Indian architect Anupama Kundoo has spent decades proving that poverty of capital doesn't mean poverty of ideas, craftsmanship, or architectural diversity. Born in 1967 in Pune, Maharashtra, Kundoo rejected the construction boom in India's major cities even as a student in the late 1980s. Instead of pursuing abundant job opportunities in Mumbai, she moved south to build a simple hut that served as both home and office in the utopian planned city of Auroville on the east coast of Tamil Nadu. She was just twenty-three years old.
From the beginning, Kundoo focused on using local resources and challenging the Western perception of India as a poor country. She refused to equate lack of capital with lack of innovation, viewing wealth as a matter of definition rather than financial resources. Her breakthrough came in 2000 with the Wall House, built on the outskirts of Auroville using locally-made materials and innovative design techniques.
The Vienna Architecture Center is currently showcasing Kundoo's extraordinary career in an exhibition curated by director Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny. The curators traveled to Auroville and stayed in the Wall House to experience its atmosphere firsthand. Their exhibition transforms the baroque brick hall built by Fischer von Erlach into a space that captures the essence of South India, combining original-scale exhibits, furniture, models, and building material samples into a naturally-toned, calming environment.
The airy Wall House, named after its two-story unplastered brick walls, can be opened on multiple sides using folding elements. The clay bricks are fired on-site in temporary kilns that are dismantled brick by brick after the firing process and built into structures, then disassembled again to make room for fields. These thin, irregular bricks, when skillfully assembled, can bear heavy loads. The same principle applies to the vaulted ceiling made of conical, hollow clay cones that interlock and are protected on the outside by a layer of ferrocement.
Ferrocement, dating back to the early days of reinforced concrete construction, consists of wire mesh similar to that used for chicken coops, embedded in a cement layer barely three centimeters thick. Kundoo uses this simple, inexpensive material for many purposes, making it ideal for lightweight construction such as interior modules for apartments. When cleverly folded, ferrocement can also bear heavy loads, and with the addition of pigments, it becomes a color element supporting modern, site-specific architectural language.
The Wall House became Kundoo's key to international breakthrough. For the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, she reconstructed the Wall House one-to-one in record time. Her local craftsmen had packed all the building materials into containers and shipped them to the lagoon. The architecture world was amazed and felt comfortable in the building. By then, Kundoo had already established herself in the West, having earned her doctorate in earth construction at the Technical University of Berlin in the mid-2000s.
After guest professorships at Yale and Columbia, Kundoo now holds a professorship at TU Berlin and operates offices in Berlin, Mumbai, and Pondicherry. However, she has built nothing in the West so far, concentrating on her homeland. The exhibition includes a film where Kundoo shares insights into her private life, including caring for her seriously ill mother in Auroville until her death. Within a few years, she also lost her sister and father, experiences that gave her architectural thinking a new direction.
These personal trials led Kundoo to focus even more on holding up a mirror to the West. She argues that Western architectural models and construction industries dominate the planet, but questions what has been gained by this dominance. She believes there is sufficient local expertise for needs-based construction worldwide, even without regulations. Kundoo calls building codes, which became pioneers of the globalized world through colonialism, a "broad-spectrum antibiotic." This critique applies to Germany's current 3,900 building codes, which many German architects and builders increasingly complain about while seeking remedies through "simple building" approaches.
In Auroville, Kundoo has built the town hall, a youth hostel, and residential complexes among other projects. Now the city faces pressure from the Indian government to commit to growth to finally reach the planned population of 50,000 residents envisioned at its founding in 1968. Currently, 3,000 people from sixty nations live there. A recent Arte documentary showed large-scale construction work, including a ring road and plans for a lake to surround the interdenominational Matrimandir temple at the city center, though water supply remains problematic.
Kundoo argues that global urbanization is epidemic, but reinforced concrete cannot be the building material of the future. She counters the construction industry's profit-seeking and ignorance toward climate change with resistant thinking and planning. As a self-confident, realistic prophet, she says India has taught her to accept her own insignificance. The exhibition conveys the feeling that it might be worthwhile to pursue other, more egalitarian ways of thinking.
The exhibition "Wealth Instead of Capital. Anupama Kundoo" runs at the Vienna Architecture Center until February 16, 2026, with an accompanying English-language book published by MIT Press available at the exhibition for 38 euros.
