From watershed interventions and world heritage landscapes to river farms and rural wetland systems — a record of practice working at the confluence of ecology, culture, and human habitat. Each project begins with listening to the land.
Every engagement begins with the land — its water memory, its soil stories, its biodiversity signatures, and the human systems woven through it over centuries. We do not impose frameworks; we read what is already present and amplify it.
Understanding the existing living relationships of a place — its water flows, biodiversity, soil memory, and the invisible threads connecting species and systems.
Studying water catchments, biodiversity corridors, terrain gradients, human settlement patterns, and historical land use — building a layered spatial intelligence.
Developing long-horizon ecological futures — co-creating with landowners and communities to articulate what this place can become across generations.
Creating phased pathways for land transformation — sequencing interventions across time so each action strengthens the next, building resilience incrementally.
Aligning ecology, human habitation, livelihood systems, and cultural identity — so that the inhabited landscape becomes a living expression of its own ancestry.
A strategic interventions masterplan at regional scale — where ecology, living heritage, and human infrastructure are treated as a single, inseparable system. This project demonstrates the practice of reading a landscape holistically: its geology, waterways, visual corridors, vernacular intelligence, and the delicate balance between a living community and its UNESCO-listed past.
Hampi sits at the confluence of the Tungabhadra river and an extraordinary boulder landscape — a living heritage site where the 14th-century Vijayanagara empire built temples, markets, and aqueducts by reading the land rather than imposing upon it. The masterplan revision (2019–2020) required an approach that understood this: that the landscape itself is the heritage, not only the monuments within it.
The intervention strategy integrated visual integrity corridors (protecting sightlines across the boulder landscape), vernacular water harvesting systems, movement infrastructure that followed natural desire paths, and tourism management that distributed pressure across the region rather than concentrating it. Each intervention was assessed against its ecological footprint, its impact on living heritage, and its long-term community benefit.
Unlike conventional heritage preservation, which often freezes a site, this approach recognised that Hampi is a living landscape with active communities, ongoing agricultural practices, and a pilgrimage culture that pre-dates the UNESCO designation. The masterplan sought to sustain this vitality while protecting the irreplaceable heritage fabric.
Every proposed infrastructure element — entry nodes, circulation paths, visitor facilities, waste management — was evaluated not only for its functional utility but for how it altered or reinforced the existing ecological and visual logic of the landscape. Vernacular construction materials and forms were integral to the design language.
The strategy deconcentrated visitor pressure through a multi-nodal approach: distributing arrival points, creating interpretive circuits aligned with natural and heritage corridors, and ensuring that local communities became active stewards and beneficiaries of the tourism economy rather than spectators displaced by it.
The Vijayanagara builders themselves were extraordinary ecological engineers — their tank systems, canal networks, and stepped terraces were calibrated to the hydrological cycle. The masterplan drew on this intelligence, proposing modern interventions that honoured the same logic: working with the land's existing gradient, water memory, and thermal comfort patterns.
A strategic interventions masterplan at regional scale for the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The approach protects natural and built heritage while maintaining visual integrity, promoting vernacular architecture, and creating infrastructure that serves locals and visitors while minimising ecological impact.
An urban water strategy for the estuary city of Kochi — stripped of its natural hydrology by decades of ill-planned reclamation. Wetlands, canals, and green networks reimagined as agents of biodiversity, livelihood, and resilient urban infrastructure, with community stakeholders as active guardians.
A water-starved village on the outskirts of Bangalore — drying lakes, disappearing streams, depleting water tables pushing an agrarian settlement into poverty. A whole-systems solution that brought the water back, revitalised the environment, and empowered the community. Competition: Runner Up — Ultratech IndiaNEXT Village 2020.
A 3.5-acre riverside property designed as human habitat — leaving the natural contour intact, allowing the monsoon river to express its spate, and designing the home as a womb within the site. Built with natural materials and plantitecture; courtyards and water bodies flow seamlessly with existing inhabitants — monkeys, elephants, and native flora.
A transformative educational environment incorporating sustainable design principles, breathtaking views, comfortable accommodation, and regenerative practices — to ignite a passion for learning and cultivate a profound connection with nature. Designed to the Living Building Challenge framework.
A community mapping exercise with the younger generation — a participatory process that led to identification of community assets, issues, and resources. The co-creative process deepened the relationship between community and place, empowering residents to become active stewards of the living heritage they inhabit.
A research enquiry into the decolonial remapping of South Asia through the lens of bioregionalism — examining how ecological boundaries, watershed systems, and indigenous land categories offer an alternative spatial grammar to the administrative borders inherited from colonial cartography.
Safe housing for returning refugees and a city fabric that enables healing. Rather than demolishing ruins and erasing the past, the concept accepts the brutal poetry of ruins and reclaims the streets practically, gracefully, and inclusively. The built space is designed for the returning citizen to make their own. Shortlisted — Matter Better Competition 2016.
A deployable, dismantle-able 100-bed ICU hospital implemented by the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Karnataka at NIMHANS Bangalore — completed in 26 days during the second wave. Open-source design for any community or government. Post-crisis, structures convert to rural Anganwadis, health centres, and schools.
These are the marks left by an active practice — not polished deliverables, but evidence of a particular way of perceiving land, water, and systems. Sketches, frameworks, ecological annotations, and spatial observations accumulated across projects and territories.
The practice operates across scales: from the intimacy of a single riverside farm to the complexity of a world heritage landscape, from a village water system to a regional ecological strategy. What holds across all scales is the same discipline of listening — reading watershed logic, understanding terrain memory, tracing biodiversity corridors, and aligning human systems with the living intelligence of place.
Shortlisted for the Regen-X project situated in the Western Ghats, aimed at reviving stewardship systems for regenerating ecology and community.
A design competition to imagine the village of 2047. The Tarahunise wetland village design explored a visionary path for rural infrastructure development grounded in natural systems.
The post-war Syria submission re-imagined housing design as a tool for reconciling violence and displacement — practical, contextual, and emotionally sustainable reconstruction.
An ideas competition by the National Institute for Urban Affairs to identify solutions for the Smart Cities Programme — recognising innovative urban approaches to common challenges.
Every landscape holds a story, a system, and a future waiting to be articulated. We would love to begin the conversation.