Architect Rahul Mehrotra is no stranger to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Principal founder of Mumbai-based RMA Architects, he is renowned for projects of varied concerns and scales such as the Hathigaon housing for mahouts and elephants near the Amber Palace, Jaipur, and the various interventions to the CSMVS campus in Mumbai. In the course of each of his Biennale appearances (in 2008, 2016, 2018, and 2020-21), he critiqued and theorised urban change, questioned the notion of permanence in architecture, and broke down the rigid hierarchies in spacemaking — bringing new ways of looking at India’s trajectories of urbanisation.
The 18th edition of the Biennale Architettura, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko, is themed ‘The Laboratory of the Future’. Her vision is to foreground previously under-represented places and peoples by exploring alternatives in decolonisation, decarbonisation, and presenting ways of doing architecture that are different from the usual consumption of natural resources. In response, Mehrotra, along with cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote and designer Isabel Oyuela-Bonzani, is presenting Loops of Practice, Thresholds of Habitability.
