“Architecture should be ethical and show empathy toward the human condition,” said Bijoy Jain, whose firm Studio Mumbai received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture from L’Institut Francais D’Architecture in 2009. The Indian modernist—known for blurring the boundaries between indoors and outdoors, and creating oases of peace from local stone and wood—studied in the U.S. and worked on the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He established his practice in 1996, building a compound that houses dozens of the craftsmen he employs near his own handsome but humble residence in the countryside of Alibag, not far from central Mumbai.
Mr. Jain’s home was recently part of “Where Architects Live,” an installation at the global design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan that re-created the residences of world-renowned talents including Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebeskind and Shigeru Ban. Mr. Jain said he sees his live-work complex as a laboratory for new ideas and a standard-bearer for old traditions. “There’s a lineage of carpentry and masonry, building with high skill and great efficiency that’s specific to India, and I am transferring that ideology to projects around the world,” said the globe-trotting architect, 49, who is working on projects in Switzerland, Spain and Japan and will teach a semester at Yale this fall. Mr. Jain spoke to us about sustainable design, how he’d blow $20,000 and the most beautiful restaurant in the world.
via Sustainable Design Is a Given in India – India Real Time – WSJ.
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