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Crafts CouncilStories

Architect Anupama Kundoo blends craft and technology


ByDebika Ray

5 September 2022

She tells Crafts how she marries the handcrafted and material innovation in her pioneering projects


Debika Ray

5 September 2022

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Architect Anupama Kundoo creates buildings in which craft and technology blend seamlessly, from her earliest project that made use of coconut fibres and unprocessed wood to the modular structures she has designed to be erected speedily using a lightweight, chicken wire-based reinforced concrete.

While most of her built structures are in India, where she first established her practice, the principles she explores are universal – she celebrates the human hand, indigenous knowledge, local supply chains and timeless design principles, and in doing so proposes innovative and sustainable methods of constructing the built environment in any context.

Her recent projects range from a restaurant in a heritage building in Berlin, where she lives, to a pavilion in Chile for the Ruta Pais foundation, which is creating tourist routes centred around artisans. In 2021 she received the RIBA Charles Jencks Award for her contribution to both the theory and practice of architecture.


Anupama Kundoo in her Berlin office. Photo by Franz Grünewald for Crafts

‘As a young person I was torn between pursuing fine art or maths, and I thought architecture would allow me to do both. I was attracted to abstract, conceptual subjects then and there’s a part of me that continues to live in the abstract, but being idealistic doesn’t mean you can’t also be practical. I like to dream big and to make things happen.

What we make makes us, so we need to be mindful of who we are becoming as we do it. The blanket removal of humans from the production of everything forces people to operate like robots, without using their intelligence or enjoying their work, and we are using up natural resources in the process. We can’t leave the human behind as technology advances, which is why, when I start a project, I look first at the human resources that exist around me – including skills, how much time people have and who needs to be employed.

For my own home in Auroville [Wall House, 2000], as well as on other projects since then, I’ve incorporated handmade bricks and terracotta pots, which made use of and developed the skills of local craftspeople.


  • Anupama Kundoo holding a model of a Volontariat home. Photo by Franz Grünewald for Crafts

My main concern is how to make abundance out of scarcity: I never assume there is nothing to work with in a place, because I have always found something, whether it’s people’s time and knowledge or a material that’s being thrown away.

In some projects, I have made use of urban waste, including bicycle wheel frames for the formwork of windows and glass bottles for masonry. We also need to value things that can’t be measured, such as happiness and wellbeing.

How my buildings look emerges from investigating the best way to make it. I’m interested in architects such as Frei Otto, Eladio Dieste and Pier Luigi Nervi, who saw engineering as inseparable from architecture.

Through technology we strive to do everything faster, with the aim that this will give us more free time. But what do we then do with the time saved? What good is there in efficiently producing what shouldn’t be made or creating ugliness at high speed?


Wall House, Anupama Kundoo's home in Auroville, India. Photo: Javier Callejas

I question the notion that only hands are involved in craft, and that it has to be low tech. Craft is about taking a given set of things and assembling them in new ways. At one of my projects in Pondicherry, the Volontariat Home for Homeless Children [developed with ceramicist Ray Meeker in 2008], I designed a series of mud brick homes that were fired in situ to make them durable and water resistant. Bricks by local makers were baked inside simultaneously, to make use of the heat.

Many might associate homes made of kiln-fired mud with being low tech, but creating these was a highly technical process.

I’ve never been nostalgic. Instead, I’m attracted to people who express what they imagine for the future. I admire the early modernist architects, the designers of the Bauhaus and of Black Mountain, and the Indian architect Charles Correa. I’m interested in ideas even if they remain unbuilt.

Straight out of school I went to Auroville, an experimental community in southern India, where I stayed for years practically in solitude. Now, I’m travelling and learning about the world. I’ve lived, taught, lectured and exhibited around Europe, America and Australia – wherever I go, I see the same human emotions that drive us and connect us.

The unbuilt potential of Auroville still excites me – but I see it as a laboratory, not a utopia. When you utopianise ideas, it’s easy to act like they are never reachable and then you remain in the banal.

I paid a big price by refusing to conform to societal expectation. But looking back today, I think I would have happily paid double. I’ve learned that when you take alternative decisions, it encourages others to follow.’


Anupama Kundoo's Volontariat houses. Photo Javier Callejas

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