SEA Conversations / Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology - session #1

SEACONVERSATIONS

MONSOON 2025-26
ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE IN INDIA: A MILLENNIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

part 1



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.

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.


sessions*

Aug 08 Organisational Restructurings Aug 22 Urban Periphery as Experimental Field
Sep 05 Multinational Dispositions Sep 19 Designing Interiorscapes
Sep 26 Sustainability & Green Building Environmental Practices
Oct 03 Heritage Conservation Practices Oct 10 The Urban Turn / Urbanistic Impulse


*all dates for 2025


session 1


ORGANISATIONAL RESTRUCTURINGS



Economic liberalization of the 1990s in India promoted market-oriented reforms, privatization, and moderated the control of state over developmental processes. Such conditions triggered an infrastructure boom, with the private sectors initiating large-scale projects across urban landscapes in India. Amidst the proliferation of special economic zones, BPOs, five star hotels, airports, malls and townships, architectural practice in India began to assume a managerial impetus, focusing upon the logics of functional efficiency in large scale project delivery and building serviceability. International capital came to fundamentally rescript architectural practice in its outlook and operations. In this panel, we bring three representative practices to open up: how have architectural firms transitioned into the delivery of megaprojects? How does the architect’s office reconfigure and organise itself to the shift in scale? What new protocols get put in place and how does it impact the relationship between the architect and the field?





discussants

Ravi Sarangan (Edifice Consultants)

Brinda Somaya (Somaya+Sampat)
Ratan Batliboi (RJB-CPL)

moderated by Ravindra Punde (SEA, Design Cell)





on Friday
8 August 2025
@ 6:00 PM IST


The event is partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
It is free and open to everyone across the world.