From a family of poor artisans who provided skilled labor to construction projects around Trivandrum, Gopalakrishnan had his first encounter with architecture during his schooldays, when his father, a building contractor in Kerala, would bring home blueprints. Tearing sheets from his notebooks and oiling them, Gopalakrishnan would carefully trace the edifices. Sometimes he visited his father’s work sites to compare the blueprints with the structures under construction.

Later, a well-known Anglo-Indian draftsman in the city taught him the basics of sketching and drawing. He apprenticed in the public works department, where he received training in building, drafting and site supervision.1

But the turning point in Gopalakrishnan’s career came when he was assigned to independently design and construct the Beemapally Mosque in 1967. Spread across 3 acres in a fishermen’s enclave, the massive project took him 18 years to complete.

With no formal training in architecture, he relied solely on British historian Percy Brown’s pioneering two-volume book, “Indian Architecture (Islamic Period)” and “Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu),” as the basis to conceive the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture for the mosque.

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• 1. It was when Gopalakrishnan’s father received the contract to reconstruct Kerala’s iconic Palayam Mosque in 1961 that the young man began to imagine a calling as an architect. On the work site, he was tasked with supervising labor and became acquainted with the inner workings of a mosque.  The Palayam Mosque’s reconstruction not only increased the family’s popularity within the Muslim community but also paved the way for contracts to spruce up commercial and residential spaces, including that of a Muslim businessman in Trivandrum.