Studio Mumbai, founded by Bijoy Jain, works with a human infrastructure of skilled artisans, technicians, and draftsmen who design and build the work directly. This group shares an environment created through an iterative process, where ideas are explored via large-scale mock-ups, models, material studies, sketches, and drawings. Projects are developed by careful consideration of place and practice, drawing from traditional skills, local building techniques and materials, and an ingenuity arising from limited resources. Bijoy Jain was born in Mumbai, India, and received his MArch from Washington University in St Louis in 1990.
He worked in Los Angeles and London from 1989 to 1995 and returned to India in 1995 to found his practice. The work of Studio Mumbai has been presented at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition (2010) organized by the Venice Biennale and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and has received several awards, including the Global Award in Sustainable Architecture (2009) finalist for the 11th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010), winner of the seventh Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award, Finland (2012), winner of the third BSI Swiss Architecture Award (2012), and, most recently, the Grande Medaille d’Or from the Academie d’Architecture, Paris (2014). The University of Hasselt, Belgium, bestowed an honorary doctorate on Bijoy Jain in 2014. He has taught in Copenhagen (2012), at Yale University (2013), and in Mendrisio, Switzerland (2014 and 2015).