Why Bijoy Jain is in the Design 100

Bijoy Jain founded Studio Mumbai in 1995, building a practice that runs against an industry increasingly assembled from specification sheets. He is known for keeping large teams of masons, carpenters and stone-workers on site through construction, treating each building as something made and adjusted by hand rather than assembled from finished components — a method most visible in houses such as the Palmyra House, its screens and walls worked from local materials rather than sourced from a catalogue.

That discipline earned Jain the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2020, a distinction reserved for architects judged to have shaped the field’s direction, and it has carried Studio Mumbai’s work beyond India — including an exhibition of his built and unbuilt projects at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The consistent argument across the output is that architecture answerable to a place’s climate, materials and craft traditions is not a retreat from modernity but a more exacting way of practising it.