Working in Mumbai RMA Architects

Working in Mumbai is a critical reflection on thirty years of the practice of RMA Architects. Rahul Mehrotra weaves a narrative to connect his multiple engagements in architectural practice, including teaching, research, documenting, writing and exhibiting since the establishment of the practice in 1990. The book is structured around the subjects of interior architecture, critical conservation, and work and living spaces that straddle the binaries of the global and the local as well as the rural and the urban.

While the book is a portfolio of the selected works of RMA Architects,

the projects are curated so as to unravel and clarify the challenges faced by architects in India and in several parts of the “majority” world where issues related to rapid urbanization and the impacts of global capital are among the many that dispute conventional models of practice. Working in Mumbai is used emblematically to interrogate the notion of context and understand how the practice evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai.

About the author

From a studio established by Rahul Mehrotra in 1990, the firm was re-formed in 2010 as RMA Architects, with studios in Mumbai and Boston, together with a not-for-profit venture RMA Research, an initiative which undertakes specific research projects related to Architecture and Urbanism.

Rahul Mehrotra is a practising architect, urban designer and educator. He is Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Mehrotra founded his Mumbai- and Boston-based firm RMA Architects in 1990. RMA Architects has designed and executed projects in India and across the world, including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, social housing, retail and art spaces, as well as conservation and restoration projects.

In 2018, RMA Architects got the Venice Architecture Biennale Jury’s ‘Special Mention’ for “3 projects that address issues of intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies.” The projects of RMA Architects will be published as a book titled “Working in Mumbai” in 2020.Rahul Mehrotra has long been involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai, having served on government commissions for the conservation of historic buildings and environmental issues with various neighbourhood groups and, from 1994 to 2004, as Executive Director and of the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai.

In 2014, Mehrotra has been a part of the CICA ― the International Committee of Architectural Critics. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Laxmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. Mehrotra studied and at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, where he awarded the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis (1985) and graduated with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) degree with distinction from the Harvard University (1987) with a master’s degree with the distinction in Urban Design from Harvard University.

He was teacher at the University of Michigan (2003–2007) at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT (2007–2010). However, he have been at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where from 2010 to 2015, he chaired the Department of Urban Planning and Design and is currently the Director of the Urban Design Programme At Harvard GSD, Mehrotra has conveyed as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design (2010-2015 and 2020 to date); the Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program ; and the Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in the Urban Design Degree Program (2018 to date). 

Review

“This well illustrated record of the last 3 decade of the exceptional practice of RMA Architects, founded in Mumbai by Mehrotra in 1990, is as the architect insists, a critical documentation instead than a monograph, so that from the outset it not only documents the work but also accounts for the context which gave rise to its existence. At the same time, it clearly indicates how the practice has evolved from designing a whole series of quintessentially urban interiors in interstitial fabric to the of major civic works such as the Tata institute of Social Science at Tulapur of 2004 at, more recently, the Lilavati Library at the CEPT campus in Ahmedabad in the year 2017.

What is commendable about Mehrotra and his Indian practice, is his insistence that the architect must fully embrace the political implications of the metier and that to this end the architect, and as a public intellectual, must serve both as an engaged designer and as an advocate of certain critical policies rather than other often more expedient solutions often opted for by the society at large.

Within what is already an extraordinary rich Indian modern tradition this consummate practice represents the very best of the post Nehru generation of Indian architects emerging today as a model of what the profession should aspire to worldwide in today’s anthropogenic environment.” -Kenneth B. Frampton

Rahul Mehrotra is Founder Principal of engineering firm RMA Architects (established in 1990 as Rahul Mehrotra Associates) of Mumbai + Boston, and is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Working in Mumbai RMA Architects