Abundance, Not Capital. Anupama Kundoo

Architecture has long been a driving force for innovation and growth and has become the materialization of global capital. Around the world, the construction industry exploits natural resources and labor. At the same time, many people can no longer afford their homes, which become tools of finance and products for investment. How could building become so destructive for humans and nature and what can architects do to counter this? The work of the architect Anupama Kundoo is an example of doing architecture differently. Her work resists the normative standards of industrialized resource regimes and technologies just as much as binary norms of beauty that require architects to be either innovative or traditional, either ecological or industrial.

Anupama Kundoo grew up in Mumbai, where she studied architecture in the mid-1980s. She moved to the experimental town of Auroville in southern India in 1990, where she set up her office, Anupama Kundoo Architects, at the age of twenty-three. She has been teaching at prestigious universities worldwide, has exhibited her work several times at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and has received numerous awards. She is currently operating offices in Berlin, Germany, Mumbai and Puducherry, India, but the vast majority of her built work can be found in Auroville and Puducherry, India.

In Anupama Kundoo’s buildings, wealth does not lie in expensive materials and perfected industrial products, but from the innovative use of materials and techniques that are locally available in abundance. She accomplishes this through the combination of high tech and low tech, the further development of traditional building techniques, inventive lightweight construction, and regional material cycles. Her projects are built knowledge for a new relationship between time, money, and material—both for regions in which there is an urgent need for cost-effective and sustainable construction to ensure basic supplies, and for regions where the focus is on tasks such as conversion and repair. The exhibition enables Kundoo’s lively architecture to be experienced sensually and is a call for doing architecture otherwise.

Curators: Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny
Project coordination: Agnes Wyskitensky

Publication: Abundance, not Capital. The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo, ed. by
Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Architekturzentrum Wien, MIT Press, 2025.

Photographs and texts from the curatorial field research of Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, together with material from the architect’s office, develop a new framework for the analysis of architecture. Essays by international authors address the issues of architecture and capital, CO2 colonialism, working conditions in the construction industry, modernist utopias in urban planning, as well as architectures of care, and provide insights into Indian architectural discourses.