Parul Kiri Roy is an architect academician and art historian. After her training as an architect, she studied History of Art from Kala Bhavana, VisvaBharati, Santiniketan. On one hand,this experience connected her to the ‘roots of Indian culture’ and re-established her identity and on the other, it widened her horizons further, enhancing her artistic and design sensibilities. She primarily engages with the idea of architecture as an outcome of occupied space, of people’s needs and user experience of the built environment. In her work and studio, she constantly strives to clarify the relationship between the intangible qualities of space perceived and the tangible aspects of the frame delineating the space. She investigates into the realm of memory, the pastness of the past as a precursor of the present, seeing how history carries relevance to contemporary times informing the practice of architecture. Parul is also involved with study of vernacular settlements, guiding students to understand the inter-relationships between morphological, cultural and life patterns in a place. Representation of architecture is another of her interest areas, from the content and quality of drawings of the built object, analytical diagrams to understand space, documentation of settlements, to how architects represent the profession and themselves in society. Art for her is a means and not an end in itself, to engage and clarify concepts through the processes of making. She is currently an assistant professor in the Dept. of Architecture, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and is working on her research exploring the correlation between education and all that informs the practice of architecture in our country.
