M-Connect: Celebrating architectural excellence & innovation - Episode 4: Global
Balancing global innovation with local identity
Last Updated: Sep 10, 2025, 15:00 IST2 min
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In architecture, the question is no longer whether design can travel across borders; rather it is how it carries the soul of where it comes from. Balancing global innovation with local identity has become the defining quest of our times.
M-Connect: Celebrating Architectural Excellence & Innovation - a campaign by Marmo solutions in association with Forbes India—is a multi-episode series spotlighting the minds behind remarkable design. Through candid conversations with 45 architects and designers, the series reveals how memory, philosophy, and context shape structures that transcend geography.
The fourth episode, Global Practice, Local Soul, brought together three leading voices whose work demonstrates how Indianness can travel without being lost: Aparna Kaushik, Founding Principal Architect, Aparna Kaushik Design Group; Zafar Chaudhary, Founding Partner & CEO, Habitat Architects and Vivek Gupta, Principal Architect, Arvind Vivek and Associates.
For Aparna Kaushik, design is the sum of many forces—the site, the client’s aspirations, her own travels and her exposure to global styles. Yet, she believes Indian lifestyle itself ensures a rootedness. “We love outdoor spaces, we celebrate weather, and we want to be outdoors all year round. That inherently makes our homes Indian,” she noted. While she blends classical and contemporary influences, she has also adopted a lesson from Europe: restraint. “In India we tend to overdo a little bit. I’ve learned to balance, to let simplicity shine.”
Zafar Chaudhary views architecture as a dialogue between cultures, climates and histories. Functionality, he says, is just the starting point; the real craft lies in creating “poetry” through proportion, scale and balance. For him, Indianness abroad is not domes or jalis, but the ethos of discovery. “In our temples, you don’t arrive at the sanctum directly—you experience layers that culminate in revealing the soul. That journey of discovery is the Indian ethos I carry into my international projects.”
Describing architecture as a “social art” that must respond to context, Vivek Gupta contrasts India’s permanence with the West’s culture of adaptive reuse. From London’s warehouses reborn as offices, malls and museums, to a church transformed into a public space with restaurants and cafés, he cites bold examples of heritage reimagined. In India, he argues, robust planning and suburban development are urgent if architecture is to truly serve people. “If we don’t design for people, we’ll only design chaos.”
Together, their voices show that India’s architectural future lies in balancing rooted traditions with global relevance.
Presented by Forbes India and powered by Marmo Solutions, M-Connect continues to reveal how design excellence emerges when global practice carries a local soul.
The pages slugged ‘Brand Connect’ are equivalent to advertisements and are not written and produced by Forbes India journalists.
First Published: Sep 10, 2025, 15:00
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