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There is a word that keeps appearing in conversations about the most interesting architecture coming out of India right now. Rooted. Not as a stylistic description but as an intention. A conscious decision to build from the inside out, beginning with the land, the climate, the culture and the materials that are already present, rather than importing an aesthetic from elsewhere and placing it onto a site that had nothing to do with its creation.
It is not a new idea. India has been building with this kind of intelligence for centuries. The courtyard that captures the breeze. The deep verandah that shades the interior from the afternoon sun. The step-well that harvests water and creates community around it. The hand-laid brick wall that breathes. These were not decorative choices. They were solutions, refined over generations, to the specific conditions of specific places. And for a long time, in the rush toward modernisation, a great deal of that accumulated wisdom was set aside.
What is happening now, across practices and cities and typologies, is a reclamation. Not a nostalgic one. Not a recreation of the past for its own sake. But a genuine, rigorous and often deeply beautiful reckoning with what India already knew about building well, and what it means to carry that knowledge forward into contemporary life.
The weight of what was lost
To understand why this movement matters, it helps to understand what happened before it. In the decades following independence, modernism arrived in India with tremendous force and a great deal of promise. Le Corbusier in Chandigarh. Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad. The ambition to build a new nation expressed through a new architectural language. There was genuine vision in that moment, and genuine achievement.
But modernism also carried within it an implicit suggestion that the traditional was something to move away from. That progress meant glass and concrete and the erasure of regional difference in favour of a universal contemporary style. Over time, that suggestion took hold. Buildings began to look less like the places they were built in and more like buildings that could have been built anywhere.
The climate suffered for it. So did the craft traditions. And so, in quieter ways, did the sense of cultural continuity that gives a built environment its character and its meaning.
A different kind of ambition
What the new vernacular proposes is that these two things, contemporary ambition and traditional intelligence, are not in opposition. That a building can be entirely of its time and entirely of its place simultaneously. That the most innovative thing an Indian architect can do right now might be to look very carefully at what was already here before reaching for what is fashionable elsewhere.
This idea is showing up across practices and scales. Sanjay Puri Architects, one of India’s most awarded practices with 17 A+ Awards to its name, has consistently demonstrated what happens when climate responsiveness and material honesty are treated as design opportunities rather than constraints. Projects like the Nokha Village Community Centre and the 72 Screens cinema in Jaipur are buildings that feel rooted without feeling backward, bold without forgetting where they come from.
At the other end of the scale, Samira Rathod Design Associates works by a philosophy its founder has distilled into five words: beautiful, local, indigenous, recycle, small. Every project is tested against the land that will hold it and the life it is meant to serve. The Cool House in Bharuch and The Shadow House in Alibag are buildings that wear their context quietly and with complete confidence.
The conversation between old and new
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this movement is not the buildings themselves but the quality of thinking behind them. The best practitioners of the new vernacular are not simply using traditional materials or forms as a visual reference. They are asking deeper questions about what those traditions understood that contemporary practice has forgotten.
Morphogenesis, one of India’s most internationally recognised practices, describes its work as a consistent reinterpretation of India’s architectural roots through passive design solutions. That phrase is worth sitting with. Passive design is not passive thinking. It requires an intimate understanding of how light moves across a site, how air circulates through a building, how materials absorb and release heat across the course of a day and a season. The Pearl Academy of Fashion in Jaipur, raised on a plinth with a traditional step-well beneath it, is a building that looks entirely contemporary and thinks entirely like a building that has always understood its climate.
Architecture BRIO describes its search as finding a balance between architecture as the act of disappearance and creating characterful, responsive environments. It is a beautiful articulation of what vernacular intelligence at its best actually produces: buildings that negotiate with their sites rather than dominate them. The Riparian House in Karjat and the Himalayan Mountain Retreat in Mukteshwar are projects that feel less designed than discovered, as though they were always meant to be exactly where they are.
The work of memory
There is another dimension to this movement that goes beyond climate and craft. It is the question of memory. Of what a building carries within it beyond its physical structure. And nowhere in Indian architecture is that question addressed with more rigour and more dedication than in the work of heritage conservation.
Abha Narain Lambah Associates has spent over 25 years earning 13 UNESCO Asia Pacific Awards for Heritage Conservation, restoring temples in Ladakh and Hampi, palaces and forts in Rajasthan, ancient Buddhist sites at Ajanta, Sarnath and Bodh Gaya. What the practice understands, and what its body of work demonstrates repeatedly, is that conservation is not the opposite of innovation. It is one of the most demanding creative acts an architect can undertake. To restore a 15th century temple is to read it with complete attention. To understand not just how it was built but why it was built that way. What it meant to the people who built it and what it continues to mean to those who gather around it today.
That kind of attentiveness, to history, to material, to community, is exactly what the new vernacular at its best is asking all architects to bring to every project they touch.
Where it goes from here
The movement has no manifesto and no single centre. It is happening in Mumbai and Bengaluru, in Jaipur and Hyderabad, in Kerala and Ladakh. It is expressed in rammed earth and hand-laid brick, in restored stone and reclaimed timber, in courtyards and step-wells and deep verandahs. It is being led by practices of very different sizes and very different approaches, united not by a shared aesthetic but by a shared conviction.
That conviction is simply this: that India’s built environment has something extraordinary to say. That the most relevant architecture this country can produce right now is the architecture that listens to what is already here, what the land knows, what the climate demands, what centuries of building have already worked out, and finds a way to carry all of that forward into the present with intelligence, integrity and genuine beauty.
The new vernacular is not a look. It is a way of paying attention. And in architecture, as in most things, that is where all the best work begins.
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