Two Exhibitions Feature Rahul Mehrotra’s Research and Practice
This summer, the work of Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is on view in two different settings: a gallery show about his firm RMA Architects in his home base of Mumbai, and a traveling exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Contextures, an exhibition on the work of RMA Architects, is on view at the gallery TARQ in Mumbai, through August 21. Curated by Ranjit Hoskote, the show features six institutional projects that exemplify RMA’s practice, especially the firm’s characteristic sensitivity to social, climatic, and historical context. Projects on view include the CSMVS Museum estate in Mumbai, the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad, the Zirad Art & Heritage Foundation in Alibaug, and three university buildings in Ahmedabad.
According to Hoskote, “RMA rejects the heroic confrontation with nature and assertion of style that architects are meant to express in the classical account. Its approach might, perhaps, be described as ameliorative: it diagnoses, seeks remedy, improves a situation. The architecture this studio introduces into any site is programmatically non-monumental. Rather, it proceeds through a dialogue with the site and its histories, through discreet and reversible interventions, empathetic surveys and subtle surgeries.”
The show is supported by the Thackersey Foundation and the Architecture Foundation.
In addition to his practice at RMA, Mehrotra conducts research on architecture and urban design practices throughout South Asia. Last winter, The Architectures of Transition: Emerging Practices in South Asia, which Mehrotra curated with Devashree Shah, and Pranav Thole, began its journey across the region and is now on view in Kabul, Afghanistan. The exhibition showcases the work of 41 emerging architecture practices engaged in shaping architecture, landscape, and infrastructure in the public realm.
The exhibition is part of The State of Architecture in South Asia, a research project asking a shared question across the region: does architecture matter in a state of transition? Across South Asia, overlapping transitions — climate change, political transformation, socio-economic shift — register with particular intensity in everyday life, and the project probes what role architecture can play amid that uncertainty.
The project was initiated by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Architecture Foundation, with support from JSW, Prakriti Foundation, and Amardeep Designs.