We are an impatient nation.
We build like we breathe—hurriedly, with the anxiety that time itself is a vanishing commodity. Permissions are painfully obtained, budgets are misguided, contractors often lack skill, and clients sometimes come with an attitude of absolute conviction for expectations, which can be disconcerting.
In such a country, the ability to build fast and build decently is not trivial — it is a civic virtue. Let us admit it plainly: India needs countless “good shells.”
When the world around us is filled with leaking roofs, airless rooms, unsafe stairs, and classrooms that ignore the sun and the wind, to make a competent, efficient, economical building that stands firm and functions is already an achievement.
Speed and competence are not small gifts. We must respect them.
But we must also be precise: a competent building is not, by itself, architecture.
Construction is the act of enclosure — of shelter, speed, cost, and utility.
Architecture begins where these are met, and still, a question remains.
It asks why and how — not only how much.
It works in that delicate tension between obedience and resistance.
Architecture resists the immediate and the obvious. It slows down our looking, rearranges our sense of measure, makes us remember — sometimes even makes us uncomfortable.
Construction satisfies need; architecture exposes meaning.
Architecture holds together many invisible things—the idea of resistance, the pursuit of beauty, the necessity of abstraction, the shaping of space as experience, and the slow labour of memory.
Resistance—because every worthwhile building stands against the easy or the merely profitable.
Resistance is not obstruction; it is ethical clarity.
It is when a plan leaves a void instead of one more rentable square metre.
It is a courtyard that costs more but gives a community air and shade.
It is a wall thickened to contain silence.
Beauty—not decoration, but grace.
The grace of proportion, of a threshold that knows where to stop the foot, of a surface that invites light rather than consumes it.
Beauty in architecture is not a garnish—it is the residue of coherence.
Abstraction—because clarity needs distance.
Abstraction allows us to hold the mess of life without illustrating it.
It is what lets a blank wall carry a child’s laughter, or a simple plane of stone become time made visible.
Memory—because architecture is also an act of remembering; not the past as nostalgia, but as continuity.
It gives a city its manners—the way one pauses before entering, the way a plinth invites conversation, the way a courtyard stores the day’s temperature.
To hold all this together, imagine a circus tent.
Beneath this tent, many acts perform.
There are jugglers of structure, tightrope walkers who balance budget and aspiration, clowns who mock our self-importance, magicians who conjure space from shadow, trainers who keep the unruly beasts of delivery and bureaucracy in line.
The tent is large because architecture is not a one-trick pony.
It can be solemn or playful, enormous or intimate.
It can emerge from material logic or from urban empathy, from the vernacular or the speculative.
If we are honest, architecture is rarely one thing twice.
So inclusivity within the tent is not indulgence—it is recognition.
But even a circus has boundaries; the tent must not collapse under the weight of performances that do not belong.
Because we have been eager, sometimes desperate, to name everything “architecture,” many things that are merely buildings have slipped in.
Façades that sell rather than express.
Towers that mistake spectacle for significance.
Housing that cannot breathe.
Campuses that could be anywhere.
We have mistaken volume for value, compliance for care.
Yet, we must be careful: not all who build fast and well are the same.
There are those whose speed feeds a false societal narrative—where efficiency becomes an alibi for superficiality, where the language of “growth” and “modernity” hides a quiet disregard for public space, proportion, or context.
They package sameness and sell it as progress, producing skylines without ground, streets without pause, and images without depth.
And then, there are those who build fast too, but whose work carries dignity, restraint, and a certain quiet authority.
Think of someone like Bimal Patel. His buildings—whatever one may think of them aesthetically—embody a clear intelligence of construction, a rational civility of form, and a self-effacing understanding of purpose.
They are not about self-display; they are about legibility, order, and efficiency that still allows space for grace.
It is true that some of his public projects have drawn criticism—yet such debate often overshadows the vast body of other work his firm has produced: measured, rigorous, and unassuming, giving shape to institutions and cities alike. That larger, steady body of work is what is being referred to here.
He has built much, and swiftly, but with a discipline that cannot be confused with the commercial bombast of the speculative city.
His work often hovers at the edge of the tent—not theatrical enough for some, not polemical enough for others —yet he is, and must remain, a permanent invitee.
His clarity reminds us that speed and substance need not be enemies.
Now consider others—Vijay and Meghal Arya, Samira Rathod, Pramod Balakrishnan, Bijoy Ramachandran, Rahul Mehrotra, Girish Doshi, Shabbir Unwalla, Uday and Mausami Andhare, Bijoy Jain, Saumitro Ghosh, Rajeev Kathpalia, and many other such colleagues.
Each different from the other, each asking distinct questions of space and culture, each sometimes disagreeing even with the other vehemently.
Yet they all belong under the tent.
Why?
Because they share a fundamental ethic: they see architecture as thought embodied in form.
They resist the easy.
They build memory.
They hold their ground against both cynicism and spectacle.
These are names I mention largely because I have personally seen and visited enough of their work.
The list, of course, is far larger—there are many others across the country who equally deserve to be part of this tent.
Contrast this with those who have mastered the logistics of delivery but not the discipline of thought.
Without taking away from their achievement, think of firms like Hafeez Contractor’s, for instance.
They represent a model where the metrics of speed, scale, and visibility overwhelm the very idea of architecture.
Such offices deliver—undeniably so—and Hafeez himself is known to be tremendously committed and hardworking.
Yet, in serving the appetite of the market, this model often surrenders the possibility of inquiry.
Cities filled with such buildings are efficient yet forgettable, monumental yet hollow.
This is not condemnation; it is distinction.
Architecture cannot be reduced to throughput and façade.
Drawing that line is uncomfortable, but necessary.
It is not about taste—it is about criteria.
Does the work hold an idea beyond efficiency?
Does it engage memory, climate, ground, and time?
Does it build something of civic meaning, not merely private success?
Does it risk being misunderstood for the sake of being honest?
Our institutions, sadly, blur this line every day.
Awards confuse polish with rigour.
Schools mistake skill for understanding.
The media amplifies novelty and silences nuance.
Clients reward compliance, not conviction.
And so the tent fills with acts that look like architecture but perform no wonder.
We need, now, a quieter conversation—one that begins not with names or images, but with reasoning.
Let us publish not “top architects” but why something is architecture and why something else is only construction.
Let us value the fast, well-built shell—but also keep the ring clear for those who use the act of building to imagine the world differently.
Because architecture—real architecture—is a fragile, stubborn thing.
It lives in that space between resistance and acceptance, between the immediate need and the long idea.
It is the part of the building that makes us pause, that lets us see ourselves with a measure of distance and care.
And if we can hold the tent steady—wide enough for difference, firm enough for integrity—perhaps we can still have a circus where many acts perform, and yet, every so often, the lights dim, the noise falls, and something inexplicably beautiful happens in the ring.
That is architecture—at its ethereal best.
Feature Image: Nava Naroda Park, Ahmedabad, designed by M/s. Prabhakar B Bhagwat. © M/s. Prabhakar B Bhagwat
