The last day of the India Art, architecture and Design Biennale was all about celebrating the work of Indian women artists and architects. The exhibition titled, ‘Samatva: Shaping the built’, showcases the work of over 80 women architects and 50 designers across the country and the ages. The popular narrative of India’s twentieth century architectural history is largely articulated around the contributions of male architects and engineers. There is very little documentation and dissemination about the contributions made by first-generation women architects or other female practitioners of the country. Existing narratives about Indian architectural history are also influenced by geographical and socio-political boundaries. The exhibition has been curated by Swati Janu, renowned artist and architect.
As the principal and owner of Atelier Manferdini, she provided unique insights into shaping the built environment, bringing her twenty years of professional experience into action. The following session was a panel discussion titled, ‘The Yin in Design – Celebrating Women’ with the speakers, Pavitra Rajaram, Founder of Pavitra Rajaram Design ; Abha Narain Lambah, Principal Architect at Abha Narain Lambah Associates and Anupama Kundoo, Architect moderated by Amit Gupta, Founder and Editor-in-chief, STIR.
The digital archive by Curating for Culture traces the journeys of 21 women practitioners and maps their contributions as significant landmarks in the larger narrative of India’s architectural history. Using oral history recordings, visual documentation, and storytelling tools, this project has created an open access archive, and contributes to the discourse about the relationships between gender and the built environment in India. This showcase also includes the visual documentation from their first exhibition ‘Vandalizing the indian Atelier: Searching for the stories of women practitioners’ held at Arthshila Ahmedabad over July and August 2023. The growing digital archive invites collaborations and further the research.
A few artists which stood out were Abha Narain Lambah, Amrita Bhallal and Moulshri Joshi. Lambah is a practicing Conservation Architect and a recipient of the Architect of the Year Award 2019 Architectural Digest, Architect of the Year Award CNBC Awaaz 2017, Eisenhower Fellowship, Charles Wallace Fellowship (U.K.) and Sanskriti Award.Her firm has been included in the AD100 Architects List for over a decade and has been featured on the International Works of Wonder (The WoW List) of 20 projects by Architectural Digest USA. Over the past 25 years, Abha’s architectural practice has had a pan India impact, with projects that include award winning conservation of 15th Century temples in Ladakh and Hampi, to iconic palaces, forts and caravanserais in Rajasthan, etc. The practice has won 11 UNESCO Asia Pacific Awards for heritage conservation and is the largest architectural conservation practice in the sub-continent.
Amritha Ballal is an architect, urban planner and founding partner of SpaceMatters. Her work delves into social ecology and spatial culture through diverse built and action-research projects. Her written works include ‘Bhopal 2011-Landscapes of Memory’ on post-disaster landscapes and ‘The city is our home’ on urban homelessness.
SpaceMatters has been awarded and published internationally, including in the Guardian, Phaidon Books, Architizer, ArcMarathon, ArchDaily, the Merit List, the Indian Institute of Architects and more.Moulshri Joshi is an architect and teacher leading the award-winning design practice Space Matters based in New Delhi. She has taught architectural design and theory for over a decade at the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi, her alma mater. Since 2005, Moulshri worked in the field of Industrial Heritage with a focus on conservation and remediation of the former Union Carbide factory at Bhopal.
The oral histories of many more women practitioners are yet to be archived and shared.The cabinet of curiosities from the studio showcases the diversity of their projects and approaches, spanning academia, activism, and architecture. The exhibition invites us to sit down, take time and listen to the oral histories by architects to understand the changing relationship of women practitioners in architecture, design, planning in India.
Feature Image: Installation by Abha Narain Lambah | Courtesy: Abir Pothi
Day 2 was about baaghs, bahaars and gulistans at the IAADB’23
Anoushkha Prasad is a post-graduate from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, J.N.U. She is currently working as a researcher and writer.
