AA: How does architectural authorship shift when the architect is asked not to design for but with especially in contexts shaped by humanitarian aid or crisis? Could you speak to how your anthropological approach, which you introduced during our first meeting in Marina Tabassum’s studio, informs this shift, particularly the methods of reaching, listening to, and facilitating dialogue with unfamiliar people, places, and cities?



VR: Yeah. I want to say that one of the interesting parallels between the practice of anthropology and architecture is that both the architect and the anthropologist are, in some sense, outsiders. They have to learn how to be guests in the world they are trying either to understand or, in the case of the architect, to transform. In this position of being outsiders, there are many ways of entering the world of what you might call "the native." As we know, only a very small percentage of the world is designed or built by professional architects probably somewhere around 5%.


So we have to ask: who is the architect? Is the training imparted in schools of architecture the only way of being an architect? As an anthropologist, I'm interested in how this profession or practice is recognized differently in various places. In some communities, they may not even have a word for "architect," yet people are deeply engaged in designing and building. Many communities are self-built. They employ people from within the community to source materials and construct structures. I remember talking to a good friend and housing rights activist living in a slum in Mumbai. He reminisced about his first house, knowing exactly the budget, the people involved, and how he built it. He found old gunny sacks, sourced four or six bamboo poles, paid a small sum for them, and enlisted friends paying them modestly to help him erect a basic structure, where the walls were made by hanging the gunny sacks between the bamboo poles. That is architecture: a complete practice where he was the developer, client, patron, designer, and builder all at once. The house was built around 1982. With that act of building, he laid claim to a small plot of land. Over time, the house grew and changed to accommodate 27 family members his brothers and their families.

It’s a magical story of what architecture can mean in people's lives and places. But unless we expand our view of what constitutes architecture, we miss the full picture. If we think of architecture only in relation to formal pedagogy in schools, we're putting a frame around it and missing all the vital practices happening outside that frame, practices that surely deserve to be called architecture too.

AA: What can architecture learn from anthropology, particularly in its attentiveness to provisional vernacular knowledge and situated forms of resilience? Reflecting on your work, how do you see these two disciplines feeding one another? Are they interdependent, or do they operate in reciprocal but distinct ways?


VR: I feel like the relationship between these two fields—architecture and anthropology is quite recent. And when it did exist in the past, it often drew from anthropology’s own colonial heritage: the practice of putting people "in their place."

Historically, anthropologists were tasked with following colonial conquest and producing compendia of knowledge that would enable colonizers to understand the natives. There was always this separation. In a way, there are modernist projects that put that knowledge to use by drawing out ideas about things that were locally available, things that were locally made—forms, aesthetics, and vernacular building knowledge specifically. These ideas did make their way into architecture.


For example, after India’s independence, much of the architecture was produced by the government's Public Works Department—housing, infrastructure, civic buildings. At the same time, a generation of architects like Charles Correa and B.V. Doshi, who were trained abroad Doshi with Le Corbusier, Correa in the United States returned to India and produced a more hybrid understanding of modernism, one much more embedded in the local environment. In that sense, they were practicing a form of anthropology—being outsiders, yet deeply attentive to what was on the ground, and interested in vernacular heritage, which many people at the time feared was disappearing.


AA: When operating as a foreigner whether as an architect, anthropologist, or aid agency worker how important is it to engage with vernacular and indigenous practices? How can the study of local forms of knowledge and resilience meaningfully reshape interventions that aim to "do well" in unfamiliar contexts?


VR: Actually, yeah, I think it’s absolutely vital. I was coming to the point that, after the generation that came of age during decolonization and the birth of new nations, what we began to see was the adoption of a more generic, global kind of architecture essentially, a "one-size-fits-all" or "one prefab fits all" model. That form of practice, as we know, has had enormous consequences on our current situation. It proliferated the use of materials like concrete, glass, and steel, which are incredibly resource-intensive and extractive.


Now, there is renewed attention to vernacular practices rethinking what they were, how they fit into local environments and this has become part of the larger discourse. In that sense, there’s a revived and important traffic between anthropology and architecture. If we look at the mid-20th century to today, there has been an enormous transition. In the mid-century, as new nations emerged, there was a desire to practice modernist architecture while remaining sensitive to local contexts.


However, during the intervening hyper-capitalist phase, what we witnessed was a shift toward generic, global development. Now, I believe we are coming back to a moment of realization: we need other forms, and many places are turning to past practices in renewed and thoughtful ways.


AA: Could you reflect on a moment in your work particularly your current projects when ethnographic listening or fieldwork stripped away the assumptions embedded in a design brief or institutional mandate? How did that experience reshape your understanding of the project's direction or purpose?



VR: Yeah. I mean, I think there is well, I gave you the example of the Santos house, the story of this one house over the course of half a century, which encapsulates a lot of urban political economy within it. Speaking from examples I know of, I would say that architects like B.V. Doshi or Charles Correa were extremely sensitive to the specificities of place. They actually took it upon themselves to produce design briefs. So, for example, when a city organization contacted them to design a mass housing project, they would write the brief themselves.


In that sense, they were really practicing ethnography—an ethnography that involved not only human beings but also the environment. Last week, I heard a wonderful story about Charles Correa, one of India’s premier architects, who, along with architect Pravina Mehta and structural engineer Shirish Patel, proposed the development of New Bombay a twin city to Bombay. They approached the government with a blueprint for a new city that could become the new seat of government. This was in the 1960s. Since then, of course, much has changed. The government, as usual, compromised; they half-followed the plan but mostly did their own thing. Later, they came back to Correa, asking him to design a layout for a mass housing project. He responded thoughtfully, taking into account the landscape a hill called Ulwe Hill and designed a very climate-sensitive layout.


Interestingly, that site was never built for housing. Instead, the plan was co-opted for the New Bombay airport. The entire hill, which Correa had foreseen as crucial for protecting the area from flooding and climate events, was destroyed and replaced with a basin for the airport. So, when we talk about listening, I believe architects are capable of listening not just to people but also to the environment a kind of multi-species understanding of what is collectively good. Yet, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they simply plug into systems without questioning the broader context.


AA: In humanitarian interventions, how can slowness or even refusal be a productive stance for architects and designers? Given your view of architecture as first a political act and second a humanitarian practice, how do you see these gestures of resistance and careful interaction as integral to the work we do?


VR: You know, one thing I learned, also from your studio with Marina Tabassum, is that one of the ways architects can change the terms of interaction, especially when designing in situations of crisis, is by taking into account the host communities.

People who have been living there, who are suddenly playing host to a large number of refugees—whether they are climate refugees, war refugees, or others must be considered. I think one of the most important ways architects can slow things down is by engaging with these pre-existing communities, consulting them, and taking them seriously when designing new interventions. Another important aspect is transferring some of the material and intellectual wealth that often comes with international aid organizations to the host community itself. How do you make the entire space resilient, rather than parachuting in a design solution?


This approach also looks ahead: what happens after these temporary settlers leave? What is the afterlife of these enormous compounds?


AA: In your work on the Multiplicity exhibition, which resists singular narratives, how do you see the concept of multiplicity unsettling the dominant frameworks of "need" and "solution" that often underpin major design-driven interventions? Could you reflect on how your curatorial experience challenged these conventional approaches?



VR: Yeah. I mean, I think we called the exhibition Multiplicity because we wanted to show that there are multiple sources of design intelligence, and that it is not just about producing solutions. In fact, it’s a mistake to think about design as simply producing solutions, because that assumes you already know the problem in advance. I feel like designing is a practice a process that deploys imagination to even understand what the problem is in the first place. Architects really need to move away from the mentality of simply taking a brief they've been given and acting upon it. Instead, they must unpack the brief, understand where it’s coming from, and engage with what people are actually doing.


For example, we showed the work of an NGO from Zimbabwe that designed physical interventions called friendship benches. At one level, they are just benches—but they make a difference by creating spaces where people can openly approach mental health and well-being. This redefined even the understanding of the problem itself: how to treat mental illness.


AA: What advice would you offer to young architects or scholars who hope to work at the intersection of design, anthropology, and humanitarianism?


VR: I think, in some ways, I've already answered that question in the sense that, whether as an anthropologist or an architect, we have to learn how to be good guests. We must always be aware that we are entering someone else's home, someone else's space. The goal is to create and cultivate relationships of trust, which can then turn you from designing for to designing with. The practice itself then has to take on a different logic. You have to rethink how you imagine your office, your working structure, and even how you imagine time. You can’t think of time as: I get the brief, I do the project, I leave. Instead, you must see that every project in your life accumulates; every project stays with you, informs you, and reshapes the way you continue to work.


AA: Many NGOs and aid agencies operating in postcolonial cities in Africa and Asia face critiques of perpetuating neocolonial practices through top-down approaches and rigid aesthetic impositions. From your standpoint as both an anthropologist and a practitioner, how do you envision rethinking these models? What practical methodologies do you believe are necessary to genuinely disrupt these inherited legacies?


VR: I mean, I think one is to practice transparency around even a simple thing, like understanding a budget. Oftentimes, people will produce standardized objects because they have been told that these are the supply streams they can draw from. But as a practical methodological framework, if there is a way of showing what those standardized methodologies cost across many different registers, not just in terms of money, but in terms of extraction, the length of the supply chain, and so forth versus what you can achieve by designing with a community, I think that would already be a big leap.

Even making the effort to compare and unpack these realities is important. From there, figuring out what should be designed, or what can be designed intentionally, becomes possible. I think it all comes from how we think about motivation where do you see the host community coming into this? I believe the host communities are absolutely vital. In the case of aid, they are the recipients—they’re not hosts so much as they are beneficiaries. If you could shift that subjective position—not seeing them as mere beneficiaries or beggars, but as authors of their own environments—that would be a crucial step.

In places like Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, you have to recognize the long history of hosting refugee communities. Building trust is a very slow process, but it’s essential—even to articulate the kinds of damages that the host community itself may have felt