Troy Schaum in conversation with Ambrish Arora

No [Applicable] Skills: Nimble Practice in Formation

TS (Troy Schaum): My studio from Rice Architecture had the opportunity to visit some of your buildings in Jodhpur with you last year. One of the things that surprised us when we were listening to you reflect on your work was your background as a bit of an architectural outsider. Can you reflect on how your particular path as a designer has shaped the way you practice architecture?

AA (Ambrish Arora): During my first year in college, I had the choice of going down a theoretical path. I didn't attend a single day of class for this program because I chose, instead, to study marine engineering at a school with fifty percent theory and fifty percent practical work at a shipyard. That excited me tremendously. My father was a first-principles engineer, so we had grown up repairing things around the house ever since I was young.

TS: My father is also an engineer. I also spent a lot of time holding tools and flashlights while we fixed cars and radios growing up.

AA: I never realized how much it influenced my thinking. But now that I look back, I see that it was fundamental to the way I began to form my version of reality where everything could be fixed and everything could be analyzed. You just need to understand the first principles and build incrementally from there. It was the first time I decided on the education I wished to have. I found the theory side tedious, limiting, and slowed down what I wanted to do. I was really drawn to the practical side of things. That’s when I dropped out of college and began a very hands-on learning model.

Right after dropping out, I was truly independent for the first time, and to make ends meet I started working at a motorcycle repair shop. After six months of that, I did a course on repairing computers, and for a while,also  visited offices maintaining and assembling computers. This was at a time when branded computers in India were expensive and unaffordable for most. Long story short, I ended up working with my father, a Naval Architect, who had chosen to become an entrepreneur making small fiberglass boats for training institutes after his PhD from IIT Delhi and retirement from the Indian Navy. We had no money, and initially there were just three or four of us in the workshop - a carpenter, a fiberglass molder, a welder and me. That’s where I learnt carpentry, welding, metal casting, fiberglass molding, and making full scale complex drawings for producing patterns and molds for the boats we were building. This experience brought me a tremendous degree of independence and self-belief. It taught me resilience, craftsmanship, and gave me a deep understanding of materials, form, and entrepreneurship.

I did that for about four years, and was fortunate enough to work with a company that taught lateral thinking in schools. I did that for a year, in Bombay, before I felt the need to go back to college at the age of twenty-three. My younger sister was studying architecture, which introduced me to formal design education and inspired me to apply for a design program. I applied to just one school- the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad - but I was over-age for the undergraduate program and under-qualified for the postgraduate program. I ended up meeting an amazing professor there, the late M.P. Ranjan. He said to me: “why don't you just intern in a design firm? Forget about education- you've got the education you need.” That's when I applied to an exhibition design firm in Delhi. Amardeep Behl, a leading exhibition designer, who was generous and open enough to meet me. He said: "you don't really have a portfolio that fits in, but come into the studio and let's see what you can do."

TS: What portfolio did you have? You had made all these different kinds of furniture and boats.

AA: I had made a folding stool and a laminated timber paddle for a kayak, aside from having built boats of various sizes, with my own hands. I had also made a prefabricated shelter for the army - a full-scale prototype. I had no drawing skills, really, and I only knew how to draw things at a one-to-one scale on the floor. When I joined this design firm Oriole, they didn't have any work for me for the first couple of months. They were on summer vacation, but Sebastian Boissard, a young French architect serving in the military, needed a flunky at his office across the street. He had a side job for an interior renovation and took me on board for four months. I started by just making him tea and coffee and photocopying his stuff. Then I got to design a range of carbon fiber furniture and prototyped them in the Hindustan Aeronautics Laboratory. I remember working 18 hours a day. I was so hungry to learn. I made one-to-one scale drawings of several pieces of furniture where I drew every screw and head of each nut, and even the shape of the threading, to scale. I didn't know when to stop.

TS: It's a hard thing for everyone, even now. How much do you have to show to get your work done?

AA: It was a great learning experience. He taught me about space, and about the architecture side of things. After he left, I rejoined Amardeep’s firm again. I started at the bottom. I was junior to the most junior intern. I taught myself AutoCad, AV technology, graphics, whatever I could lay my hands on. They needed some lightweight structures, so I would design them and get them prototyped. That's the only way I knew how to work.

TS: What years are these, roughly?

AA: This was 1993. Within six to eight months, I was leading my own projects. I rapidly moved up the ranks and within two years, I was made an associate at the firm. The partners appreciated my willingness to take responsibility and gave me a lot of opportunities, though I was not liked by many people around me.

TS: Was that because you didn't have the proper background, or that you didn't go to design school in the “correct” way?

AA: I think it's also because I wasn’t particularly obedient to seniority and challenged a lot of their decisions. I became only the second associate in the firm and there were people who'd been around longer than me. Also, I would take over interactions with the client, as I liked taking full accountability for my actions. I would often tell my partners: “you don't need to come for the meeting”; I was happy to handle them.

TS: You were twenty-five or so?

AA: Yes, I was twenty-five. I was hungry, and I loved what I was doing. For the first time, I was working with people who were young and had similar interests. I then worked on an Art film, Dance of the Wind; my senior partner was the art director and I was the assistant art director. When a production manager was fired from the team, the film director, Rajan Khosa, asked: “are you willing to be the production manager?” I said “I've never done it, but I'll do it.” And slowly I learnt to manage a crew of about sixty people.

TS: What films were they? What kind of productions were they?

AA: They were Art House feature films with very low budgets. So the critical thing was staying within the budget, and I was pretty good at that. It needed very, very long hours of work, which I was comfortable with.

TS: Did the job also include finding locations?

AA: Yes, finding locations and negotiating prices on how to rent spaces, then planning out the crew movements, and finally making sure everything's in place.

TS: A massive production operation is as much as a design operation.

AA: Exactly. That was a huge learning curve. Then in 1997, a well-known scenographer Rajeev Sethi had a project in the World Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. He wanted to set up a studio and approached my partner and I to help him set up and run the team. He was doing a theme pavilion called the Basic Needs Pavilion. He had no experience in handling projects of this scale and neither did we, but we knew more about execution than he did. I went and fronted the studio’s coordination with the Expo Hanover team.

TS: You were in the role of scenographer and not really in the role of architects at that point.

AA: Yes, we were in the role of scenographers and his primary assistants. My partner did all the conceptual work in the studio and I became his executive arm. I was communicating the conceptual work to the Germans for feasibility tests, which was a very chaotic process. But it was fantastic because Jean Nouvel's team and Toyo Ito's team were all working in the satellite studios there. I had the opportunity to go and immerse myself in what was happening.

TS: How long did you have to be there?

TS: In the mid-nineties, you were doing architecture as a junior architect, and then you got into scenography after that?

AA: No, they were all scenographic. I didn't do any architectural work well until the year 2000. That's when I did this first interior project.

TS: And that was the office you just described.

AA: It was an IT office and the design concept focused on carving out space, material interactions, and movement of light. It was a far cry from scenography. A couple more commissions later, my partner and I decided to part ways. In June of 2002, I set up Studio Lotus with no money and one project.

TS: With a partner or just on your own?

AA: Soon after I started, within the first couple of months, I invited two of my previous colleagues Sidhartha and Ankur to join me. That was also when I thought about the possibility of creating a firm whose identity was bigger than mine. I didn't want my name in the practice. I needed a name registered in the Bank to take a check advance for our first project. I was taking a walk with my mother-in-law in a garden and I asked her: “what should I call the firm?” There was a lotus growing in the fish pond we were walking past. She said “you can call it anything, why not this, Lotus.” And that was it.

TS: Did you know you were going to design buildings when you started it? Was it an architectural endeavor from the start?

AA: It was more interior focused at the time because all we got initially were interior inquiries. I had no idea where it would lead us to.

TS: Could it have been a furniture design practice?

AA: It could have been anything. We were really just struggling with making ends meet because the fees just didn't pay for the amount of effort we put in. After about a year, we had no money left and we were going to close it down. Fortunately, we got a project to do a big fair on an eight-acre site. They gave us 30 days to design and build a crafts fair, which saved us and gave the practice some leeway. Then in 2004, we worked on a few Interior and Retail environments which again won several awards and got us a lot more work. I think that was our first inflection point beyond survival as a firm.

TS: Was the RAAS Hotel your first big project, in a way? That's how you presented it when my students and I visited your projects in Jodhpur with you.

AA: That was not just a big project—it was our first architectural project. We'd never done any building before then. We had only worked on Interiors and exhibitions before that.

TS: The visual, scenographic approach to RAAS Hotel’s materiality and history comes through in your work—we can see it in both the interiors and the façade. Also, especially in the Krushi Bhawan office building, where the materiality and the image are very clear. There is also a clear logic, in both formal language on site and its use of sliding screens to filter and frame the view. Zooming out a bit, embedded in your work there are certain known building typologies. For instance,  in the RAAS Hotel Jodhpur you have bar form and in the Krushi Bhawan Office Building you use mat-building logics of low slung courtyards. How did you gain the confidence as an architect to explore typologies and other formal tropes that seem absent from your training but are very apparent in the projects? Did it come from learning from traditional models or just collaborating with other architects?

AA: I am actually a bit of a philistine when it comes to architecture. I know very little about architecture in the world, whether it's contemporary or historic. I love to learn about it, and I appreciate and understand certain aspects of it. But when I travel with my peers, it takes me a while to understand their vocabulary when analyzing buildings we are seeing. My learning has been very intuitive, and I do learn very quickly, and I'm hungry to learn, but it's very fragmented. Whenever I see something, I try and learn as much as I can about it, but I make sense of it in my own way because I don't really have a point of reference of how I should make sense of it. So when it came to, for instance, the RAAS, I didn’t have a theoretical framework on why we were making the design decisions - the process was site based, sketch study based and intuitive to what felt right and authentic to the process. Often, ideas come to me in my practice of meditation, which I do regularly, during which I go through long periods of introspection. It sounds very esoteric, but that is what it is.

TS: Are these spatial ideas or are they more image-based? How do you translate that thinking into form-making?

AA: It's not as vivid as that. It's like I'm grappling with it, I'm grappling with it, and then I'm drawing lines. For me, solutions take a lot of iteration. I do things and tear them apart because I do know when it's not right or when something is missing, but I don't necessarily know what needs to be done. I often change something very fundamental in the concept, even after we are well into the design development stage because it doesn’t feel right. In the case of RAAS, it was just an epiphany of what was right for the project, after a lot of iteration by Rajiv Majumdar, my collaborator on the project, and I.

TS: In your Jodhpur presentation, you mentioned that often the high-end architectural aspirations in India were about replicating Raj to extend the imaginary of the past into the contemporary. Whether tourist or local, everybody could assume a degree of familiarity as a part of the royal legacy in India. As you have pointed out, one aspect of your seeks to establish an alternate definition of contemporary Indian identity in different regions you are working in. Could you expand on what you meant by that?

AA: Absolutely. Not just the Raj. There is so much obsession with the formal connection with the past as a way of being contextual. It is sadly superficial and often a pastiche. This is something I ask of people - “what's more relevant and what's more Indian—a polyester kurta or a khaadi handloom T-shirt?” To me, it’s the latter which is a lot more relevant to who we are, as opposed to a machine-made polyester fabric that looks like a traditional garment. Aside from the symbolism, it is about using the handmade and the artisanal and making it relevant to today’s lifestyle instead of the optics of a project coming from a sense of nostalgia or an identity rooted in form.

TS: That also informs the value of local labor and skill sets and other things.

AA: It is also about interpreting them in ways relevant to our lives today as we look forward and embrace the future, but still unique to who we are.

TS: Your practice is based in Delhi while your work extends across the larger region of south Asia. How do those relationships to place and identity shape your practice? Are you mostly Delhi architects that are going to other places and working, or do you engage that relationship between two different places coming from the capital city? How do you deal with that question of identity in your work?

AA: I'd like to believe we spend a lot of time understanding the social aspects of where we work, both in terms of materials and methods of working that are native to a region. When necessary, we engage with locals from that region who know the context better than us. We often fall short of being truly authentic to this process, but regional context remains an underlying focus and value that we try to address in every project we do.

TS: Have you ever had a problem with a project where people reject it because you were considered outsiders? Have people wanted you to do a certain thing because they hired you to come from a different area?

AA: We had a unique problem with the Krushi Bhawan building we were commissioned to design by the State Government of Odisha. The Chief Minister wanted to create new benchmarks of contemporary architecture for the state, and invited 3 architects to come and build an iconic building each, with Studio Lotus being one of the 3. His mandate was that whatever we build should speak to the future, yet also be accessible and non-intimidating to the farmers who would be key stakeholders for the building. As the central office building for the State Department of Agriculture, it was a very important building for Odisha, which has declared itself one of the country’s only Agricultural states. When we presented our design scheme for the first time, the Chief Minister loved it. However, all the other officials could not relate to it because they did not see any sign of modernity, which to them meant steel or glass on the façade; so much so, that in the early stages of development almost no one else believed in the vision of the project. For smaller towns, seeing these high-rise glass towers was the aspiration and the officials thought we were going back in time. It was only after the building started to take shape and became an attraction for the locals and tourists alike, that the officials started to get excited about the project. On completion, the building won several national and international awards; but our biggest reward was when we started to get messages from local people saying: “you've given the city a new identity”, “a new way to look at our tradition.”

TS: When you say local people, you mean the people on the street and not the leaders that invited you, right?

AA: I mean the citizens of the city. It was exciting for these residents to see architecture built by their people, with their skills and their materials, but interpreted in a new way. It opens up new conversations and new engagements with culture, skill, and material. As one of our roles, we begin to break down habitual ways of viewing culture and tradition and open it up to new ways of doing things. I think to some degree, we've been successful at doing that.

TS: What is the reason why you didn't have glass in the Krushi Bhawan project? Is it because it's a very low energy building?

AA: There is glass in the Krushi Bhawan project, but the window-to-wall ratios are low, to create higher thermal mass and lower U-values, at low cost. We used a relatively lower surface area of glass and it's all deeply shaded.

TS: Were the Odisha officials expecting a fully air-conditioned building?

AA: Yes. There was major apprehension as they wanted the new building to be fully air-conditioned, even though substantial areas of their existing offices were not - they saw it as a sign of progress. We showed them how we could achieve a high degree of thermal comfort through passive design measures. Given the large variations in day and night temperatures of the city, we designed a night-purging system that flushes the building with cool air post sundown; the coolth gets trapped in the thermal mass of the building. With the use of fans, day temperatures stay comfortable without the need for air conditioning. We managed to achieve very high levels of adaptive thermal comfort, at an EPI (Energy Performance Index) of only thirty-two KWh/sq.m/yr. Creating more passively-cooled buildings also provides more comfortable environments for the city, preventing build-up of heat islands on account of emissions from HVAC systems. The challenge we realized, was not so much thermal comfort as the psychology and mindset built up as aspiration around air-conditioning.

TS: It's almost as if you see your work as regional prototypes as you talk about this context of luxury as an anti-luxury building. We rethink the relationship to materiality, identity, and ecology that becomes a prototype for a region. What kind of people do you hire, in terms of their background? Would you hire somebody with your early portfolio today at Studio Lotus?

AA: We mostly hire people with design training. However, we have hired people who didn't have design training but demonstrated they had the drive to go beyond the listed job descriptions; the ones who demonstrated a clear statement of purpose and how much they're willing to make a go of it. As a matter of fact, one of our current principals at the studio, Asha Sairam, had applied as an intern 11 years ago. She had studied fashion communication and was just determined to get in. She was persistent, and I said to her, “look, you have no [applicable] skills.” She said, “no, but I'll come and learn them.” She stuck around and is now leading an important part of the practice.

TS: It seems, from the outside, this engagement with design practice as a broad field of knowledge and skills produces a nimble practice. Your projects seem to adapt across regions and places. It is hard to read how deliberate you are about the techniques but certainly the outcomes reflect a consistency in attitude and perhaps a malleable method.

AA: For one, the fundamental nature of our practice is that it's inward looking. You summed it up brilliantly—we do look at every project as a prototype for the region, some more successful than the others. If I were to look back at the past 20 or 25 projects, I think at least ten of them are in that zone of regional prototypes. I encourage people to look inward, learn more about ourselves, the regions we work in, and learn about the processes we have access to, because that's unique to who we are and no one else has access to that. You develop the ability to quickly sift through the clutter to discover something of value, as most of what is happening around you is far from what will inform the prototype that you need to create. To succeed in this, we need to build our skills as facilitators, and that’s something we focus on a lot in the studio - building our ability to bring the best out of different stakeholders including our clients who we see as partners in the project as much as they are patrons.

We do a lot of work internally to enable groups of people to work together powerfully. The way to do that is to build yourself up and build others up. A big part of building yourself up is reflection and silence. I deeply encourage meditative practices and practices of silence. Building a conscious practice is really building this idea of self-awareness and our introspective role, both metaphorically and literally, culturally, regionally, and as human beings.








Ambrish Arora is founding principal at Studio Lotus, an Aga Khan Award-nominated practice, known for its award-winning projects for the RAAS Hotels, and Krushi Bhawan. The office’s work is rooted in Conscious Design, an approach that celebrates local resources, cultural influences, a keen attention to detail, and an inclusive process. Ambrish’s role is largely studio-focused, leading design processes that direct the trajectory of projects. He is a custodian of the guiding values that have served as a cornerstone for the practice.


Troy Schaum is an architect with the New York City and Houston-based practice SCHAUM/SHIEH. He is also engaged in teaching and research as an Associate Professor at the Rice School of Architecture where he has been teaching since 2008. He is also the editor of Totalization: Speculative Practice in Architectural Education, (Park Books, 2019) whose contributors explore the status of expertise in the formulation of contemporary practice.