Ar. Snehal Shah at Parul University: Five Lessons Every Young Architect Should Learn!

Some architects design buildings. A few teach you how to think about them. Snehal Shah, founder of the practice Snehal Shah Architect, did the second when he addressed students at the Young Ideas session hosted by the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Parul University. Drawing on his book, he laid out five lessons that shaped his career, each one a principle a young architect can carry into their own work.

What follows is Snehal Shah’s own framework, as he presented it, followed by the projects in which he tested it. The value is not in admiring the buildings but in seeing the reasoning that produced them.

Shah traced his understanding of geometry, form, and precision to two teachers. At a very young age, he had a stellar opportunity to learn and work under the legendary Indian Architect – B.V Doshi (Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi) at CEPT University, Ahmedabad and then he worked directly with the Swiss Master – Mario Botta in Lugano. As they say, a perfect architect is shaped by learnings, experiences and under guidance.

The two influences pulled in complementary directions. From B.V Doshi came a deeply Indian sensibility, an understanding of climate, courtyard, and the way built form sits within a landscape. From Mario Botta came European rigour, a precision of geometry and detail that leaves nothing to chance. Holding both, Snehal Shah argues, is what lets an architect design work that is rooted in its place yet exact in its execution, and neither can be picked up from a book.

As he navigated through his old memories, Snehal Shah said it is essential to build for the present. He then showcased a few medieval structures, from the Gothic cathedrals of France to stepwells, followed by the famous vavs of Gujarat. The key learning was to understand that these constructions were designed for permanence, monumental belonging, and structural integrity. They are engineering lessons still worth learning.

The vav is the sharper example for an Indian student. A stepwell was constructed to solve water storage and create spaces for social gatherings, while ensuring that water stayed cool even in extreme heat. It was, in many ways, an example of mechanical cooling before the concept formally existed. That is what Snehal Shah means by learning from history: old buildings are a library of tested answers, not a museum.

Climate, for Snehal Shah, is a non-negotiable design input, not an obstacle to fight. Rather than sealing a building against its environment, he works with it, using strategic orientation, natural ventilation, and shaded courtyards to maximise daylight while blunting the harsh Indian heat.

This is the core of his method, and he stated it simply. His entire approach rests on three constants: the movement of the sun, the shadows it casts, and natural air ventilation. When a client once challenged him, asking how he could believe in something he had never seen, his answer became a design principle.

“I believe in the sun. As the sun moves, shadows cast, and that is a wonder to me.” – Snehal Shah, founder of Snehal Shah Architect

Snehal Shah described his practice as an empirical chain, where each new project is a direct continuation of the last. By gathering data, testing materials, and observing how earlier spaces actually performed once built, an architect accumulates a repository of knowledge that no textbook can supply. It has to be experienced, and each completed building becomes evidence for the next.

This is why a young architect should treat every early project, however small, as data rather than merely a deliverable. How a courtyard actually performed in July, whether a material aged as expected, how people really used a space against how it was drawn—each observation compounds. Over a career, that accumulated, tested understanding is what separates an architect who repeats textbook moves from one who knows, from experience, what will work.

His final lesson was to embrace error openly. His command of the hardest elements, intricate roof systems and expansive central courtyards, came, he said, from making good mistakes on earlier projects. An architect rarely realises an absolute ideal on the first attempt. What they walk away with instead is a deep, practical understanding of how to do it better next time.

“His whole method rests on three constants: the sun, the shadow it casts, and natural ventilation.”

Snehal Shah illustrated the framework with landmark work, each project solving a climate or context problem.

• TCS Gandhinagar: designed around a single workstation’s need for light and sized for ten thousand employees, it answers the hot, dry local climate with careful sun orientation, extensive greenery, and a moat outside the canteen for natural cooling.
• Shiva Temple, Nadiad: a redevelopment on a 20,000 square metre plot at low cost, where the walls were restored and clad in thin marble sheets while the idol was preserved.
• A vertical house in Mumbai: built for a client who wanted silence from the city, set within a garden and surrounded by trees, its linear plan running east to west for daylight, shade, and cross-ventilation, with two courtyards to light the living rooms and modulate temperature.

Across these and others, from the Gujarat Vidhyapeeth’s Vice Chancellor’s residence to a guest house for Cadila and the Ram Krishna Mission Temple in Porbandar, the same three constants recur: the sun’s movement, the shadow cast, and natural air ventilation.

What ties the portfolio together is not a style but a method. Whether the brief is a corporate campus, a temple, or a private house, Snehal Shah begins from the same three questions: where does the sun move, where do the shadows fall, and how will the air move through the building. Everything else follows from those answers.

That is why his work spans such different programmes without losing coherence, from the sustainable residence of the Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Vidhyapeeth and the B.K. Majumdar Institute of Administration to a guest house for Cadila Pharmaceutical, the Ram Krishna Mission Temple at Porbandar, and the Amrut Mody School of Management in Ahmedabad. Each is a different answer to the same climate-first questions, which is precisely what makes the method teachable: a student can apply it to any brief, in any climate, and arrive at a building that belongs where it stands.

Snehal Shah offered one memorable analogy. He compared the evolution of Bollywood villains, once instantly recognisable by a distinct style, now indistinguishable because leading actors play them, to a trap in architecture. Some traditional practices, he suggested, survive by hiding behind vague concepts rather than evolving. His advice was to stop overcasting a design in fog and to move forward honestly with modern architecture, without abandoning the fundamentals.

His closing message to students was firm: never compromise the fundamentals, orientation, the movement of the sun, and natural ventilation, for the sake of convenience or to force a project through. That discipline is the thread connecting his lessons to those of the other architects at the event, including Charanjit Singh & Snehal Shah on sustainability and Yatin Pandya on human experience.

Snehal Shah’s five lessons are not a historical curiosity. In an era where students can generate a rendering in minutes and copy a striking image from anywhere in the world, his insistence on masters, history, climate, experience, and mistakes is a defence against shallow design. A building drawn quickly from references, without regard for its sun, its site, or its users, may photograph well and fail to live well.

The lessons also describe a way of building a career, not just a building. Learning from teachers, from history, and from one’s own mistakes is a long game that rewards patience and honesty over shortcuts, which is precisely the discipline the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Parul University brings its students into by putting practitioners like Snehal Shah in front of them.

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