Acclaimed Indian architect Anupama Kundoo has been named as the recipient of the 2021 RIBA Charles Jencks Award by the Jencks Foundation and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

The award is given to an individual or practice who has simultaneously made a major contribution to both the theory and practice of architecture.

Anupama Kundoo will receive the award on Tuesday, 2 November at 6.30pm (BST) after which she will deliver a lecture and be interviewed by a critic in collaboration with the New Architecture Writers program, with questions from an online audience. 

The architect was previously spoke to WAC’s Netherlands Reporter Lola Kleindouwel to discuss her recent exhibition and the notion of “time” in architecture as part of WAC’s Live Instagram Series. 

Titled Taking Time In Architecture, two episodes of the interview can be watched on the Episode I and Episode II on IGTV.

Anupama Kundoo trained as an architect in Mumbai before building a substantial body of work in the experimental town of Auroville, in Puducheery from 1990 – 2005. 

Working in this environment, she developed a long-term research project into sustainable and building technologies with an experimental approach to material reuse and sustainable construction methods. 

She has taken this research into design units and workshops in universities around the world including at Parsons The New School for Design in New York, as a senior lecturer in the University of Queensland, Davenport Visiting Professor at Yale University and she is currently Professor at the FH Potsdam. 

Kundoo’s work and design process was recently on show in a exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, with a monograph called Anupama Kundoo: Taking Time: The Architects Studio