusiastic about the assignments as I realized that it was not just about painting shades of green onto my drawing, it was about adding a new dimension to the space which ultimately affects human health, prosperity and behavior. I also enjoyed the similar subject of climatology, I remember doing case study of Ken Yeangs Menara Mesiniaga at Kuala Lumpur where he explores passive strategy of tall buildings I am born and brought up in Mumbai which is one of the biggest metropolis of India, here it’s all about growing tall, so much that you are almost disconnected from the street. With a need of never ending construction in housing and commercial sector, the city is booming with glass facades, and providing green spaces is secondary. The resultant of such needs is merely adding artificial grass with some potted plants on the terrace top of a 50 storey residential tower to portray it as a luxurious space to sell the apartments which are seen as products or commodity. Few of the above observations and many more affected my final year design thesis and formed the basic crux of the dissertation called “Street, building and the In-between”, where I questioned the boom of glass buildings in Mumbai, its significance as a language for the the city and most importantly its need and usability, which according to me is resulting in creating a virtual world and not spaces where people can breathe and conceive their daily work and activities. Hence in my opinion, the design should be such that it is made livable from the beginning and not just imposing technologies at the end to rectify the usability. After passing out with a bachelor of architecture degree, I joined a small firm called Kalayojan architects and PMC in Mumbai, it’s a small practice where the principal architect is strongly influenced by ideologies of architect Charles Correa, a great architect whose designs have influenced Indian architecture .One of his common design type is using courtyards for light and ventilation which is an integral part of most of 19th century housing types in 2nd tier cities and villages of India. While working with Kalayojan, I got involved with working for an on-site project, a state funded educational campus in Mysore, Karnataka ,an intense contoured site, where I not only learned more about institutional design but also its real time application and execution. I Witnesses a lot of meetings where the client and all the consultants where we were trying to solve the problem of water flooding of the heavily contoured site, and calculating the number of rain water pits so that the water instead of getting recharged doesn’t end up flooding the site due to high ground water table. A desire to learn and explore more about traditional, native and regional methods of sustainable building technologies, I enrolled for a workshop at the Auroville Earth Institute at Auroville,India for course called ‘Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks’. The workshop was a 6 days long one, where each day we did hands on work and built various architectural elements like foundations, lintels, arches, CSEB brick walls etc. It was an amazing experience as the workshop attendees were not only people from architectural background but also others like localities, engineers, laborers and people from other countries like Germany who had come to learn about this sustainable building technology.Altough the engineers were well versed than me with the proportions of mixing soil, clay and sand, I thoroughly enjoyed and learned
a lot from my team mates. The workshop gave me glimpse of how to use ‘Soil/earth’ to build homes and its use in various climate zones. Although this technology has restriction in terms of the number of floors and load spanning limitations it very useful for building in that region. With all the above mentioned experiences I have discovered my interest for ideas of sustainability and see myself practicing that in future. In my country there are various definition to sustainability and it varies from region to region, some see it as an added need in today’s time, where various technologies are used to make the building more climatically viable, others look at it as region specific solutions where the budgets are low and knowledge is restricted within the regional limits. However I believe that ideas of sustainability cannot be an after solution to a design, it has to begin with the commencement of the project. Sustainability has several facets that can be summoned up by the concept of the triple bottom line, we have to think about people, planet and profit all together to deliver a truly sustainable model. It is an integrative system. It is not only a challenge but also an opportunity. I am very fascinated by the various green rating systems such as LEED and Living Building Challenge and wish to expand its concepts in my country. I believe that these concepts exist in India, but need to be consolidated. There needs to be a platform for people from the built environment to look upon. I hope and wish I am successful in doing that.