Samvad Design Studio is an architectural practice established in Bangalore, India. The studio explores architectural tectonics and typological inventiveness to create dignified habitats for varying users, in diverse contexts, climate, budget and scales. We pursue designing, theorising and researching architecture as interconnected streams. Conceptualising architecture through an iterative and non-linear process, we move back and forth between larger master plan to detailing, attempting to achieve a coherence, expressive in parts and the whole. The process involves working on tracings, making varied scaled physical models, quick ideational sketches to detailed working drawings, forming a feedback loop. The framework, while informed by critical regionalism, has no stylistic affiliation, and conforms to no self-conscious palette or details. We have been attempting to imbibe qualitative likeness in ideas of interpreting context from historic built practices to critically rigorous contemporary practices. Our approach strives to be neither sentimental of the vernacular nor engage with reductive isms as styles. While there is no conscious attempt to achieve visual consistency, we do work through our process towards gaining a certain coherence and rigour. We are constantly striving for expressive structural, material, contextual articulation, and possibilities to achieve a tactile depth, very particular to Indian sensibilities while aspiring for contemporaneity.
Founders: R. Ramalakshmi and Surabhi Shingarey
Key works by Samvad Studio
