November 15 , 2025
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Aditya Birla Auditorium | On-Site
This panel will examine how architectural styles introduced from abroad are indigenized, transforming to reflect local cultural, environmental, and social contexts. It will explore the historical, economic, and societal factors that enable such adaptation and integration. Panelists will discuss how these hybrid forms shape urban identity, becoming central to a city’s heritage and lived experience. The conversation will highlight the interplay between global influences and local traditions, showing how architecture evolves over time, responding to climate, materials, community needs, and cultural practices. This exploration underscores the dynamic relationship between design, society, and place-making in contemporary cities.
Atul Kumar is Founder Trustee of Art Deco Mumbai Trust, a not-for-profit charitable trust that has created a public repository dedicated to Mumbai’s Art Deco. His work explores the city’s modern history, shaping both its built form and its cosmopolitan identity. Actively engaged in civic issues, he has championed heritage conservation and its UNESCO World Heritage nomination. He has pioneered extensive research on the Art Deco style, leading the documentation of over 1500 Art Deco buildings in Mumbai, sparking vital conversations on urban culture and living heritage. He is on the Board of Directors of the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies (ICADS) and Chairs their Preservation Committee.
Sundaram Tagore is a art historian, gallerist, and an award-winning filmmaker. A descendant of the influential poet and Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogue through his contributions to numerous exhibitions as well as his contemporary art galleries and their multicultural and multidisciplinary events. Tagore’s debut film, The Poetics of Color: Natvar Bhavsar, An Artist’s Journey, premiered at the MIAAC Film Festival in New York City in 2010 and garnered several festival awards. His second film, Louis Kahn’s Tiger City, a feature-length documentary on the renowned architect Louis I. Kahn featuring Academy Award-winner Debra Winger, debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019.
Tinaz Nooshian is the Creative Director of Art Deco Alive!, a first-of-its-kind, cross-continental cultural festival currently ongoing in Mumbai. She leads programming and curation for the festival which draws from the visuals arts, preservation, education and community engagement to unite the shared Art Deco architectural heritage of Mumbai and Miami. In a two-decade-long media career, Tinaz has helmed leading publications including The Times of India and Mid-day as Editor. Mid-day’s first woman editor, she is credited with the newspaper's dramatic turnaround, making it the only single-origin publication to make it to India’s top 10 English dailies.
Sean Anderson was Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) before becoming an Associate Professor at Cornell University. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, with a PhD in African Art, he has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates. In October this year, his large-scale curatorial effort for Bvlgari opened at the NMACC Mumbai: Serpenti Infinito. At MoMA, he co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition ever at MoMA to highlight the work of African American and African Diasporic architects. Sean has written books on South Asian ritual sculpture, the modern architecture of colonial Eritrea and co-edited a volume dedicated to contemporary architecture and design in Sri Lanka.
