How to Build an Indian House

A model for designers of mass housing anywhere: how homes can be built in one of the world’s densest cities

This volume focuses on one of Mumbai’s and India’s perennial and most daunting questions: mass housing. How to Build an Indian House documents, analyses and represents robust examples of different housing types in the city. Along with documentary drawings and photographs, architect Sameep Padora developed a series of analytical models in order to understand spatial organization and infrastructure in residential building typologies.

This documentation is particularly pertinent today, given the critical need to address the issue of housing in India. Since this subject is of immense interest to professionals and students alike, the cases studied here range from residential typologies in Mumbai, such as the chawls (originally workers’ housing that has morphed into vibrant communities), to more hybrid examples such as the Swadeshi Market, which demonstrates an interesting multiuse building. These Mumbai typologies challenge architects, planners and designers to test their imagination in thinking about affordable housing.