Between 1995 and 2005 your firm seemed to have developed its own vocabulary. How has the firm, which has seen three generations of landscape architects, grown over the years?

Every summer I would go to Pune for holidays. My grandfather had long retired. But I remember going to the Saakal office near Shanwar Wada once a week, where he held a workshop for readers who had questions on how to grow vegetables, flowers and other plants. He had such patience and he cared enough to keep on explaining things till he was sure that people knew what to do.

And then when I started studying architecture, I would often ride pillion with my father on his old white Lambretta scooter and go to sites at the crack of dawn where he would plant gardens. It really was theatre, the way he selected plants from a large truck load, and tapped a stick on the ground where he wanted a particular plant placed and a large group of workers would follow him and he would pace up and down for hours at an incredible speed. I would enjoy seeing this over and over.

From 1970s after my father formally set up his design firm, he did these very lyrical and gentle landscapes that really told the story of trees. Many of them are no more; and it struck me how fragile these landscapes really were. Sadly, we have no photographic records either, though we have drawings. The work from the late ’90s has been recorded. I think a lot of the work we do, comes from the hurt of seeing the earlier work vanish, so we tend to embed something into the landscape that will make its reading more robust.

The landscapes my grandfather and father did had a vocabulary albeit a different one, and hopefully there is one now.

Seeing the way they worked, or dealt with trees and the land, one learnt about observing nature carefully, about seeing order in them that are not apparent. Slowly the idea of landscapes in its fullest entirety seems to have seeped into our bones, and so for us that I think is the biggest growth. That we can imagine ways of thinking about landscape that is dynamic, thoughtful, abstract and communicative, irrespective of scale or type of project.

But the biggest growth was the learning of a spirit, a way of looking at life that was full of conviction and passion.

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Craft and theatre often walk hand-in-hand in your architectural projects. They lend themselves to exaggeration but also become observers of the landscape and environment.

Look at us, we are the biggest dramabaaz, nautankis in the world. Also, there are very few lands left in the world where the hand and the mind come together so beautifully be it in metal, or stone, or cloth, or pigments. The idea of craft and that too without a fuss, in humble places of production is something we see all the time around us. It’s natural then to use this as a resource, as an idea in the work we do. For example, in the Devi Art Foundation building and then yet again at the Alchemist’s Abode in Baroda we took what were conventional office buildings and designed them to efficiencies that are the norm, with budgets that are not much higher than the market, to craft large projects with the precision of the hand. I somehow reject the idea of the industrial in the way we have now made it commonplace. I do understand that with the scales we have to build in this country, that is one way to go. Most beautiful cities in the world, or that which we consider of value even today used tools of mass production that were available then, with the clear control of the mind and the hand. I miss that in a lot of the new faceless work, and hence perhaps root for it so strongly in ours.