Anupama Kundoo
Anupama Kundoo (born in Pune in 1967) is an Indian architect. Biography. Anupama Kundoo studied architecture at the Sir J. J. College of Architecture, University of Bombay and received her degree in 1989. She was awarded the Vastu Shilpa Foundation Fellowship in 1996 for her thesis on "Urban Eco-Community: Design and Analysis for Sustainability". She got her doctoral degree from the Technical University of Berlin in 2008. Kundoo established herself as an architect in Auroville in 1990 where she designed and built many buildings with "energy and water efficient infrastructure" adaptations. She worked here from middle of  1990 till 2002. Kundoo taught at the Technical University, Berlin, and Darmstadt in Hesse during 2005. She worked as Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design, New York until 2011 then moving to Australia as a senior lecturer in the University of Queensland. In 2014, she shifted to Europe and began working at the European School of Architecture and Technology at the Universidad Camilo José Cela in Madrid. Work. Her approach to building design is based on material research that minimizes environmental effects. Her basic design approach is to use "waste materials, unskilled labour and local communities". One  of the notable buildings built for her own residence is titled the "Wall House", built in a community area of with a built-in space of constructed for one million Rupees in 2000, in Auroville for communal living. This house is L-Shaped in the plan, has a courtyard in the middle; while it is modern in concept it adopts traditional "vernacular" use of materials such as compressed earth, concrete, and steel. The bathroom is set in an open-to-sky design, with smooth merging with the interior and external spaces and landscaped, giving it both a modern and a  regional appearance. A full-sized replica of her Wall House was made by hand and exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. New York Times called it as "a gem among rubble". Another of her theme is "Liberty" which presents a reading place as a free library, a creation built with three types of trees fixed in the centre of a square space. The trees' trunks and branches are made from steel and the leaves made of salvaged books, with the floor made of concrete. This was exhibited at the Placa de Salvador Segui in Barcelona during June–September 2014