About the Institute

Imparting education at Institute of Design, Environment and Architecture (IDEA) is considered to be a two-way process involving both teachers and students. Teachers engage with the students and endeavor towards finding solutions to complex as well as day-to-day problems linked to human habitation. This approach helps make for a more interactive and experimental model of education. Along with a potent team of innovators and collaborators, IDEA has focused on developing new teaching methodologies and redesigning the curriculum of architecture education in general.

Here, we believe in an institution not only being a place to acquire knowledge but in being a place of self-learning as well. We perceive design both as a self-referential discourse as well as spatial abstraction of activity. Students are encouraged to think about architecture in the context of space and time. A research-based hands-on approach is taken where students deal with real life issues of the society so that they develop into well-rounded professionals who can be assets not only to the profession of architecture but to the nation as a whole.

The collaborative studies with various national and international institutions is one of the ways of making our students more and more aware of the global scenarios and thus making them better for the present and enabling them for the future.

We have relished talking and writing about the majesty of the colonial architecture of Bombay or the glitter of Luteyens’s Delhi. But, rarely the common people of India have been the central theme of our imagination and creativity. Largely, the profession has fallen short, on many fronts, of establishing itself as a service which is important for the masses like the that of doctors, lawyers, economists and more and thus its “relevance” in a larger discourse. At IDEA, we believe that one of the bigger challenges for the profession of architecture in general is to establish, before anything else, its relevance in the society as whole rather than only for a specific class of the society.

We have, for a long time, missed out on comprehending the dimension of time. The times have changed, and right now the country is going through an urban crisis. Our cities are going through profound transformations and there is a dramatic change in their demographics. This means that we need to understand the shelters and the neighborhoods more than the villas and the mansions. There are clearly a far bigger number of people below poverty line living in our cities than our villages. On a completely contrasting front, India ranks third largest in the World in the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and seventh in the nominal GDP. Also, it is classified as “Newly Industrialized Country” by most of the economists of the world. Our sole objective should thus be to deal with these paradoxes and respond to newly emerging building needs.