Some of the world's most innovative regional architecture never makes the headlines simply because no one is telling its story. For the sixth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Brodka of designboom dissects this exact bottleneck with architects Niroop Reddy, Sujit Nair, and Aman Aggarwal, tracing how a historic lack of architectural storytelling has obscured a massive design revolution taking place across the Indian subcontinent.
The story of modern Indian architecture is a journey of breaking free from the post-liberalization era of the 1990s, an era heavily dominated by imported Western aesthetics. Today, the landscape is entering a mature, self-aware phase — one that trades those foreign templates for an intimate reclamation of local context, craft, and sustainability. This evolution marks a shift away from the technical sound the discipline was long associated with; it has become an act of profound cultural storytelling.
At the same time, optimism arises about the inherent power of Indian projects to speak for themselves over time. While the profession is currently in flux, the focus is permanently shifting toward an architecture that no longer needs to import its identity, proving that regional context holds a louder, more profound voice than any universal template.
Project info:
podcast: Room For Dreams
episode: 06
theme: The Indo-Global Dialogue
host: Claire Broadka
guests: Niroop Reddy of NA Architects | @na_architects, Sujit Nair of SDeG | @sdeg__, and Aman Aggarwal of Charged Voids | @chargedvoids
collaborator: INDX|GLOBAL | @indx.global
