GAD Editorial · Published · · English study · Chinese summary · Study dated 2026-10-08
Studio Mumbai is useful to study because it makes the relationship between designing and making unusually visible. Founded by Bijoy Jain in India in 1995, the practice brings architecture into close contact with the skills of craftspeople and the physical behaviour of materials. The Fondation Cartier's profile of Jain describes this collaborative approach. It suggests a practice whose identity resides in how work develops, rather than in a repeatable family of building shapes.
That method can be examined at several scales. Studio Mumbai's architectural archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture includes a 2011 selection of projects, among them Tara House, Palmyra House, House on Pali Hill and Leti 360 Resort. This wider building practice matters when looking at the firm's pavilions, furniture and exhibitions. The smaller works are opportunities to study material and occupation in their own right, rather than substitutes for an architectural portfolio.
For the 2016 MPavilion in Melbourne, the practice designed an environment of bamboo and rope, accompanied by handmade wooden stools. The Naomi Milgrom Foundation's commission record identifies the stools as the work of Studio Mumbai and craftspeople in Mumbai, using locally sourced timber. Their simple dimensions and construction brought the scale of a seated body into the larger pavilion commission.
The stool is an instructive part of the project. A pavilion can be described through a roof span or an overall silhouette, yet its everyday use also depends on where and how people sit. By carrying an attention to making into the furniture, the commission connects the large spatial idea with an object that a visitor can approach and use. Craft becomes part of the organisation of an encounter, not only a quality to admire from a distance.
The exhibition Breath of an Architect, presented at the Fondation Cartier in Paris from December 2023 to April 2024, expanded that investigation into an installation. The institution's press kit documents architectural fragments and works in earth, stone, terracotta and bamboo, alongside contributions from painter Hu Liu and ceramic artist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye. These elements occupied the setting of Jean Nouvel's building through relationships of weight, surface, interval and light.
An exhibition offers a different kind of evidence from a completed house. It can isolate a material question or make a visitor unusually attentive to a surface, but it does not demonstrate the full demands of weathering, domestic use or long-term maintenance. Keeping that distinction in view makes Studio Mumbai's smaller work more valuable as research. It shows what an experiment can reveal without asking it to prove everything.
Across these commissions, the workshop emerges as a way to test architectural ideas through direct contact with materials and the body. A model, fragment or piece of furniture can expose a question that an overall image leaves unresolved. For other practices, the transferable lesson is to give such experiments a clear role in design decisions, allowing what is learned through making to change the space that is eventually built.