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The chaos, the calm, the industry of ideas is captured in the documentary Reading Architecture Practice: Mumbai, conceptualised by architects Rajeev Thakker, Shreyank Khemalapure and Samarth Das. A project that grew out of conversations in 2015, between Thakker and Khemalapure, took the shape of a film through the matrix of nearly 40 architectural practises in the country. They chose to limit the number to five, and expand its width through categories of design, pedagogy, research, conservation, and multidisciplinary practise. For the film, they interviewed urbanist Prasad Shetty and architect and urbanist Rupali Gupte; architect Sameep Padora; conservation architect Vikas Dilawari; architect-activist PK Das; and from Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), Director Aneerudha Paul and Dean Research & Academic Development Rohan Shivkumar.

To each of them, the filmmakers sent a questionnaire, which included their ideas of the practise of architecture, their role and engagement in society, and why they chose Mumbai as a city to work and live in. It’s in the unfolding of these questions that the film presents its case. “We wanted to make an argument, challenge ideas, and engage with the processes of practise, and in doing that present a vision of architecture itself,” says Thakker, former Director at Studio-X Mumbai, a platform that created conversations around architecture and the urban scape.

While Shetty speaks of the “city as cumulative of all practises, where you are getting produced by the city and you are constantly contributing to the production of the city”, Padora finds interest in the interstitial city, the in-between spaces of slums and markets. “The role of an architect has been passive, restricted to providing a service. But as a discipline, we need to reclaim lost ground,”
he says.

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