HIGHLIGHT: BIJOY JAIN

Bijoy Jain, the founder of Indian practice Studio Mumbai, has long been well-known for his earth-bound material sensibilities, and an approach to architecture that bridges the gap between Modernism and vernacular construction.

Early life and career

Bijoy Jain (born 1965) is an Indian architect and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor of architecture at Yale University. He received his M. Arch from Washington University in St Louis, USA in 1990. He then worked in Richard Meier office at Los Angeles and London between 1989 and 1995. He returned to India in 1995 and founded his own firm Studio Mumbai. His works have been presented in many venues including the Alvar Aalto Symposium, the Architectural League of New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which holds several of his project archives. He was also a finalist in the Agha Khan Awards 2010 Cycle.He is has been compared by architectural historians at Harvard, MIT to B.V. Doshi and Norman Foster.

In 2015, Jain's work was featured alongside Umberto Riva's in the exhibition Rooms You May Have Missed at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His works are present in many international locations around the world like Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles apart from India. His recent works are in Melbourne and Adelaide, Berlin, Zurich, Dusseldorf and Geneva.

Awards

-Global Award for Sustainable Architecture from L’Institut Francais D’Architecture, 2009

-Design for Asia Award from the Hong Kong Design Center, 2009

-Third BSI Swiss Architectural Award, Switzerland (2012)

Most iconic projects

One important distinction is that in Studio Mumbai there are no catalogs. Every design comes through a brainstorming session from the team. They discover architecture through making things