Anjan Mitra

Anjan Mitra is an architect and urban designer by training, but at heart, he is essentially a designer. Over the last four decades, he has explored diverse fields of design and planning, including product design, interiors, architecture, landscape, heritage conservation, cultural tourism, and urban revitalisation. He firmly believes that responsible design and planning practices can add value and meaningfully transform the way the built environment is conceived and perceived, helping establish or revitalise its social connections. His search for responsible architecture and urban design in the Indian context began with The Appropriate Alternative in 1992 in Kolkata.

To him, design is a thinking process and a collective effort. It is a negotiation between available choices to arrive at the most effective, practical, and implementable alternative—one that enables maximum sustainable value addition. Through his projects, he strives to establish meaningful connections with their larger contexts and bring about positive change through innovation, whether ecological, environmental, or socio-cultural. He believes every project can become a successful one if it is able to unearth the latent potential of the site, its stakeholders, and the programme. This, he believes, is made possible through a design approach that seeks to make corrective gestures, transforming various forms of waste and wastefulness into valuable assets.

For him, research and documentation are integral components of the design process, helping to evolve context-sensitive innovation and out-of-the-box thinking that result in meaningful placemaking.