Sameep Padora: Diversity is our biggest strength, we are a country where food, language, clothing changes every 200 km

SAMEEP Padora’s body of work belies his young age. At 48, he has already won multiple international awards, worked on several public work and low-income housing projects, and created some exceptional restaurants where the decor wrestles with the food for attention. He is also the newly appointed Dean of CEPT University (formerly called the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology), which had the legendary BV Doshi as founding director and is currently run by Bimal Doshi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s preferred architect.

Padora is understandably elated at the appointment. “I think it’s a myth that what you study is very different from what you do in the real world. Pedagogy in academia can inform practice, you don’t have to lose that idealism,” he reasons. Padora and his firm SP-Arc, which he founded in 2007, had put together two books on low-income housing and had presented talks on it. He is also on the board of a couple of schools. “There was already a connection to academia. If we can use the infrastructure of CEPT to keep its legacy going, that would be great.”

Padora, who was drawn to “beauty objects” since childhood as his grandfather traded in Kashmiri carpets and textiles, has a great roster of design education himself. He went to Los Angeles, at SCI-Arc, instead of London and Europe, as the more exciting young architects were coming out of here. He also studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and then did his Masters at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

He took courses in macro-finance and project finance to understand how low-income housing functioned in developing countries. “A developer once came to our Mumbai studio to build one such project in Karjat. We have had chawls and slums in Mumbai, but there was no discourse about the architecture of these facilitated a sense of community. We started doing drawings to study them, and started to see their value,” he says.

Padora’s firm is also unusual for creating some truly spectacular temple projects, the award-winning Temple of Steps in Andhra Pradesh. “We started making temples quite by chance. A group of villagers had come to my farmhouse near Pune asking for a donation to build a ‘concrete temple’. I asked them why they wouldn’t build it stone and they said they had no knowledge of stones. I began by advising them, getting local quarries to donate the stone and get the priest involved to give his inputs too. It became like a local community project,” he smiles. “I like the idea of sacredness more than religion, it’s like finding a beautiful spot when you are trekking that’s transformative and meditative.”

The Temple of Steps near Nandyal, Andhra, was commissioned by Parth Jindal’s wife, Anushree, after she saw the previous temple. “We realised that the local farmers had to change their crop patterns because of water scarcity. While a cement factory nearby was wasting water it had produced. So we created kunds, or water bodies in the temple complex, and the ghat as our design language. It became a metaphor. We started harvesting water here that was being let off into the farms to assist the crop, so it was also a social project,” he says.

Working with communities has given Padora a rare openness in his work. “AK Ramanujan had asked in an essay ‘Is There An Indian Way of Thinking?’ In a country where language, food, clothing changes every 200 km, how can you prescribe a singular design language? It’s like the ‘Ramayana’ has 300 variations, in some where Ravana is the good guy. Truth is flexible. India’s greatest strength is our diversity, we find that less and less in the current climate where we are pushing for a singular type of identity,” Padora explains. Some of Mumbai’s most stunning restaurants have been designed by Padora’s firm – the Indigo Deli at Palladium, The Clearing House, Eau Bar at The Oberoi Hotel.

“Biki Oberoi said to me that from the moment a guest walks into a restaurant, to when she is ushered into a seat, there is a space where her attention is not occupied. The nature of this space builds one’s experience. This stayed with me. At the Indigo Deli, we wanted to create that inviting cafe in a generic mall that sort of made you want to sit down on an impulse. I had worked with Atul Ruia before, and of course, Malini Akerkar had a lot of great design inputs too.”

Some of his other celebrated works are Lattice House in Jammu, which attempted to “create order within the chaos of that city, like a little jewel box”. It was featured in Wallpaper magazine. The other is the much-photographed ‘The Glass House’, a Goan gem built entirely in local laterite stone and glass, like a grid with glass walls that looked over the nearby paddy field. It was co-designed with fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani and Asahi Glass. The Split House in Mahabaleshwar respects the neighbours in the gated community and trades a large edifice for a home that’s split into two very modern, even futuristic, structures.

The Maya Somaya Library at Kopargaon in rural Maharashtra has won the firm the coveted Beazley and Brick awards. “We wanted to understand how kids would engage with a building, in an age of phones and laptops. We discovered that all kids wanted to do was climb to the top of it. We used a 16th Century construction technique from Spain, Swiss software, a Uruguayan concept elsewhere. Today we sit on amazing networks of knowledge, and we cannot question the polarities of local and global. This building is entirely without RCC and you can walk on top of the roof. One of the students wrote to me on instagram and said the building had inspired her to study architecture, and that was gratifying,” Padora smiles.

Padora, who is part of the Bandra Collective, six architects who work with the BMC for public space development, says public work projects have taught him lessons in mitigation. “There are so many departments to deal with, often most are at loggerheads with each other. This is something you design schools don’t teach you,” he laughs.

Namrata Zakaria is a seasoned writer and editor, and a chronicler of social and cultural trends. Her first book, on late fashion designer Wendell Rodricks’ Moda Goa museum, is due to be published shortly. Zakaria is especially known for her insider’s take on fashion, luxury and social entrepreneurship in India. Her writing is appreciated for shaping opinions, busting myths, making reputations and sometimes breaking the odd career. Zakaria is also involved in putting together philanthropic efforts in the field of economic and environmental sustainability.

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