Reading at Advanced level
India's built environment is undergoing rapid transformation, yet a critical debate persists among architects and practitioners: can the country's contemporary buildings establish an authentically rooted design language, or will globalised conventions continue to dominate? Menaka Doshi interrogates this question through projects that prioritise vernacular climatic strategies, cultural integration, and indigenous building methodologies—rejecting the false binary between tradition and modernity. These works demonstrate that contemporary architecture need not be architecturally derivative, leveraging localised knowledge systems alongside contemporary material and structural innovation.
The imperative extends beyond aesthetic autonomy. Buildings calibrated to India's climatic realities—extreme solar gain, monsoonal precipitation, regional material ecosystems—exhibit superior thermal and hydrological performance relative to prescriptive Western prototypes. Architecturally-rooted design fosters cultural continuity while demonstrating that modernity itself is not geographically bound. This emerging practice reframes the modernism debate: not as a retreat to tradition, but as a sophisticated synthesis in which contemporary building science and materials integrate with place-based knowledge, yielding structures that are simultaneously contemporary and culturally situated.