My style has also evolved as an organic and fluid collection of principles and elements, which together guide my design. Having started with a deep and abiding respect for the international masters, where each element of design comes together to fashion a symphony, my formative years were heavily influenced by a vocabulary of brick and concrete in their purest forms, unadorned and honest in their expression. Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and B V Doshi were the principal conductors of that symphony.
Over the past few years, influenced by advancements in not only material science, but also the functional and physical perceptions of space, I have allowed my style to become softer, and more inclusive in every sense of the word. I would define it at this time as being global in its physical form yet striving to be local in how it is perceived. Every project is designed within varied climates, for different communities, and in different materials, which presents a challenge where it may be easy to lose one’s identity by reflexively and blindly embracing local streams or rejecting pre-conceived notions without weighing them objectively.
I have striven, through design, to design functionally and communally meaningful spaces, with a degree of innovation that can be physical or meta-physical, where the physical vocabulary of the building serves as a mere tool to convey the idea of what it wants to be and what it wants to mean to its inhabitants.
I also find myself being drawn to the materials that I grew up with, their textures and their flaws, their sheer simplicity yet their relevance across scales. Once we walk away from a set of guidelines that would be perceived as a ‘style’, a whole universe of design opens up, freeing me to respond to what talks to me in a project, and try to reply to it in its own language, with all its nuances and grammar. In conclusion, my style could perhaps be most aptly described as ‘contemporary sensitive’ or perhaps an architecture of Futures Past.’
