Architect and writer, whose work explores the convergence of design, sustainability, and building physics. With a B.Arch from Bengaluru and an MSc in Advanced Sustainable Design from the University of Edinburgh, she practiced in Scotland as a Building Performance Consultant. Currently runs her design studio, across multiple cities in India. Her approach integrates technical research with architectural thinking, examining how buildings perform within their environmental and cultural contexts.
In Iran's capital, Tehran, movement defines the city. Each day, millions navigate a landscape shaped by highways, traffic corridors, and dense urban blocks. Over decades of rapid expansion, infrastructure has become the dominant language of development. Streets prioritize vehicles, sidewalks function as narrow conduits, and many public spaces operate primarily as passages rather than places of gathering. Across parts of West Asia, ongoing conflict has also reshaped the region's urban landscapes, where significant architectural environments have been damaged or transformed. Within this broader context, the preservation and creation of everyday civic space becomes increasingly meaningful. Recognized with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Jahad Metro Plaza project, designed by KA Architecture Studio, demonstrates how modest infrastructural interventions can reshape the civic life of a city.
The metro network plays a central role in Tehran's daily life. It connects distant districts and sustains the rhythms of the metropolis. Yet the places where the underground city meets the surface are rarely conceived as civic environments. Metro entrances typically appear as fragments of infrastructure: stairs descending below ground, surrounded by railings, kiosks, and improvised circulation paths. They function efficiently as thresholds, but seldom as places to remain.
For most of human history, night arrived as a planetary certainty. Darkness spread across landscapes, and the sky revealed thousands of stars. Today, that sky is disappearing. Artificial light spills upward from cities, scattering through the atmosphere and turning night into a permanent haze. Research mapping global sky brightness shows that more than 80 percent of humanity now lives under light-polluted skies, and the Milky Way has vanished from view for over a third of the world's population. The disappearance of dark skies is usually discussed within astronomy, but the sources of that change are deeply embedded in the built environment. Buildings emit light, reflect it through glass façades, and extend illumination far beyond their walls. In the technosphere, the vast system of infrastructures and materials humans have constructed, architecture now shapes both physical space and the sensory conditions surrounding it.
Founded in 2015 in Ahmedabad by Anand Sonecha, SEAlab is a practice shaped by a slow, contemplative engagement with place, proportion, and participation. Recognized as one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, the studio builds with simple materials and local techniques, pursuing environments that are experienced as much as they are seen. This ethos became particularly tangible in Gandhinagar, where the School for Blind and Visually Impaired Children did not begin as a purpose-built institution. The school had been operating from an existing primary school building, with classrooms stacked above dormitories and twelve children sharing a single room. Space was limited, and so were growth opportunities. The new academic building was required to expand capacity, improve living conditions, and support greater student independence.
On a hot afternoon in May, when the air over western India turns metallic with heat, no one remembers façade composition. They remember where the shade falls. They remember which corridor breathed. They remember the house that was cooler than the street. What stays in memory is comfort beyond the form. Repeated thermal preference stabilizes into spatial configuration, and over time, those configurations become building types.
A Gothic cathedral can take centuries to complete. A world exposition pavilion may stand for six months. A ritual structure in Kolkata rises and vanishes within five days. Yet each draws pilgrimage, shapes collective memory, and reorganizes urban life. If heritage has long been defined by what endures, architecture repeatedly shows that cultural authority can also belong to what gathers people.
For much of the twentieth century, conservation frameworks privileged permanence. The Venice Charter, adopted by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, focused on safeguarding monuments and their material authenticity. Cultural value was tied to physical fabric such as stone, brick, and timber. To protect heritage was to preserve what stood. The logic felt stable, even self-evident.
A building still being adjusted, repaired, and debated is declared World Heritage. Another, equally influential, must survive five centuries before anyone considers protecting it. This is not an anomaly in the heritage system; it is the system. Across the world, architecture does not age at the same pace because time itself is not neutral. It is cultural, political, and deeply uneven. What we call "heritage" is not simply old architecture; it is architecture that has reached the right moment in a particular place.
For decades, heritage has been easiest to recognize from the street. We protect facades, skylines, and monuments because they are visible, stable, and legible as cultural assets. Yet most of what we remember about living is how we eat together, withdraw, argue, care, and rest, which happen far from view. It happens inside rooms. As open plans quietly give way to thresholds, corridors, and enclosures, a deeper question emerges: what if cultural memory survives not in what architecture shows, but in how it is lived?
Founded as a practice working across architecture and community-focused projects, pk_iNCEPTiON is based in Maharashtra, India. The studio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, works on rural schools, houses, libraries, and public buildings, with a focus on spatial organization and adaptability. Operating across varied social and climatic contexts, pk_iNCEPTiON approaches design through careful attention to movement, scale, and the relationship between built form and open space.
Sunset panorama of a large residential gated community (Aparna’s Elixir) viewed from Khajaguda hills, India. Photo by iMahesh. License Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
You learn how to behave long before you arrive home. At the gate, you slow down and wait. You are watched, then waved through. A badge is checked, a barrier lifts, a camera blinks. Nothing dramatic happens, and that is precisely the point. The most consequential work of gated communities is not done by their walls, but by the choreography of entry that quietly teaches residents what to expect, whom to trust, and where they belong.
Bazaar in Hyderabad, India. Photo by Kanishq Kancharla on Unsplash
Architecture is most often represented as a stable object: a building captured at a moment of visual clarity, isolated from surrounding contingencies. Plans, sections, and photographs promise legibility by suspending time. Yet many of the world's most enduring public environments resist this mode of representation altogether. They are not designed to be read instantaneously, nor do they reveal their logic through form alone. Their spatial intelligence emerges gradually, through repetition, occupation, and duration.
The bazaar belongs firmly within this category. It cannot be understood through a single drawing or a finished elevation. Its organization is not fixed but rehearsed. What sustains it is not purely architectural composition, but shared timing, collective memory, and long-standing patterns of use. Togetherness in the bazaar does not arise from formal design decisions; it is produced through repeated encounters, negotiated proximities, and social familiarity accumulated over time.
Indian modernism is often narrated through a narrow lens: a handful of iconic institutions, master architects, and formally radical experiments that came to symbolize the nation's post-Independence aspirations. Yet this version of history overlooks the far larger body of modernist architecture that quietly shaped everyday life across the country. Beyond celebrated campuses and canonical buildings exists a vast, dispersed landscape of housing blocks, offices, hostels, hospitals, markets, and townships — structures that were designed to function and endure.
In contemporary architectural discourse, scale is often mistaken for influence. Large firms, landmark projects, and master-planned developments dominate visibility. It goes on to reinforce the idea that architectural ambition is measured by size, reach, or spectacle. Yet across India and similar contexts, a quieter but equally consequential body of work is emerging. It is led by small but mighty practices operating with limited resources, close client relationships, and an intimate understanding of local conditions.
In 2025, India's most consequential design projects unfolded largely out of sight. While public attention gravitated toward museums, cultural landmarks, and visually arresting façades, the architecture that most decisively shaped daily life existed underground, at the city's edges, or inside secured compounds few citizens would ever enter. Sewage networks were rebuilt, flood tunnels bored beneath dense neighborhoods, substations lifted above floodplains, and data centers multiplied across peri-urban landscapes. These were not peripheral works of engineering; they were the spatial systems that allowed Indian cities to remain functional through record heatwaves, erratic monsoons, and accelerating urban growth.
In recent years, this long-standing relationship began to shift. Architectural images did not simply become more refined or technologically advanced; they took on new social and institutional significance. As images moved beyond professional contexts and entered wider public circulation, their role expanded. They were no longer only methods of communication within the discipline, but also objects of public interpretation, discussion, and, at times, dispute. This marked a subtle but important change in how architectural visuals were understood and used.
Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla | Rana Haddad + Pascal Hachem Reveries, Desert X AlUla 2024
Architecture and design enter 2026 in a moment of renewed experimentation, urgent environmental reflection, and an expanded global dialogue on the built environment. As cities confront the pressures of climate adaptation, demographic shifts, and technological transformation, this year's international calendar offers a lens into how the discipline is responding, creatively, critically, and collectively. From long-standing biennials to newly established platforms, the events of 2026 spotlight architecture's evolving role as both a record of our changing world and a driver of more equitable, sustainable futures.
Mishing traditional bamboo house, Majuli . Photo by Rumi Borah. License Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Across India's varied geographies, from coastal backwaters to desert fortress cities, architecture evolved with a deep, instinctive connection to climate. These were not isolated craft traditions but complete ecological systems in which material cycles, thermal comfort, and community knowledge were interdependent. As COP30 turns global attention toward the links between heritage and climate resilience, India's vernacular practices appear less as historical artifacts and more as climate technologies refined over centuries.
Across Europe and beyond, architects are confronting a turning point. As rising emissions targets collide with shrinking material supplies and the growing urgency of climate commitments, the built environment is being forced into a deeper reckoning with how it consumes, circulates, and discards resources. What was once considered waste is now revealing itself as a dormant architectural archive, an urban ecosystem of materials waiting to be reclaimed, revalued, or reimagined. Within this shift, architects are beginning to play a radically different role. Not only as designers of buildings, but also as orchestrators of the flows that sustain them.
This emerging mindset is reshaping the foundations of practice. Instead of depending on long, extractive supply chains, designers are beginning to build their own closed-loop networks, establishing material banks, negotiating deconstruction protocols, and participating in new forms of urban mining.
Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, Rajasthan India. Photo by Sanhitasinha. License Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
India's palaces and former colonial warehouses are witnessing a new kind of restoration, one that happens beneath the surface. From discreet steel supports tucked behind centuries-old masonry to digital sensors embedded in frescoed ceilings, technology is quietly reshaping how heritage buildings are protected for the future. These upgrades are more about subtle precision and less about spectacle; invisible engineering wonders.
As the world moves towards adaptive reuse, architects and engineers are confronted with an evolving challenge to make historic structures safe for public access while maintaining the authenticity of the architecture. Whether it's upgrading palaces to cool efficiently or seismic reinforcement of Victorian godowns, the goal is beyond preservation. It's about the intelligent coexistence of the old and the new.
