Shopping what buildings need these days isn’t easy. Unless your passwords and authenticator apps forget everything you’ve taught them overnight, there’s a litany of specifications waiting in your inbox to browse through every morning. It’s all there for you to retail into the detail, from WiFi counting toilets to toasters with internet cameras. Anything and everything seems to be connecting. Super-computers have jetsoned down into dishwashers; data readers can be wired into cladding. You don’t even need to be home, now, to burn your toast. Whatever your views on the smartness of all this, architects seem set on buying up a response. But are we producing architecture or architecturalising product? Remember that uploads quickly come with updates and we all have obsolete phones hiding in a cupboard somewhere. “There’s more to this technology game than WiFi streaming door handles,” I think as I download a ticket to Bengaluru. “Bengawhere?” you say. Get with the tech.

The invitation comes from Ar. Rakesh Kodoth and the Karnataka Chapter of the Indian Institute of Architects to provide a keynote to open their bi-yearly Latitude conference. Something similar perhaps to the invite I received a year or two back from the Waikato and Bay of Plenty branch of our own institute but with some seriously Indian-sized levelling up. Three days of architectural touring are followed by a day on an award jury and, then, a two-day conference-come-festival worthy of the state’s near 70 million people. Some extraordinary architects are added to the bill: Mexican Mauricio Rocha, American Marlon Blackwell, Sri Lankan Milinda Pathiraja and Indian Verendra Wakhloo, amongst others. The stage broadens with New York-based editor-in-chief of August magazine Dung Ngo, hip hop artist Gubbi and even luminaire Indian animator Suresh Eriyat. You might imagine the media fun. India does love a selfie.

Each evening, the conference crowd connects by flowing straight out of the auditorium and into a full dance party. In the space outside, there are all sorts of flashing lights to go with the confetti. The biryani on the menu tastes back to Persia but is now distinctly Indian. Hollywood has become Bollywood. Even cricket has taken on a distinctly subcontinental character. You might add festival conferencing, and tech.

This is Southern India. It rains and the city is green. Cows are goddesses and wander the streets. Silk flows, there are smiles aplenty and yellow-coloured sugar-pop water tanks are everywhere on the skyline, with new buildings seemingly going up everywhere else. Even when coding in some AI reality margins, Bengaluru’s current tech workforce of more than two million risks making San Francisco obsolete, let alone Silicon Valley. Forbes magazine recently described the West Coast home of American tech as needing another reset as it has done “every decade or so” through its development. On arriving at Bengaluru’s shiny new and fresh-out-of-the-box Enter Projects Asia (EPA) SOM airport, it seems as though “the next groundbreaking technology that will once more re-energise tech”¹ may upload from a very different and subcontinental direction.

Yet, architecture in India equally manages to prompt the question of whether or not all this tech needs turning on in the first place. While the West’s ‘would-you-like-fries-with-that’ ideologies have helped shop the current rise of product into architecture, India has, historically at least, tackled life with fewer technical manuals. There’s nothing but knowledge in those square stepwells, for theirs is a learned and rounded architecture. Architecture comes from the full circle here, for it recognises that water levels, and life, fluctuate. Those yellow water tanks up there in Bengaluru’s skyline speak to not having to rely on constant power to pressurise a water supply continually. It’s a reductive rather than direct consumption.

Think to the ABC of Indian Architects. Achyut Kanvinde’s functionalist modernism is the new, no flashing lights needed.² B.V. Doshi’s seminal diary account Paths Uncharted makes scarce commentary to buildings requiring comforts from proprietary product.³ If buildings are “alive”, as he asserts, they generally don’t need to be plugged in. Charles Correa’s A Place in the Shade⁴ demonstrates the ways in which little spaces need to function environmentally. He may plug in a ceiling fan but remember the mercury does run high and long in an Indian summer. It’s the difference between vestibule and verandah, compound and courtyard, hardware with and without flashing lights.

Yet the game is changing. In 1995, Mexican poet and diplomat to Delhi between 1962 and 1968, Octavio Paz described, in his In Light of India essays, that there is much to learn about life from India, for elsewhere “the excess of reality [has] become an unreality”.⁵ Thirty years later, you might imagine Paz posting a warning to the constant blinking of the new within Indian architecture, for their doors, like ours, are wide open to technology. The hum of the conference auditorium’s mechanical is matched only by the sound of the drones buzzing around the interior recording my lecture. Our high-end hotel is fully sealed with metal detectors and life inside feels scarce, no matter how comfortable. Yet architects learn from the past as well as the future and we can all learn to breathe. After three days of touring buildings with a wonderfully talented group of Bengaluru architects, I can’t remember any kind of tech, let alone a door handle. In fact, I’m not sure we ever went inside.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Sunitha Kondur and Bijoy Ramachandran of Hundredhands. Ramachandran was more than listening in making his 2008 and 2019 films on Doshi.⁶ Why plug in a light bulb when you must take away the light to see the light. Hundredhands’ spatial “negotiations”, as they describe architectural life in India, go deep in the plan to section light as a perimeter. Light can be a boundary, just as you might expect from a school fence. Their Airaa Academy school may be built of earth bricks and concrete but its space is so openly contained by light, they are free to tattoo what’s left. Try finding that in a catalogue. Their play is no less fluid at The Bangalore International Centre, which shapes and opens to move air and light around a large institutional building as if it were a simple house. Light is scaleless, so, too, breathing it seems.

Architect Kukke Subramanya takes the ins and outs vertically to show buildings needn’t be complicated. Kukke Architects’ office channels rather than flashes. They simply build in off-form concrete and, in stepping and offsetting half-floor spaces one above the other, they gravity rainwater downwards to a court under the building and, in return, direct cool air upwards. It’s masterly. What goes down, goes down. What goes up, goes up. Between, there are spaces rather than rooms, each scaling to task: a space with a table, a saree store, a raised garden, a seat and a bookcase.

All these architects teach, and the work is nothing but scholarly. Remember, India’s universities date back far longer than do those in Europe. Nalanda University had nine million books and 10,000 students more than 500 years before Oxford or Bologna University was established.⁷ There’s also innovation in reduction. Senthil Kumar Doss from Play Architecture structurally interlocks stone, and only stone, into a 3.8m nine-square grid. Nisha Mathew and Soumitro Ghosh of Mathew and Ghosh Architects bend light as liquid to space the internal voids of the Sua House office and gallery. And then, as if to firework the emergence of architecture from here in Southern India onto the world stage, Avinash Ankalge and Harshith Nayak of their aptly named architect office, A Threshold, hollow their Subterranean Ruins house in against its excavations to make a jungle oasis. In building only within the resource capabilities of the local village, they win The Architecture Review’s 2024 Emerging Architect Prize.

The work of these and other Indian architects was recently the subject of The Plan’s Special 2025 Edition, edited by Peter Rich and including essays by such eminent scholars as Durganand Balsavar. Understanding relationships between inside and out, of having and not having, is integral to this new Indian Architecture, as Balsavar asserts⁸ but, equally, to each of our different far far aways. This is why, five years after my first subcontinental writings, I now write a second Essay from India.⁹ We need these conversations and, suitably for Bengaluru, Rich’s publication is available online.

So, as the conference DJ really winds things up, our Indian publisher has long since run out of books and we all get down and continue the dance started by Doshi’s IIM building, days before. For, after settling you to the weighty expectations of solid stone construction, Doshi delivers what must be one of the great 90-degree corners to step in architecture and opens you to a pergola-ed space that is neither inside nor outside. It feels doorless. As Peter Zumthor described on his visit with Ramachandran, “It doesn’t feel like an institution which wants to impress you”, before concluding, it’s “thinner” than the work of Corbusier in India, or Kahn at his IIM Building in Ahmedabad.¹⁰ He refers to the lightness of those concrete members up top, which spring off one another as if they were timber but, perhaps, also to the ‘mat’ plan, which elongates on axis and visually connects through the oblique. As Ramachandran and I discuss, it feels ever external. In light of India’s advancing technologies, we might also read a lightness to requirements. The 100-acre site had just three trees when Doshi designed the building and, within these freedoms, there is today a forest, a university and WiFi.

All these buildings run tech, just as they have door handles. Yet theirs is an inherently inviting and outwardly user-friendly architecture because these Indian architects are doing more with less and making rather than streaming answers. Shopping these Indian ‘lightness to requirements’ or what Ramachandran tells me Doshi called “One plus” may well become our architectural future, for such generous sensibilities allow everything else in life. It’s worth remembering, whatever your latitude, there’s no on-button to architecture.

Essay from India Part One can be read here.

References
^{1 Tim Bajarin, 2024, ‘Silicon Valley Is Resetting Itself For More Robust Growth’, Forbes.} 

^{2 B.K. Tanuja and Sanjay Kanvinde, 2016, ‘Achyut Kanvinde Chronology of Works’, in Achyut Kanvinde – Ākār. New Delhi: Kanvinde Rai & Chowdhury and Niyogi Books, pp. 412–439.}

^{3 Balkrishna Doshi, 2019, Paths Uncharted. Mapin Publishing.}

^{4 Charles Correa, 2010, A Place in the Shade: The New Landscape & Other Essays. Penguin Books India.}

^{5 Octavio Paz, 1995, Vislumbres de la India. Ecco.}

^{6 Premjit Ramachandran and Bijoy Ramachandran, Doshi (2008), vimeo.com/ showcase/265903 and Doshi: The Second Chapter (2019), vimeo.com/ showcase/65388030}

^{7 Sugato Mukherjee, 2023, ‘Nalanda: The university that changed the world’, BBC.}

^{8 Durganand Balsavar, 2025, ‘The Architectures of Diversity: Reimagining praxes in the Indian Subcontinent’, The Plan, Issue 160, Special Edition.} 

^{9 Jeremy Smith, 2020, ‘Essay from India’, Architecture NZ, March/April, pp. 40–46.}

^{10 Peter Zumthor in conversation with Bijoy Ramachandran, Indian Institute of Science, JN Tata Auditorium, 22.2.2024.}