Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect based in Boston and Mumbai and he has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD where he is currently Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. Born in 1959, Mehrotra grew up in Lucknow, a city in Northern India and an important cultural and artistic hub. His father was a manager at a large machine tool company. The family moved a lot following Mehrotra senior’s frequent promotions, which led to changing residences owned by his company. Besides a few years in Lucknow and Delhi, they lived in different neighborhoods within Mumbai.
Mehrotra was educated at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad (CEPT) and graduated from Harvard’s GSD in 1987. Following his apprenticeships in Boston and Mumbai, he opened his practice, RMA Architects in Mumbai in 1990, just one year before economic liberalization in India was initiated and the economy shifted from socialist to capitalist. The architect and educator famously identified architecture in this new period in India as “the landscape of impatient capital.” He stands out as a critical transitional figure in 20th-century Indian architecture—the key link between the architects of the Nehru generation and those whose careers started already after the county’s economic liberalization.
