Architects in Mumbai: Designing Beyond the Built

On what it means to practise architecture in Mumbai today — and why the most interesting architects in the city work beyond the wall.

Architecture, to us, has never been confined to the built. A drawing, a game, a digital environment, a museum exhibit — each is a spatial proposition as real as a building. This is the conviction that founded Bricolage Bombay, and it is what we mean when we describe ourselves as architects in Mumbai: not merely makers of structures, but designers of spatial experience in all its forms. In a city as layered as this one, that expanded idea of architecture is not an indulgence; it is a necessity.

Mumbai does not need more buildings that merely stand. It needs architecture that thinks — about the city, about the people moving through it, about the future arriving faster than we expected.

The architect as a thinker, not just a builder

What is an architect for, if not to ask what a space is really for?

The popular image of the architect ends at the construction drawing. We begin much earlier and end much later. Architecture, for us, is a way of asking questions — about how people will gather, learn, worship, work and remember — and the building is simply one possible answer. When we masterplanned the eco-village at ISKCON Talasari, the real design was the journey from the social to the sacred; the buildings followed the idea. A good architect in Mumbai is, first, someone who refuses to take the brief at face value.

Designing across scales

How does the same studio move from a single room to thirty-six acres?

Our work in and around Mumbai spans an unusual range of scales — from the intimate rooms of a private home to the hundred-thousand square feet of the Museum of Solutions, from a cinema lobby to a community campus. This range is deliberate. Architecture is the same discipline at every scale: the orchestration of movement, light, material and meaning. A studio fluent across scales brings the intimacy of a house to a museum and the rigour of a master plan to a single room.

Technology as a deepening, not a shortcut

Can virtual reality and 3D printing make a building more human, not less?

With the digital realm making visualisation easier, new questions of space open up — and we lean into them. We design with virtual reality, parametric tools, 3D printing and new media, but never as novelty. Technology, in our hands, is a way to deepen craft and to test ideas before they are built, so that the finished work in Mumbai is more resolved, more daring and more humane. The architect who embraces the new does so not to chase fashion but to meet the changing world with open eyes.

Rooted in Mumbai, working across India

What does it mean for an architecture studio to belong to a particular city?

We are a Mumbai studio, and the city is in our work whether the project sits in Lower Parel or in the hills beyond. From Mumbai we have designed cinemas, resorts, temples, offices, retail and homes across India — carrying the city’s density, ingenuity and appetite for the new wherever we go. To be architects in Mumbai is to be shaped by the most demanding design environment in the country and to bring that discipline to every project, everywhere.

Architecture as responsibility

We embrace the new not as novelty but as responsibility. The world changes; architecture must change with it, or it becomes a monument to yesterday. That belief is the thread running through all our work — the conviction that the boundary between what is built and what is imagined is exactly where an architect should choose to stand.

A building can shelter a life. Architecture, done well, can change the shape of one — and that is the work we came to Mumbai to do.

Bricolage Bombay is an architecture studio in Mumbai designing experiential spaces, institutions, homes, cultural campuses and new-media environments across India. Explore our work or speak with us about your project.