India today stands at a crossroads where the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, social inequality, and urban transformation converge with a growing awareness of the inadequacies of its educational systems. Architecture education, in particular, demands urgent rethinking.
Architecture is not simply the art of building; it is the act of shaping human environments — physical, social, and ecological.
Yet, much of Indian architectural education remains bound to inherited systems and disconnected from both local realities and the crises of our times.
1. The Context: A Changing World and an Unchanged Pedagogy
Over the past decades, rapid urbanisation and economic liberalisation have altered India’s built environment at an unprecedented scale. However, architecture schools continue to operate on colonial academic structures and modernist pedagogies developed for entirely different contexts. The Council of Architecture (CoA) syllabus, despite several revisions, often emphasises technical training over critical thinking or social engagement.
Students are trained to design as service providers, not as reflective practitioners capable of questioning the socio-political and ecological implications of their work.
In a country of vast inequalities — where gated communities rise beside informal settlements, and ecological degradation threatens both urban and rural livelihoods — architecture must expand its mandate beyond aesthetic and functional design. It must address the moral and environmental urgencies of our age.
2. Climate and Ecology: Towards Regenerative Thinking
Architecture in India cannot remain indifferent to the ecological crises surrounding it. The floods, heat waves, and droughts experienced across the subcontinent are not merely environmental phenomena — they are spatial problems, deeply linked to how we build, occupy, and manage land.
Architectural education must therefore shift from sustainability as a technical add-on to ecology as a foundational philosophy.
Students must learn to think of architecture as part of a living system — one that interacts with soil, water, air, and biodiversity. Studio projects should integrate field-based research in sensitive ecosystems such as coastal zones, floodplains, deserts, and forests. These immersive experiences would cultivate a visceral understanding of the environmental impact of design decisions.
Moreover, the curriculum must embrace the idea of regenerative design — architecture that restores rather than merely sustains. This requires integrating environmental science, materials research, and landscape ecology into design studios, while fostering collaborations with scientists and indigenous knowledge holders.
3. Technology and Ethics: From Efficiency to Equity
Technological advancement is transforming the architectural profession, from AI-assisted design to digital fabrication and smart infrastructure. However, these tools often amplify privilege — serving elite projects while neglecting the informal and the marginal.
Architectural education must confront this imbalance. Instead of treating technology as a neutral instrument, students should explore its ethical dimensions.
Who benefits from smart cities? Who is excluded from algorithmic design? How can digital tools be reoriented toward social equity and ecological repair?
Institutions must build experiments where technology meets ethics — where students prototype affordable housing solutions, climate-responsive materials, and digital tools for participatory design. Open-source and low-cost technologies can empower communities rather than corporations.
By reframing innovation as a social responsibility, architecture schools can prepare students to become inventors of equitable futures.
4. Social Inequality and Spatial Justice
Architecture in India mirrors its deep social divisions. Caste, class, and gender hierarchies continue to manifest spatially — in segregated housing, exclusionary public spaces, and uneven access to infrastructure. Architectural education must train students to see space as a site of power and inequality.
Courses on urban sociology, political economy, and human geography should be integrated into the curriculum, helping students read the built environment as a product of social relations. Field studios must include work with marginalised communities — informal settlements, rural habitats, and small-town transformations — not as token exercises but as central to architectural learning.
Students should learn participatory methods, co-design strategies, and tools for community advocacy. The goal is to nurture architects who can listen, facilitate, and negotiate — not only design.
5. Decolonising Architectural Knowledge: Balancing Tradition and Modern Practice
Indian architectural education has long borrowed from Western models, often overlooking indigenous building traditions and ecological wisdom. From temple architecture to vernacular dwellings in Ladakh, from bamboo houses in the Northeast to stepwells in Gujarat, India holds centuries of accumulated environmental intelligence. Yet, these traditions are rarely treated as knowledge systems within academia; they are seen as craft, not theory.
To decolonise architectural education is not to reject Western thought, but to diversify the sources of learning.
This includes embedding indigenous construction systems, local materials, and climate-responsive typologies into core courses. Students should engage directly with artisans, local builders, and craftspeople, treating them as co-educators rather than subjects of study.
Equally important, however, is ensuring that students are equipped to participate in the contemporary professional landscape. The vast majority of architectural graduates in India will work within private practice — a sphere that demands both technical proficiency and professional acumen. A decolonised curriculum must therefore create a balance: fostering critical and contextual thinking while preparing students to navigate and transform the existing structures of practice.
Graduates must not only be able to challenge the dominant paradigms but also operate competently within them — to innovate, lead, and reform from within the system.
This also demands a linguistic and epistemic shift: moving away from English as the sole language of architectural discourse, and recognising the rich terminologies and metaphors of regional languages that describe space, material, and environment.
6. Research and Critical Inquiry
A meaningful transformation requires an academic culture grounded in research and reflection. Most architecture schools in India remain teaching institutions, not centres of inquiry. To address this gap, schools must establish research clusters that focus on themes such as climate adaptation, housing policy, material innovation, and cultural landscapes.
Encouraging faculty and students to publish, conduct field research, and collaborate with NGOs and public institutions can link academic work to societal transformation. Funding mechanisms — through public research grants or private philanthropy — should support such initiatives, allowing schools to operate as think-tanks for spatial and environmental issues.
7. Institutional Reform and Financial Models
The reform of architectural education cannot be achieved without reimagining its institutional and financial foundations. Most architecture schools in India depend almost entirely on tuition fees, limiting accessibility, innovation, and intellectual independence. To make education inclusive and socially relevant, institutions must explore alternative financial models — public funding, community endowments, cross-institutional research grants, and hybrid philanthropic partnerships.
However, the absence of financial models for newer forms of professional practice is perhaps an even greater concern. Young architects who wish to work with communities, environmental issues, or participatory projects face enormous structural barriers. Unlike large private firms, these socially and ecologically motivated practices often operate outside the frameworks of profitability and developer-driven economies.
There is an urgent need for institutional support mechanisms that can sustain such alternative practices — through seed funding, public commissions, research grants, and fellowship programs. Here, governing institutions such as the Council of Architecture (CoA), the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA), and leading academic institutions must take an active role in investigating and shaping new systems for practice. These bodies should create enabling conditions — legal, financial, and intellectual — for architects who seek to engage with public good, community design, and ecological restoration.
Equally, the governance structures within schools must prioritise autonomy, transparency, and collaboration, ensuring that academic freedom is not constrained by bureaucratic or commercial pressures. Faculty recruitment must recognise diverse expertise — from traditional craftspeople to digital innovators — thereby breaking the disciplinary silos that dominate present academic hierarchies.
8. The Ethical Foundation: Architecture as Public Responsibility
At its heart, the reform of architectural education must be guided by an ethical commitment: that architecture is a public act.
Every building contributes to a shared landscape and affects the lives of many who may never enter it. Architectural education must therefore instil humility, responsibility, and empathy.
Students should graduate not as service providers but as citizens who understand the political, ecological, and emotional consequences of what they build. Education should prepare them to ask difficult questions: What does it mean to build in a fragile ecology? How can architecture repair rather than exploit? What forms of beauty emerge from equity and care?
In conclusion, reforming architectural education in India requires nothing short of reimagining what it means to design in the twenty-first century.
The new architect must be an environmental thinker, a social listener, a technological innovator, and an ethical actor.
This transformation demands new pedagogies, new institutional structures, and, above all, a renewed imagination of architecture as a discipline rooted in empathy, justice, and environmental care.
Such an education will not only produce better architects — it will cultivate stewards of the environment, interpreters of culture, and creators of futures that are both equitable and alive.
Featured Image: River Study Course at School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai. © Ravindra Punde.
