Aarti is an architect with a deep interest in ecological design and the visual arts. Her interdisciplinary design and research practice - based out of a small village in Uttarakhand in the Central Himalayas of India -  explores interconnections between ecology, design, climate, culture and social identity. Her work has received several accolades, including scholarships from BaseHabitat, Holcim, and the Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid. 

 

Born in Delhi, Aarti completed her architecture studies in 2015 from the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, and spent her formative years in the profession working with noted Indian architect and philosopher, M.N. Ashish Ganju, where she developed a critical understanding of socially and environmentally responsible architecture. Key projects she worked on with Ganju include closed loop ecological planning in informal settlements in Delhi, the national museum of architecture to showcase indigenous climate responsive knowledge from India, and an Institute of higher learning for Tibetan Buddhist nuns in the foothills of the Himalayas.   

 

Following this, she moved to the Kumaon hills where she has been working since 2017, managing projects in remote rural areas on hilly terrain where resources, climate, working conditions, worldviews, and the concept of time are quite different from cities. Being conscious of the social-ecological processes linked with architecture, her work attempts to create dialogues about learning from indigenous knowledge, restoring ecological communities, rekindling our kinship with nature, and having a systems view of architecture and rural-urban planning.

 

Aarti earned her masters in integrated urbanism and sustainable design from the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and her postgraduate specialisation in ecological design and construction process from Building Beauty Sorrento.

 

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