Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai
Architects · Asia Pacific“Winner of the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2020, Bijoy Jain has spent since 1995 building an architecture rooted in craft and material honesty that owes nothing to the global glass-tower default.”
Why Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai 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.