Having worked as a professional architect for two years in one of the largest cities in the world, Also having recently graduated, I recognize the need for innovation and advancing equity in designing spaces for people. As an architect and an urban designer, I am deeply passionate about community justice and sustainability. A community centered approach has been at the core of all projects I have worked on. I have experience working on multiple residential and institutional projects of varying scales and I hope to bring this knowledge working with the design studio to focus on creating equitable spaces for living. I hope to learn at the cutting edge of design innovation and to contribute to making our cities better habitats for living for all communities and the environment.

I graduated as an Architect from CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India in 2020. My drive to understand workings of a city and the larger role of design started as an exchange student at ETH Zürich while working on an Ideal City Studio. I worked on a team analyzing and designing selected Ideal city projects that concluded in a studio publication. This led me to work with Rahul Mehrotra Associates as a project architect, in Mumbai where I worked on design and execution of projects varying from single family estates to large scale educational institutions. I was the sole architect working on an estate of 2 acres with a 10,000 sq-ft single family home. I was also the sole project lead, working on a 30,000 sq-ft administration extension to a Pharmaceutical Factory. I have also worked professionally with an interdisciplinary team designing and executing a residential estate and a golf course on a 4 acre site. Through these projects I have juggled across multiple professional roles and worked with diverse teams to see the project through from the design stage to execution. I have also pursued my passion for sustainability through design competitions. Our team was selected to present our project at the Design Resilience in Asia symposium in Taiwan. Our project looked at redefining the strained relationship between people and water systems in Chennai to create a new standard of living sustainably.

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I am focusing on expanding my knowledge beyond design through courses that look at land entitlement and development. I have also worked with non-profit organizations in the Salinas Valley to propose targeted housing solutions for the housing crisis across the valley. These experiences introduced me to the challenges of executing a project outside the realm of design and to broaden my perspective to include knowledge from multiple professions. My graduate thesis focused on countering the infrastructural isolation of West Oakland and empowering the community to counter injustices through constructed speculative scenarios that tie a lost culture with a utopian future. These projects have really helped me look beyond the field of design and to blur professional boundaries to use urban design as a tool to empower lives and solve problem holistically. 

My professional experience has helped me develop strong visualization skills and I am proficient with a broad range of rendering softwares like V-ray, Lumion, Enscape and Adobe Suite. As an Urban design student, I am also well versed in QGIS and ArcGIS and have professionally worked with 3-D visualizing tools like Rhino, Revit and Sketchup. I am an ambitious and enthusiastic worker, and have consistently performed well under pressure. 

Thank you for your time. 

Varun