Around the world, the architect profession had been dominated by men until the 21st century. The advent of various interior design concepts & sophisticated wall designs after the 21st century inspired many women to get into this profession and pierce their name as an architect on much-renowned architecture. With the statistics being taken all over the world, the licensed women architect percentage in India is more when compared to several other countries i.e.) around 44% of India’s 58,646 registered architects are women. Even in developed countries like the US, the UK, and Germany the percentage of registered women architects is only 25, 32 and 21 % respectively. Here are some of the renowned women architects from India who have achieved greater milestone & have bagged handful of awards across countries.
Brinda Somaya was born just after the post-independence on June 28th, 1949. She completed her B. ARCH and Master of Arts from Mumbai university and Smith College (United States) respectively. Her architecture works not only restrict to Corporate, institutional and industrial campuses but also in public spaces like rebuilding parks, pavements, and parks. Some of her renowned constructions are TCS (Mumbai), Nalanda International school (Vadodara) and Zensar Technologies (Pune). She has also bagged a hand full of awards for her unique designs in construction. A few of her awards are listed below
AWARDS
Shimul Javeri Kadri was born on October 18th, 1962 in Mumbai. She studied bachelor’s in architecture at the Academy of Architecture (Mumbai) and pursued Urban planning at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. After she returned from the US, she set up her firm known as “SJK Architects”. Kadri has a unique style of designing and constructing buildings using natural elements, materials and cultural contexts. She has a vast experience in handling a lot of projects that include educational institutions, bungalows and industrial buildings. One of her famous architecture that was noticed around the globe was Automobile Design Studio for the firm -Mahindra and Mahindra Limited. This design won the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design Award in 2016. Some of the other awards bagged by her are listed below,
AWARDS
Sheila Sri Prakash was born on July 6th, 1955 at Bhopal in India. She studied architecture at the Anna University and pursued design execution program from Harvard University in 1973. At that time, there was a bias against women entering the architecture field. Because of her perseverance, she landed into architecture field and today she is one of the leading architects in India; designed and completed more than 1200 projects, most of those are for local arts and heritage. One of her greatest achievements is designing a home in 1993 in Chennai with recycled materials and it was the pioneer system for rainwater harvesting and later it was made compulsory in every home by the state government of Tamil Nadu in 2003
AWARDS
With several numbers of women architects in India, they have set a new benchmark for women. Yet, there are still some women, especially in rural areas searching an option to showcase their raw talents in various fields. When such situation prevails, 15 women from Sirudamur village (near Thindivanam) had gone through a 7-day rigorous training at NIPPON PRO Training Academy; a project named n-Shakthi which empowered those rural women to become a certified wall painter and now they have taken up wall painting as their profession. Likewise, every woman should follow their passion & get into various domains as they wish; to become a paragon to the future generation.