I grew up in the inner-city of Mumbai, watching the city continuously adapt and layer itself with “newer” forms year after year. The neighbourhood I come from has a strong heritage and entrepreneurial history, along with complex social, economic, and spatial conditions. This backdrop has been central to shaping my interest in buildings, places, neighbourhoods, and cities.
I began my studies in economics and accounts, shaped by growing up in a trading city, but soon realised that would become the backdrop to my creativity in architecture and urbanism. After researching the informal yet resilient settlements of migrant workers, I gained hands-on architectural experience to learn how ideas could be transformed into built form.
Later, I moved to the Netherlands to immerse myself in the highly ordered and structured approach of TU Delft’s Dutch urbanism and practiced it in Dutch offices. This encounter between “messy” morphologies and “orderly” systems was a critical learning experience, sharpening my contextual understanding of space, form, and design across scales.
I have learned to navigate design and placemaking across diverse contexts, balancing analysis with imagination. For me, it is essential to first see places as they are and then reimagine them with a creative twist. As a licensed architect in India with professional experience in architecture and urban design in both India and the Netherlands, I enjoy critically decoding places, their form, their character and their communal edges. I admit, I am a bit of a nerd about it.