Speakers / Panellists
Over three days, the conclave will deliberate on the multiple and diverse approaches towards the one central idea at the core of creative practice: 'To Draw'; drawing as documentation, drawing as an archive, drawing as a speculation, drawing as an investigation, drawing as a progression,
and drawing as a search for meaning.
UDAY
ANDHARE
Uday Andhare is design principal at Indigo Architects since 1998. He steers the studio with a belief in a technically appropriate and ecologically sensitive approach that weaves together threads of traditional wisdom into design. He is a visiting faculty in architecture at his alma mater, CEPT
University, Ahmedabad and has taught and lectured in several institutions in India. He graduated in architecture from CEPT University and a holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture with honours from the University of New Mexico, USA. Uday has interned under B.V.Doshi at studio Sangath and has worked in California and New Mexico in the US. Their practice is rooted in a process-driven, ecologically sensitive approach that integrates
traditional wisdom into contemporary design. Their portfolio includes several institutional projects across India for educational, social, and cultural endeavours, including the Natarani Amphitheatre in Ahmedabad, the Living & Learning Design Centre & Museum in Kutch, and the Ajrakh Studio in Ajrakhpur, Kutch.
NÍALL
MCLAUGHLIN
Níall McLaughlin designs buildings for education, culture, health, religious worship and housing. He won Young British Architect of the Year in 1998 and received the RIBA Charles Jencks Award for Simultaneous Contribution to Theory and Practice in 2016.
Níall was elected an Aosdána Member for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Ireland and as a Royal Academician in the Category of Architecture in 2019. In 2020, he was awarded an Honorary MBE for Services to Architecture. Níall has been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2013, 2015, 2018 and winner in 2022 for The New Library, Magdalene College.
His work is featured in the Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, 21st edition and Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture, 5th edition.
RAJEEV
KATHPALIA
Rajeev Kathpalia is the designated partner at Vastu Shilpa Sangath LLP, formerly Vastu Shilpa Consultants or VSC, the multi-disciplinary practice founded in 1955 by the Pritzker laureate Balkrishna Doshi. Kathpalia’s work integrates frugal and environmentally responsible strategies to create inclusive habitats for people. Designing across a range of scales, Kathpalia‘s practice encompasses regional and city plans, institutional campuses, individual buildings, and even furniture. Kathpalia serves as a trustee and is a former director of the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, a research-based, non-profit charitable trust. He also runs the Foundation‘s International Habitat Studio Program. He was recognized with the 2003 Prime Minister‘s Award for innovative Urban Design for his pioneering advocacy and design work on the inner city of Hyderabad within the Charminar precinct. He was conferred the 2019 Award for Distinction in Architecture by Washington University, USA, and the same year was appointed as Honorary Professor at the Xia Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China.
SANJAY
MOHE
Founding partner of a Bengaluru-based Mindspace founded in 2004; Sanjay Mohe has had many positions of repute prior to that. He has had a working association of 21 years with Chandavarkar and Thacker, besides which his experience also includes a short stint in late Charles Correa’s office and in Saudi Arabia. An alumni of JJ College, his works straddles a spectrum of award-winning projects – Institutions, Residences, Housing, Research labs, Memorials, Libraries, Hospice, factories, beach resorts etc. Some of the awards won include: The JK Great Master’s Award, for Lifetime Achievement 2019; Golden architect award by A+D & Spectrum foundation; A+D & Spectrum foundation Architecture Award won 3 times, The J.K Cement Architect of the Year award won 8 times; ar+d – International Annual Award of Architectural Review London and Gold Medal from ARCASIA – (Asian Forum for Institutes of Architecture). Mohe is a well-known face adorning a lot of architectural forums, talks and juries.
BIJOY
RAMACHANDRAN
Bijoy Ramachandran is an architect based in Bangalore and is a partner at Hundredhands, a studio he founded in 2003, with Sunitha Kondur. He currently serves on the faculty of architecture at the British School at Rome and is the Design Chair for the post-graduate program at BMS College of Architecture in Bengaluru. Ramachandran is also on the Board of Reviewers of SEED, Kochi and the Board of Studies of the Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, Mumbai. He has a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s degree from BMS College of Architecture; he has also attended the Glenn Murcutt masterclass in Sydney. In addition to practising architecture, he has produced three documentary films: two on the celebrated Indian architect Sri B.V. Doshi, ‘Doshi’ (2008) and ‘Doshi: The Second Chapter’ (2019); and one on architectural practice in Bangalore, ‘Architecture and the City: A Bangalore Perspective’ (2005).
PETER
RICH
Peter leads Johannesburg-based Peter Rich Architects, an internationally recognised firm with a diverse portfolio of projects, including museums, cultural and community buildings, housing projects, and sustainable neighbourhoods in US, UK, Rwanda, India and China. He has been a Professor of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for 30 years. He has been awarded the Gold Medal by the South African Institute of Architects and is a recipient of the South African Professional Service Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. The firm is also renowned for winning World Building of the Year 2009 at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona for Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre and having an entire exhibition dedicated to their hand-drawn architectural drawings at the Venice Biennale in 2018. Peter has extensively documented the indigenous African settlements during the Apartheid in the 1970s. A publication by Jonathan Noble,‘ The Architecture of Peter Rich: Conversations with Africa’ follows his work with African tribal settlements, and Ndebele art and architecture.
SEHER
SHAH
Working with the foundations of drawing and architecture, Seher Shah’s practice speaks to states of absence, memory and fractured histories. Her work explores the poetics of space through architectural perspective drawing traditions; contested relationships between history, objects and time; and the relationship between drawing, abstraction and poetry. Working with paper as a site for memory and mark-making, she shares the fragility of the intimate alongside the scale of the historical, and in between the architectural, political and personal. Working with variations of line, depth, and flatness, through graphite and ink, charcoal and dust, cast concrete and iron, her works are dedicated to the intimacy of mark-making through surfaces and their material weight. She is involved in long-term collaborations with architectural photographer Randhir Singh and with the Glasgow Print Studio through the printmaking processes of intaglio and photogravure. Seher Shah received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are held in major museum collections.
RANDHIR
SINGH
Randhir is an award-winning architectural photographer based between Barcelona and New Delhi. He received his B.Arch from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and spent fifteen years working as an architect in New York while studying photography at the International Center for Photography. His work draws on his education as an architect and is rooted in exploring modernist architecture and urbanism in South Asia. Over the last fifteen years, he has photographed government housing projects (CPWD), hydraulic architecture (Water Towers) and has collaborated with artist Seher Shah on Studies in Form. He was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art New York to produce an extensive portfolio of photographs on modern architecture in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for the 2022 exhibition titled The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947- 1985. Singh is currently working on a series of photography-based books exploring modern architecture. Titled Modern South Asia, this series features in depth photographic essays on buildings of historic importance along with newly commissioned writing and drawings.
RIYAZ
TAYYIBJI
Riyaz Tayyibji is a practicing architect/partner at anthill design. He was the
co-ordinator of the Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission and a team lead at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. He is interested in the urban built environment of the subcontinent and the development of modern Indian architecture.
Riyaz is actively involved in architectural documentation, research and academics. He has written on Gandhi’s buildings and their implications for an alternative reading of modern architecture. In 2019 his essay, ‘Gandhi’s Buildings and the Search for a Spiritual Modernity’ was published by MOMA’s online resource the POST.
Riyaz has curated exhibitions on the architecture and urbanity of Ahmedabad that have opened both internationally and in India. The most recent of these is The Stepwells of Ahmedabad: A Conversation between Water and Heritage, opened at the Kanoria Centre for Arts and the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad in 2016. He has recently published a guide to the city’s architecture.
RUTVA
TRIVEDI
Rutva Trivedi is a design director whose work navigates the intersections of spatial design, identity systems, and public art. As co-founder of Guerrilla Art & Design (2013, with Hanif Kureshi), she has developed a distinctive visual language grounded in Indian street aesthetics, vernacular lettering traditions, and the immediacy of hand-crafted techniques.
Through collaborations with St+art India Foundation, XXL Collective, and the Handpainted Type Project, Rutva’s projects have unfolded in public squares, transport hubs, markets, and festival sites, embedding themselves in the rhythms of everyday life. Her work foregrounds design as a social and cultural connector, transforming sites into living canvases that carry the textures, languages, and histories of their surroundings.
Her practice also engages with stencil-based processes and typographic forms as structural elements that shape the viewer’s movement, perception, and relationship to space. Working across scales—from architectural façades to ephemeral street interventions—she treats typography as both a communicative tool and a material archive of place.
MAUSAMI
ANDHARE
Mausami Andhare is design principal at Indigo Architects since 1998. She holds a Master’s degree in architecture with honours from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA in 1996, and CEPT University in 1993. She guides the team in a range of educational, residential, cultural projects and interior design. Her abiding interest in a contextual architecture was honed through work experience with Prof. Christopher Benninger in Pune India, Illi Dieter Architects, Zurich, Switzerland and PJHM Architects in California, USA. Their work engages with multiple facets of a conscious, eco-sensitive approach to architecture. As a process-oriented practice, it foregrounds the primacy of ‘place’ over ‘form’, exploring the layered interplay between the formal and informal to craft rich spatial experiences.
Drawing is central to their process—not merely as a means of representation, but as a way of seeing, recording, and discovering. It becomes a reflective practice that grounds design in observation and response. Authorship of thought and delineation amalgamate into a common, shared journey—reversing the assumed linearity between intent and process.
AYAZ
BASRAI
Ayaz Basrai is Co-founder of The Busride Design Studio, a leading Architecture and Interior design firm in India. Ayaz graduated in Industrial Design, specialising in Product Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in 2003. In 2006, he set up The Busride Design Studio with his architect brother Zameer, as an independent design studio specialising in the design and creation of built environments. With wide ranging interests in Illustration, Immersive media, Design and Research, Ayaz is constantly dabbling in the ever-expanding latitude of Design expression. The Busride Design Studio works on built environment projects ranging from hospitality and entertainment, immersive media to film and production environments, retail and exhibitions, installations, institutional and architectural environments. More recently, Ayaz heads the studio's research arm, The Busride Lab, based in Goa, which works on research and design projects in the domain of Heritage Conservation and Futures Research, at the intersection of Architecture, Technology, Design and Art.
VIKAS
DILAWARI
Vikas Dilawari is a practicing conservation architect with more than 3.5 decades of experience exclusively in the conservation field, ranging from urban to architecture. He has done his double Masters in Conservation from School of Planning and Architecture (New Delhi) and from the University of York (Distinction). He was the Head of Department of Conservation
Department at KRVIA, Mumbai from its inception till Aug 2014. His practice has worked on many significant heritage public buildings in Mumbai and in other parts of the country and several have national and international recognition. He was instrumental with INTACH Mumbai chapter to list the CMST (or erstwhile VT) station as a World Heritage Site in 2004.
Nineteen of his projects have won UNESCO ASIA PACIFIC Awards for Cultural Preservation in SE Asia, including Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum and CSMVS in Mumbai. Vikas has lectured and written extensively on the subject of conservation nationally and internationally. He has been a member of the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC) on several occasions.
B L
MANJUNATH
With a Bachelor’s and Masters’ degree in Civil Engineering, B L Manjunath worked for a decade with M/s Umesh B, Rao & Co., Bengaluru – a leading engineering consultant. He established his own structural consultancy, Manjunath & Co, in 1994. The practice believes in deciphering the seed of
the structural system while designing and exploring materials to their full potential considering their maximum stretchable bandwidth before failure. They learn about structures from nature and from everything around them. Their vision for the role of engineering in design and of design in engineering was shaped by Humanistic, rather than simply technical principles. Over 35 years of work experience in Structural Engineering Design, Construction and Management, they provide expertise in Design and Detailing using Specialized Techniques for Educational Institutions, Material Handling Plants in Thermal Stations, Industrial Buildings, Townships, Commercial Complexes, Hotels, Apartments, Residential Bungalows, Resorts et al. The key projects include: Azim Premji Foundation, Schools and District Institutes across India, IIIT-Bangalore, Raas Hotels - Jodhpur, amongst others.
SHUBHRA
RAJE
Shubhra‘s practice involves designing buildings and teaching architecture, working in environments that engage diverse issues, multiple constituencies and varying scales, from interior design and architecture to creative urbanism and conservation. With graduate and postgraduate degrees in architecture and a minor in theory and criticism from Cornell and CEPT Universities, she founded shubhraraje_built environments, an architecture and design studio that concerns itself with relevant design, architectural economy and spatial ecology. Shubhra heads the Architectural History and Research program at CEPT. In addition, she has taught at her graduate alma-mater and the Denver and Boulder campuses of the University of Colorado. She has been a visiting critic at universities across the globe, lectures where invited and serves on the boards of various community arts organisations in Colorado and India. She is a founding member of the Anant Raje Foundation, created as an archive as well as a platform to support cross-disciplinary initiatives in the fields of art, architecture and the built environment.
MOHAN
RAO
Mohan Rao is the founder and principal designer at INDÉ, a research-based multi-disciplinary practice based in Bangalore, India. Initially focused on Landscape design, his practice has expanded its horizons substantially to include environmental design, regional planning and landscape conservation across scales and geographies. Mohan is a regular figure in academic and professional circles, both national and international, that intersects the domains of ecology and sustainability, social and natural ecology and water and human settlements. Educated and working largely in the global south, Mohan’s (and by extension, INDÉ’s) practice is focused on critical development issues framed by lenses of sustainability, vulnerability and resilience. He considers it a privilege that nearly three decades of working with diverse traditional cultures has shaped his practice to both research and learn from as well as leverage traditional knowledge systems in addressing contemporary development challenges. His practice, writing and research strives to expand the scope of landscape architecture – both as a discipline and as a profession.
ORIJIT
SEN
Orijit Sen is an Indian graphic artist, designer, muralist, activist, and social documentarian. His expansive body of work, spanning murals, public art, comics, and graphic design, has been widely exhibited in India and internationally. Grounded in social observation, his stories, set across times and geographies, remain deeply rooted in the politics and emotions of the present. Orijit leads People Tree Studio, a collaborative art and design space he founded with designer and curator Gurpreet Sidhu in 1990, and is a founding member of the Pao Collective. He also serves as Chief Editor of Comixense, a quarterly comic magazine for young adults. As Mario Miranda Chair at Goa University, he led Mapping Mapusa Market, an experimental project combining research, education, and participatory art. He is currently working on the Mapusa Mogi Mural: a 100m x 8m public art mural made entirely in ceramic and glass, capturing the layered histories, everyday life, and spirit of Goa’s iconic market town.
VISHWA
SHROFF
Vishwa Shroff’s artistic practise is firmly rooted in drawing, with a proclivity towards architectural forms that serve as compelling take-off points for a deeper contemplation on memory and our relationship with the material world. Her works seek to explore the narratives of lived experiences that lay embedded within surfaces. Shroff trained at The Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda and at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (UK). She has had eight solo exhibitions, including The Music of Buildings at TARQ, Mumbai (2022) as well as several group shows. She has participated in a number of artist residencies, such as Swiss Cottage Library, UK (2017); Paradise Air, Japan (2015); CAMAC Centre D’Art – Marney Art Centre, France (2011) and at the Stiftung Laurenz Haus, Switzerland (2022). She has been the recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists in 2011 and the Josuken Housing Research Grant in 2020. Shroff is the co-director of SqW: Lab and is represented by TARQ.
ROBERT
STEPHENS
Robert Stephens is a Bengaluru-based architect who loves to write. Creating experiences and spaces that are deeply rooted in India's urban history is his passion. Robert lived in Mumbai for 16 years, working with an architecture studio on projects ranging from private residences and corporate offices to educational institutions and cultural spaces. His love for the Maximum City, urban history and the built environment led to his first book, Bombay Imagined, An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City. In 2023, Robert and his family moved to Bengaluru where he began an independent architecture studio, and his first project is the Urbs Indis Library and Garden. Since 2010 Robert has been creating a contemporary archive of aerial photographs focused on Cities of India. Captured 10,000 feet above sea level, the images have appeared in publications such as The Guardian, DOMUS India and Scroll.in, and exhibited in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai and Edinburgh.
ARJUN
BAHL
Arjun Bahl is a cultural entrepreneur whose work spans music, spatial design, and public art. Beginning in the independent music scene, he founded Crayon Events & Entertainment in 2006 and later Most Technical India, where he helped shape early nightclub culture in India through immersive sound and lighting systems. In 2014, he co-founded St+art India Foundation, where he has led the creation of Seven Public Art Districts across India and a range of initiatives that embed art into urban infrastructure, policy, and community life.
Arjun also directs XXL Collective and Gallery XXL, curatorial platforms for interdisciplinary contemporary art, and is a partner at Guerrilla Art & Design, working with global brands to craft experiences at the intersection of storytelling, space, and technology. His practice connects the engineered with the emotional, exploring how environments can be reimagined as cultural systems.
