The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture is pleased to kick off its Fall 2015 Lectures and Exhibitions series with a discussion from Rahul Mehrotra. Mehrotra is a practicing architect and educator. He works in Mumbai and teaches at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he is Professor of Urban Design as well as a member of the steering committee of Harvard’s South Asia Initiative. His practice, RMA Architects, founded in 1990, has executed a range of diverse projects that have engaged many issues, multiple constituencies, and varying scales, from interior design and architecture to urban design, conservation and planning. As Trustee of the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI), and Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR), both based in Mumbai, Mehrotra continues to be actively involved as an activist in the civic and urban affairs of the city.

The approach to "Working in Mumbai" has been to actually use the city and region as a generator of practice--as a way to evolve an approach and architectural vocabulary that draws its nourishment from a more elastic definition of the profession which sees multiple disciplines as being simultaneously valid in engaging with this kinetic landscape. The attempt is to combine materials; to juxtapose conventional craftsmanship with industrial materials and traditional spatial arrangements with contemporary space organization; and, to explore how architecture can be used as an instrument to resist the polarized conditions in our cities. In short: to give expression to the pluralism and dualities that so vividly characterize the Indian landscape.