I like to think of myself as a part-time architect, educator, entrepreneur, and full-time traveller, thinker, tinkerer. I have always been fascinated by how things are made, and the places and people that are involved in their making.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia, sometimes visiting India—which I saw as my parents’ country—and falling in love with its rich and multi-layered history and built heritage, so much so that I moved there to study architecture. I then attended the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association in London, where I got my Master’s degree, and now I work between India and the UAE. There is so much to contrast and reconcile between the places I have lived, their cultures and built environments, and they have each shaped me in significant ways.
Particularly fascinating to me are the back alleys of places, the inner mechanisms, and the undersides of bridges—where the real, unedited, behind-the-scenes functions of making things work happen, like a well-oiled machine.
In India, we have a way of working we call jugaad, which means being creative within the limited resources you have on hand. This is seen in the inspiring energy of Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest informal settlement in Asia, whose residents run intricate networks of industries of all kinds - including manufacturing, recycling ,and repurposing - within extremely tight resources and difficult conditions.
The Design Research Lab is where I learned to be inventive and industrious myself, by embracing new ways of defining architecture, using new technologies, and inventing machines and systems that did not yet exist. Visiting factories, shipyards, and manufacturing units taught me that architecture is informed by many different disciplines, and architects cannot hope to make a significant impact if we work in insulated silos and interact only within our professional circles.
During this time, I conceived DesignAware, a passionately experimental architecture and intentionally interdisciplinary design studio, with an aim to create awareness through design.
When I returned to India to establish the studio, I realised the great disparity between education and practice. In school, we are taught the importance of being great designers, thinkers, and innovators and are encouraged to practice independently, but are not equipped with the tools to start and run an architecture firm.
Though I had the opportunity to learn from inspiring architects and mentors when it came to design, principles, and our approach to work, resources and business support within the architectural community were absent. Moreover, being from a minority in many ways, I felt a stark void in role models who looked and thought like me. Most architects still ascribed to the traditional outlook of private practice being a long-term investment that would take decades to get firmly established.
However, I’m from the first generation to grow up with the internet through which everyone can share their creative work instead of waiting to be 'discovered'. The generation that applies the 'move fast and break things' adage, so I looked to the tech industry for guidance which was missing—and still is—in the architecture community.
The newly formed Indian state of Telangana became an incubator for startup culture, and I found myself immersed in it, as this process of building coincided with setting up my practice.
At DesignAware, we aim to make design and technology more accessible through architecture that is socially-relevant and community-oriented. How do we situate ourselves in this dichotomy? Everything begins with the awareness that there is no right or wrong way of being an architect.
Beyond discipline, method, scale, and context, the role of an architect is to make non-obvious connections between seemingly disconnected concepts; to facilitate conversations, to bring together, to allow growth. We are ingrained with this rigid idea that architecture is exclusive and exclusionary whereas in reality, the field of architecture is vast and all-encompassing.
I believe that design should be a democratic process and can benefit from diverse voices and skillsets. In Hilltop School - a charity school we designed inside the historic Golconda Fort in Hyderabad - we endeavoured to make the design process a participatory one by involving the students, teachers, and workers. This was a difficult project: due to the rocky terrain that we wanted to preserve, the tight context, and the limited budget. It is far easier to start tabula rasa than to work within existing constraints of context, and layers of history, and memory.
It was the severe terrain that inspired us, challenged us, and shaped the project. Architecture requires a hyper-specific approach and must respond to its context. Existing standards cannot be applied in every location, and in order to combat the danger of a single identity, architecture needs a bottom-up approach to be decolonized in some ways. At the same time, we need to be wary of repeating history or replicating solutions that worked in a time before. Time is also context.
We have become deeply involved with the school for eight years now, not only as architects and designers, but also by starting an annual crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the school. In this project, I also learned the importance of being involved in the execution of our designs, and although women are commonly present on construction sites in India, how rare it is for them to be in leadership positions, and how difficult it is to be heard.
Coming from an avant-garde school which was an incubator of cutting-edge methods, I was initially hindered by limited access to tools for digital fabrication. Over time, I learned that where systems don’t exist, we must create our own. Entrepreneurs know the importance of the pivot: to 'be like water' and find the path of least resistance.
In India, customisation and doing things differently is easier because the construction industry is self-organised and not strictly regulated – with that comes great freedom. We can take advantage of this by experimenting with different materials and fabrication methods, and custom designed solutions. In order to gain better control over the execution of our designs, I co-founded BuildAware in 2020 (in the middle of the pandemic) and we completed our first design-and-build project last year.
In our recent project Ribbon House, we designed a wall of individually rotated blocks that could easily be built by computer numerical control (CNC) if we had the budget and access to machines. Instead, we trained masons on site to work with the augmented reality tool Fologram on their smartphones to assemble the wall.
It is important to recognise that the existence of machines does not necessarily mean the elimination of the human component, and an ideal design and construction process would create opportunities for human-machine collaboration, each doing what they do best. This way, we move toward an architecture without architects in the traditional sense.
Now that I have some authority, I am always working to create opportunities that I wish I had when I was a student or at the beginning of my career. Each of our initiatives has an educational component: we started the program Studio_to_Site that brings students and young professionals to our sites for hands-on learning during construction under the execution team. I created the Fractals Workshop as a generative design and computation workshop in which participants create 'analog algorithms' from the growth patterns of natural systems.
When we were commissioned to design a series of urban installations for Hyderabad Design Week 2019, we turned the spotlight on our students, so they could make their mark on the urban fabric. In a design-and-build process, the students worked with the fabricators—the artisans of today—and student designs were transformed into large scale installations.
We believe that many minds and many hands can come together to create something that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
For a project to be successful, an architect must think about the future life of the design: how it would grow after it is occupied, adapt and evolve over time, and maybe even beyond that, after it is done serving its purpose.
Our concern with construction waste and cookie-cutter architecture led us to research the revival of local, natural materials and vernacular techniques, and to reconcile traditional methods with computational design and digital fabrication in our research we call The Digital Vernacular. We applied the learnings we received from local craftspeople in different contexts to a series of computationally-designed complex geometric sculptures, each specific to its location.
HeliX 2.0, the latest in this series, is a helocoidal reciprocal structure designed partly with the assistance of generative AI tools, and fabricated by furniture makers in cane (rattan). We recognise the potential of generative AI as a creative collaborator that can give shape to our formal aspirations, which were so far trapped inbetween our dreams and sketchbooks.
Over the years, DesignAware has grown beyond an architecture studio into an incubator of sorts, a platform that has birthed many great initiatives by its members. We have a lab-like approach to work which is experimental and open-ended. Many of our projects begin with a question, and we try to arrive at an answer through the design process, to reconcile the real and the virtual, the tangible and the intangible. I believe that only when you become comfortable with uncertainty can you innovate and evolve.
Why is it even called 'practice'? It’s a process of constant trial and error, honing your craft, and learning new things, developing new ways of working, with continuous reinvention. You never truly 'arrive'.
DesignAware is not just a practice, it’s a movement. We continue to seek ways to create awareness about design, in service of the defining principles, with the acceptance that we will always be imperfect.
About the author
Takbir Fatima is an architect, educator and entrepreneur. She is the director of interdisciplinary design and experimental architecture studio DesignAware. She is an Adjunct Faculty at the Boston Architectural College and CEPT University. She was included in 100 Women: Architects in Practice (RIBA Publishing, 2023). Most recently, Takbir was invited by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, to exhibit her work alongside 80 women architects in the exhibition Samatva: Shaping the Built as part of the very first India Art, Architecture & Design Biennale 2023 at the Red Fort, Delhi.
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