Speaker
“Good architecture doesn’t happen naturally, it requires a conspiracy of circumstances and participants.” — David Chipperfield, Common Ground (Common Ground: A Critical Reader, Marsilio Editori, 2012)
Architect Bijoy Ramachandran has long held that buildings are never made alone, they are negotiated into being, shaped as much by the people who use them as by the hands that design them. It’s a belief he traces to David Chipperfield’s writing on architecture as collaboration, and one that guided his own vision for BIC.
To design a building for public life is to design for people you will never meet, institutions whose needs shift over time, and a city whose relationship to culture keeps changing. Ramachandran’s construction of BIC was an attempt to hold all of this at once: commercial realities and social vision, individual desire and collective purpose. In this session, he revisits the ideas that shaped the space, and what it has meant to watch a building conceived as a conspiracy of circumstances take on a life of its own over the years.
This talk is part of a series marking twenty years of BIC. It is a chance to trace what has changed, what has endured, and how ideas evolve over time. BIC is proud to have been host to conversations that connect culture, ideas, and public life across two decades.
In collaboration with:
Venue: Auditorium
Speaker
Bijoy Ramachandran
Bijoy Ramachandran is an architect based in Bangalore and is a partner at Hundredhands, a studio he founded in 2003, with Sunitha Kondur.
He currently serves on the faculty of architecture at the British School at Rome and is the Design Chair for the post-graduate program at BMS College of Architecture in Bengaluru. Ramachandran has been a panelist at the annual all-India undergraduate thesis review, the Kurula Varkey Forum, at CEPT, Ahmedabad, and serves on the Board of Reviewers of SEED, Kochi and the Board of Studies of the Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, Mumbai.
Ramachandran has a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s degree from BMS College of Architecture; he has also attended the Glenn Murcutt masterclass in Sydney.
In addition to practicing architecture, he has produced three documentary films: two on the celebrated Indian architect Sri B.V. Doshi, ‘Doshi’ (2008) and ‘Doshi: The Second Chapter’ (2019); and one on architectural practice in Bangalore, ‘Architecture and the City: A Bangalore Perspective’ (2005).
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