Ar. Sameep Padora at Parul University: Learning from the Past and the Land

Ar. Sameep Padora is a practising architect, urbanist and academician having more than two decades of experience. He studied architecture at the Academy of Architecture in Mumbai. He attended SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and received his Master in Design Studies from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 2005. In 2007 he founded Sameep Padora and Associates, a Mumbai-based practice whose work ranges from community infrastructure and residences to educational institutions and public spaces, with a strong interest in regional knowledge, craft and contemporary practice that has earned national and international recognition. He was one of the keynote speakers at Parul University’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning during the inaugural session of World Architecture Day 2026.

Ar. Sameep opened with his own student days. Struggling in his first year at the Academy of Architecture in 1992, he was sent by a faculty member to Pune to see a small Charles Correa project, the Kasturba Memorial. The visit, he said, made something click: he came to understand not only what he was meant to learn in school but also the history and legacy he was building on, and the idea that practitioners build on the shoulders of earlier projects and architects.

He described his studio as working in four formats. The studio format, where a client commissions a design, is what architects are trained for. Collaboration recognises that with so many actors involved, the architect is no longer a sole author. The collective reflects his belief that architects must come together to influence the city. And research answers the claim that school and practice are separate worlds. The studio does a little of each, he said, and each format informs the others.

Ar. Sameep argued that temples, fixed in cultural memory as a single kind of edifice, have in fact always evolved, pointing to Badami’s transition from cave temple to temple complex and to temples’ historic links with water and dance. His first built project was a small basalt village temple near Pune, built with villagers and priests on traditional east-west planning, where seven surrounding trees turn the outside into an outdoor mandapa; it was built frugally by farmers over about two and a half years. Fifteen years later, the Temple of Steps at Nandyal, for JSW, doubled as a water-management project: water otherwise lost to evaporation in nearby quarries was channelled to a planted kund to recharge groundwater for farmers, with the step becoming the single element forming both the kund and the body of the temple.

His studio’s hostel in Kota responded to the warehouse-like coaching hostels of the city, many rooms without light or ventilation, and to the serious mental-health pressures facing students in that environment, which Padora cited as part of what the project set out to address. The design opens the building through terraces, courtyards and a jaali system so each room gets light and air, with courtyards that build a sense of community. He also showed a rural Maharashtra community centre built around existing trees using rammed stone dust, factory fly ash and reclaimed ship-breaking timber, and an adjoining school library built with the Catalan tile-vault technique, using Eladio Dieste’s compression-ring details and ETH Zurich’s RhinoVault software, a structure about 150 feet long and only 4.5 inches thick. His argument: the region is no longer locked by geography but open to knowledge networks.

He further explored projects of the masonry tradition in a Hyderabad building, where the studio designed both a corbelled thick-wall detail and the tools required by masons to carve it. Another project involved art labs at Hampi for the JSW Foundation, cast using site soil as formwork and coloured with iron oxide sourced from a factory.

The studio also worked on a fourteen-villa housing project in Goa that brings the character of village fabric into a connecting street while allowing seasonal flooding at the edges.