Sonal Sundararajan Associate Professor

Sonal Sunderarajan

Associate Professor

Vidwan Profile

https://krvia.irins.org/profile/298033

Interests

Sonal is an architect and urban designer who has been teaching at the KRVIA since 2007 .At the KRVIA she is interested in exploring the possibilities for the sources of architectural thinking within theory, art and experience in order to explore architecture and urbanism as an expanded discipline and practice. She teaches the first year design theory and drawing courses, the fourth year urban design studio as well as the final year design dissertation studios. She is also the Alumni Coordinator at the school. Through her engagement with the trajectories of individual students, is extremely interested in the building up of an idea of architectural practice that is diverse, critically formed and framed through the encounters between the self and the world.

Pedagogy

She is a founding partner at aDRG, a practice based in Mumbai that engages in work of diverse scales and temporalities.She has been involved in architectural practice, pedagogy, research and writing on the city, art and architecture through the years. Her interests range from poetry, writing feminist theory, and drawing.

Milestones

She has been Project Co-ordinator for the Preparation of an Environment Management Plan for the proposed RTDZ, in the urban peripheries, a project that framed the issues of environment through questions of livelihood and local practices, through the Research and Design Cell of the Institute in a study for the MMR-EIS.
She was also the KRVIA co-ordinator for the UrbanLab+ an International network of urban laboratories addressing critical questions facing built environment education.
As a project architect at CRIT, she was involved in a study on redevelopment options for slums in Mumbai, through the case of Korba Mithagar as part of a series of pilot studies for The All India Institute for Local Self government.
She organised the exhibition Explorations in Representation at KRVIA, that was an extension of the work exhibited at the Turning Tables exhibit as part of the Urban Lab+ Collective at the Palazzzo Mora, Venice Biennale in 2012 .
Sonal writes on art and architecture and her writings have appeared in SPADE, Domus, The Mumbai Reader, The Urban Pamphleteer and several other publications