68th Annual Convention of NASA

The National Association of Students of Architecture, India (NASA), is one of the largest student-driven associations of architecture across the world that has been bringing together more than 200 schools of architecture that has grown to that number over the period of three decades. In 2006 when I had first attended NASA as a participant from Academy of Architecture for the HUDCO trophy (which we also won), I had left with a mixed impression of hope and despair. Confused between competition and festival, the event seemed like a lost opportunity to my young critical mind, and we never turned back to participate in the event.

Years later, I was invited as a speaker to the event of the 68th Annual NASA Convention at the Woxsen University. Despite strong reservations, I signed up to see what shape it had taken over the years, and more specifically, how it appeared from "the other side" of things. However, having organized countless events over the last 12 years, and from a more intimate understanding of the archi-pedagogical landscape of the country, I had way more empathy for the entire endeavour now. To pull of this event with more than a 100 colleges, the scales of coordination, the complexities of programming, the management of resources and promise of coming back year after year - with only student energies - must not be an easy feat.

This is not to say that NASA  could still be looked up for its intellectual contribution. But in moderating a single  seminar session and delivering a talk to a room filled with more than 150 students from all across South Asia - I could sense the immense potential that could inform the pedagogical landscape of the country. What the queues of young people waiting to enter our rooms told me was their hunger to connect, reach out and access people who could help them take their questions further, who could open their trajectories beyond their limited intellectual resources within the smaller towns. How do students studying in smaller towns and universities get to meet thinkers and professionals from fields that are otherwise available only within larger schools or prominent universities who can afford them? How do students wanting to explore alternative trajectories in architecture and education find outlets beyond the confines of their archaic intellectual infrastructures.

NASA is then, an opportunity for all these students from cities small and big, across South Asia, to equalise and connect. Over the four days, architecture students not only present the work they produce for the various competitions - that have themselves expanded and attuned to the times (to include journalism, films, and so on), but they also participate in workshops, talks, meets, and in general meet possible future colleagues. A lot often gets lost in the conundrum of scale and organisation of the event, but then, I realised that there is so much that could happen in the coming together of about thousands of  students of architecture in a single space! I am sure some of these students still make life long friends - like I made in 2006 with students of CEPT - who had for the first time introduced some of us visiting to the Kurula Varkey Design Forum - that we attended in 2007, moderated by the likes of Juhaani Palasmaa - whom none of us knew! I felt a strange sense of responsibility now, as I spoke to the young students who held me after my talk to discuss their dilemmas and some who took pictures with me almost making me a celebrity... But precisely that feeling of how sharing your trajectory could become so meaningful for someone who has been searching a resonant voice, was so rewarding...

Sometimes, we take our privilege for granted. I grew up in Mumbai - big city, best schools, intellectual life, resourceful space, access to best minds...I had everything at my disposal, and I have taken advantage of all of it too. Having toured to many smaller towns to teach, discuss and share ideas over the last decade, I realise that such big-city exposure produces a worldliness that feeds into one's work almost naturally, and it is also precisely the world from where other spaces seem like they are "yet to catch up". We cannot simply dismiss this argument to the democratic availability of intellectual resource to media. The catching up will happen only if there is a window to look beyond, and the windows shall open only if they are made in the first place. How do we think of equalising education, and expecting intellectual conversation if in the first place, people do not have access to the same resources?

I think I was humbled off my intellectual snobbery and despite all the problems of NASA that still remain, it is commendable that they continue to do it year after year. These days, my Instagram doom-scroll brings me time and again to this one particular enterprise where a seemingly native individual in the forest across a water source will dig up the soil from the riverbank and then keep sieving it for hours in flowing water - only to collect a tiny, miniscule amount of gold. The event of NASA is such a mixture of promise and hope - of assurance and aspiration. In bringing naiive, young minds together, I am sure they pull up some capacities for some people. In raising this horizon of hope, the event must maintain its quest to keep sharpening and raising its ambition for more people across the subcontinent to become a community of people who must hope. 

Auroville Housing Roger Anger

 

Architectural Practice In India: A Millennial Archaeology

monsoon 2025-26

At the threshold of the first quarter of the millennium, which also marks a generation since India’s economic liberalization, architectural practice in India is ripe for a critical re-evaluation. In this period, the country has gradually, yet starkly shifted from a socialist framework to a neoliberal state, where developmental politics has ramified architectural production into new directions and logics. Existing scholarship on the built environment in India has often focused narrowly on the aesthetics of form, the evolving identity of the architect, or the reception of modernism as inherited from the West. Architectural discourse has largely taken one of two paths: either documenting work deemed academically significant, or framing emerging practices in terms of identity—often measured against binaries such as modern versus indigenous/vernacular. Such approaches tend to posit the architect as a servant of academic canons or fixed ideals.

Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.

‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.

The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.

The Spectacle of Demolition

 

University of Lagos

 

Cidade de Goa by Charles Correa