Women Architects in India

Women architects in India, Contemporary and Early women architects, their works, projects, biography, status

1. WOMEN ARCHITECTS IN INDIA Perin Jamshedji MisTri Urmila Eulie Chowdhury Pravina Mehta Hema patel CANNA PATEL CHITRA VISHWANATH ANUPAMA KUNDOO Brinda somaya

2. EARLY NARRATIVES

3. Perin Jamshedji MisTri

4. About Birth: Born in Mumbai in 1913 in a progressive Parsi family. Her father Jamsetjee Mistri was a renowned architect. Education : Having had her early education in a Gujarati school in Mumbai, young Mistri entered as a boarder in Miss Kimmin’s High School in Panchagani . At the age of ten she went to England and completed her education from the Croydon High School. Degree : Joined the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (J. J.) School of Art. Joined her father’s firm M/s. Ditchburn , Mistri and Bhedwar in 1937 which was started in 1891 and had opened a branch in Karachi in 1916. She is believed to be the first woman architect to be professionally qualified in India.

5. SHELTER FOR SALVATION ARMY IN AHMEDNAGAR St. Stephen’s Cathedral Church, Mumbai St. Stephen’s Cathedral Church, Mumbai

6. Urmila Eulie Chowdhury

7. About Urmila Eulie Chowdhury (1923-1995) was India's first qualified woman architect, a teacher, and a writer. Some historians believe that she was Asia's first qualified female architect. She graduated from the University of Sydney with Bachelor of Architecture in 1947. In addition, she learned singing and piano at the Conservatory of Music of the Julian Ashborn School of Art, Sydney, Australia, and also obtained a diploma in Ceramics in New Jersey, USA.

8. About She worked for a brief period in United States and returned to India in 1951 to join the team of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret , Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew for designing of the Capital City of Chandigarh. From 1951 to 1981 Eulie Chowdhury broadly remained in Chandigarh and worked on different positions except for 1963 to 1965 when she was entrusted the assignment of Director, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. She worked as Chief Architect of Haryana from 1971 to 1976 and Chief Architect of Punjab from May 21, 1976 to October 31, 1981. In 1983, she established the Alliance Française de Chandigarh.

9. WORKS Eulie Chowdhury's architecture bear the footprints of more of Pierre Jeanneret and less of Le Corbusier. Her architecture had the ingredients of purity, simplicity, truthfulness, humbleness, minimalism, and economy. An overview of her buildings proves the above discourse true. She was more fascinated by the use of brick on external surfaces, occasionally punctuated by plastered and white-washed surfaces. Unlike Le Corbusier, she very rarely designed buildings in exposed concrete. Women Polytechnic College, Sector 10, Chandigarh Government Housing, Sector-35, Chandigarh Government Model Senior Secondary School, Sector-37, Chandigarh

10. PRAVINA MEHTA

11. About Pravina Mehta of Mumbai was a leading Indian architect, planner and also a political activists. During the Indian independence movement, she was inspired by Sarojini Naidu, a freedom fighter and participated in the street protests against the British raj before she started her study of architecture at the Sir j.j. She was involved in the conceptualization and proposal of the new Bombay plan in 1964 in collaboration with Charles Correa and Shirish Patel, which involved extension of the island city located to the east on the mainland.

12. Mehta was involved in the design of houses, factories, schools, and institutions, but her structures no longer exist. She also aimed at establishing a link between architecture and other art forms. It was her view that traditional Indian art forms, which are rhythmic in style, could be translated to "the language of concrete and mortar“

13. J .B. Advani Oerlikon Electrodes Factory It was built in 1963 with labour intensive on site fabrication . Ventilation and lightning were provided by rhythmic arrangements of windows. Her main preoccupation was with re-establishing a link between art and architecture and with Indian values which she felt was missing from the contemporary Indian buildings of that time.

14. HEMA PATEL

15. About Hema Patel studied architecture in Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), Baroda, in 1959-64. Her father was a civil engineer involved in building construction, and her elder brother Hasmukh Patel is a well-known architect. She was greatly inspired by Pingleji’s aesthetical values in architecture. Patel was design conscious from the beginning and has been interested in gardening as well as designing jewellery and clothes since her early teens.

16. In 1967, she began her professional career working for a large architectural firm for six months before joining Louis Kahn’s practise for two and half years in East Coast. There were several projects that Patel worked on while at Louis Kahn’s office. The experience of practising made her aware of the patriarchal attitudes of the society towards women. Since her return to India she has continued to be active in her profession. She headed the School of Interior Design at the Institute of Environmental Design, Vallabh Vidyanagar from 1990 to 1997; she also started a five year architecture programme at Sardar Valabhbhai Institute of Technology at Vasad , Gujarat. The Kimbell Art Museum in Dallas The Convention hall in Venice

17. CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES

18. Canna Patel

19. About Canna Patel is an Architect and Interior Designer with over 28 years of professional experience. Education: Bachelors in Architecture at CEPT, Ahmedabad she did her Masters at U.C. Berkeley.  Professional Pracice: She is the Chairperson HCP Interior Design Pvt. Ltd. (HCPID), widely regarded as a reputable and professionally managed firm.   Career: Her early career focused on Interior Design projects, in which she has established a nationwide reputation, renowned for her signature style of designed interiors that complement and indeed, seamlessly blend with the Architectural forms and spaces.  Focus on detailing and integration of art in her interiors and architecture are trademarks of her work. More recently, she has executed Architectural commissions that reflect a fine sensitivity to Indian climate, social norms, cultural values and aspirations.

20. With time, lifestyle and technology changes and the way people use space gets changed too. As a designer we got to redesign same space for same family but different time with different generation. Redefining spaces not just by material colour but changing the experience of using the same space in a different way was our inspiration for this project. The client had sentimental values attached to the house and religious, we had to be careful with our design moves and sensitive towards it. To give them a feeling of a brand new house without doing much civil changes was the biggest challenge. By using minimum materials we achieved timelessness in our projects

21. Bhavin & Rupal Vadgama’s Weekend Home

22. Chitra vishwanath

23. About Principal architect & managing director at Biome Environmental Solutions, Bengaluru Nigerian national diploma Bachelor of architecture, CEPT Ahmedabad 1990-2008, Founder Chitra Vishwanath Architects Advisor to kilikili www.kilikili.org Co- ordinator in:ch – an indo -swiss sustainability education initiative

24. BIOME environmental solutions

25. Project- THE ATELIER BANGALORE

26. Project- THE ATELIER BANGALORE The Atelier is designed as a temporary structure in response to site limitations. This entails that it can be dismantled and the materials and land recovered in entirety. Conforming to the education system, the spaces are designed in a permeable sense. Eight branching columns support a sloping roof which effects a gentle change in scale. The interior is visually liberating, being perceived entirely as one volume.  Walls of varying heights enclose curvilinear spaces, blurring volumetric definition The external envelope is a pattern of pervious, opaque and transparent surfaces, lighting and ventilating the space. Dotted with skylights, the roof has an i nsulating bamboo plywood false ceiling which contrasts pleasantly with the metallic frame. Construction techniques such as chappadi stone foundation, paver block floor, paper tube partition walls and a bolted steel structure make it transposable.

27. Brinda Somaya

28. About Brinda Somaya was born on 28 June 1949.   Somaya completed her bachelor of architecture degree from Mumbai university and her master of arts from smith college in Northampton, United States.  Her work includes corporate, industrial and institutional campuses and extends to public spaces, which she has rebuilt and sometimes reinvented as pavements, parks and plazas. Some of these campuses include Tata Consultancy Services, Banyan Park, Mumbai; Nalanda International School, Vadodara; and Zensar Technologies, Pune. She is currently the Chairperson of Board of Governors for School of Planning and Architecture, Vijayawada.

29. Brinda Somaya started SNK in a garden shed in Mumbai founding what would become one of the most diverse Indian practices internationally recognized for its innovation and sensitivity in design. The buildings must respond to the land, go beyond concepts, geometry, forms and symmetry, while incorporating continuity and change.

30. NALANDA INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, VADODARA,2010 The inspiration for the design of this project came to the architect from ancient Nalanda university in Bihar. The architect’s desire was to create a peaceful space suitable for learning, one that would raise the spirit of the students and would more than just reflect the culture and heritage of India.

31. NALANDA INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, VADODARA,2010 The brick buildings with their terracotta-tiled roofs provide a cool atmosphere in hot and dry climate in Vadodara. Natural stone flooring contributes to the cooling effect, while the China mosaic used in the nursery school along with the pattern and coloured cement lends a sense of play for the young children. The architecture expresses the complex interaction between the site, climate, tradition, material and human spirit.

32. ANUPAMA KUNDOO

33. About Anupama Kundoo was born in Pune, India in 1967. She graduated from Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai in 1989, and received her PhD degree from the TU Berlin in 2008. In 2013 Kundoo received an honourable mention in the ArcVision International Prize for Women in Architecture for ‘her dedication when approaching the problem of affordability of construction and sustainability in all aspects’.

34. PHILOSOPHY She demonstrates a strong focus on material research and experimentation towards an architecture that has low environmental impact and is appropriate to the socio-economic context. She has worked extensively in India and has brought several innovations in the projects she designed adopting “ sustainable building technologies and infrastructural systems ”.  Her experiments across projects ranging from baked mud houses to high rise buildings are worth archiving as case studies for future references. She expresses her design approach clearly by stating: "My designs are not driven by the worry that the world will end, but by finding ways to make the most with what one has."

35. PROJECT- WALL HOUSE Wall house is having three main features: Ecofriendly building materials alternative technology An architecture that is energy efficient Climatic responsive. This house is L-Shaped in plan, has a courtyard in the middle; while it is modern in concept it adopts traditional "vernacular" use of materials such as compressed earth, concrete and steel. The bathroom is set in open-to-sky design, with smooth merging with the interior and external spaces and landscaped in manner which gives it both a modern and a regional appearance.   A full sized replica of her Wall House was made by hand and exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Net York Times called it as "a gem among rubble".

36. WORKING ON LIGHT MATTERS The ‘Light Matters’ investigation was about generating the form of roofing systems based on crease patterns seen frequently in origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. The idea is that such forms are very efficient and can allow the use of much thinner elements. In this project the structure was so light, the formwork being considered was recycled corrugated cartons rather than wood or steel formwork. This makes the structure very cost-efficient. She used the knowledge of geometry and engineering to significantly reduce the material consumption. Light Matters was therefore about using knowledge (light) to achieve efficient light structures, not only in terms of weight but also in terms of environmental impact.

37. thankyou Presented By- Shreyasee Thakral Pallavi Wadhwa Iksheta Tyagi Kartik