Photos: A look at Anupama Kundoo’s internationally acclaimed architectural work
The architect works with a small team, has done much of her work in Pondicherry and Auroville, and is committed to social and environmental principles in her work.
Anupama Kundoo, 54, was awarded the Auguste Perret Prize for Technology in Architecture by the International Union of Architects in May. Last week, the Royal Institute of British Architects chose her for the RIBA Charles Jencks Award, which she is set to receive in November. You may not have heard of her. But you’ve probably seen her residence, Wall House. It was showcased in the India episode of the Apple TV series Home last year.(Picture courtesy Javier Callejas)
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Wall House, constructed just outside Auroville, was made with handmade mud bricks using pre-industrial techniques instead of polluting factory-made ones. Its terracotta roof was developed with ideas from local potters. The result: a sleek, avant-garde home that is still indisputably Indian. She replicated her house, brick by brick at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.(Picture courtesy Anupama Kundoo)
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Pune-born Kundoo’s home, like her, is determinedly unique. She started her own practice straight after graduating from Mumbai’s Sir JJ College of Architecture in 1989 and worked with modernist architect Roger Anger in Auroville. It let her experiment with non-commercial, sustainable techniques long before green-building was a construction industry catchphrase.(Picture courtesy Andreas Deffner)
Among her acclaimed projects is Full-Fill Homes, modular crates cast in ferrocement, which can be assembled cheaply in about a week, with minimum construction experience. Most of the furniture is built-in, lowering costs further.(Picture courtesy Javier Callejas)
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She has also developed and designed a shelter for homeless children in Puducherry. The domed rooms are made up of clay bricks handmade locally, and fired from within. So the rooms function as their own kiln.(Picture courtesy Javier Callejas)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
