Sameep Padora

Sameep Padora is an architect and author. Born in Chamba, Northern India, Sameep Padora established his Mumbai based practice in 2007 after graduating from the GSD, Harvard University. The studio’s work has been widely published and has in the past received the Wallpaper Design Award for Best Public Building, Beazley Architecture Prize, Wienerberger Brick Award, Archdaily Building of The Year, Wallpaper Design Award for House of the Year, as well as the Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture and the AR Library Commendation Awards.

Besides the architectural practice, Sameep also runs a not-for-profit sPare that researches issues of urbanization in India with a focus on housing. sPare’s research publications; In the Name of Housing, How to build an Indian House and (de)Coding Mumbai are projects attempting to unravel the production of affordable housing in Indian cities. Sameep has presented the studio’s projects and built work at numerous forums including te Seoul Biennale and at various universities including the GSD, Cooper Union, Cornell and TU Delft amongst others.

Sameep serves on the academic boards of a number of educational institutes and is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University.

Edoardo Narne

Edoardo Narne is an Associate Professor at the University of Padua. Visiting Professor in 2002-2003 in Architectural Design at the Alfonso X University of Madrid, in 2011 at the IUAV in Venice, in 2018 at the Goa College of Architecture in India, occupying the international chair Charles Correa, and in 2019-2022 at ENSTP Youndè, Cameroon. Since 2017 he has been Director of the inter-university Master, University of Padua and University of Catania, “Forms of Contemporary Living”. Member of the teaching staff of the PhD program “Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Sciences” at the University of Padua. He is the author of about one hundred scientific publications. In many of his writings, the themes of living on an urban scale are analyzed with strong attention to the typology and morphology of buildings and to the experiments of social housing and cohousing. Since 2019 he is coordinator and Tutor for the G124 project on the suburbs of the Architect-Senator Renzo Piano.

Vyjayanthi Rao

Vyjayanthi V. Rao is an anthropologist, writer and curator, teaching at the Yale School of Architecture. Her work explores the role of culture and speculation in shaping built and living environments. Her understanding of speculation expands beyond the financial realm into practices that center around the imagination such as design and art. In addition to observant participation through fieldwork, her research draws on sound, image, mapping and collaborations with visual artists and architects. She has published extensively on these subjects, co-curated exhibitions for the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022) and the Center for Architecture in New York (2023) and participated as an artist in the Kochi Biennale (2016) and the Chicago Biennale of Architecture (2023). Since 2023, she has been one of the Editors in Chief of the journal Public Culture (Duke University Press).

Melissa Smith

Melissa Smith is an architect and urban planner based in Ahmedabad, India, and founding partner of BandukSmith Studio, an architecture and (urban) design practice which builds, and also asks questions of the way we make our built environments, and how this can impact the realities of practice. She completed Master of Architecture and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow in 2010. At CEPT University, where Ms. Smith has been teaching in the Architecture and Planning faculties for the past decade, she served as the founding Program Chair to establish the first Bachelor of Urban Design program India. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and generally follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time.

Kaiwan Mehta

Kaiwan Mehta is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. Mehta has studied Architecture, Literature, Indian Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University. In April 2022 he was appointed as the Dean at Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, at NMIMS University. He was recently elected to the coveted International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA).