Towards the end of my hour-long conversation with the founders of Chaal.Chaal.Agency, Sebastián Trujillo-Torres, one-half of the design-research practice, emphatically proclaims, "We need to start educating young professionals to see architecture as a way to address issues and not necessarily as a way to design buildings.” Pivoted on what comes across as an unexacting but resolute declaration, Chaal.Chaal.Agency—working between India and Colombia—functions with the intent of “triggering larger transformations through small interventions”. Founded and headed by Kruti Shah (Indian architect, researcher and academician) and Sebastián Trujillo-Torres (Colombian urban/architectural designer and academician), Chaal.Chaal.Agency eschews canonical architectural vocabularies, processes and intents in favour of pedagogical, community-led projects to ascertain self-sufficient, equitable and cohesive outputs.

The studio’s atypical methodology of approaching each project—both speculative and physical—means that Shah and Trujillo-Torres routinely face vacillating inquiries about the veracity of and need for their work. Recalling their experiences during the initial years of their collaboration, Shah and Trujillo-Torres reveal how they systematically lost a series of design competitions that they participated in, owing to their inclination towards “challenging the fundamental pre-conditions of architecture and urban design rather than complying with the brief”. Trujillo-Torres further shares, "We try to first construct a brief in a collective manner rather than taking a problem at face value.”

What inspires the studio’s cognizant process, apart from their propensity for critical thinking and direct engagement with concerned stakeholders, is a slew of literature and various contemporary practices addressing comparable issues via their work. Some of these practices, cited by Shah, include Delhi-based Social Design Collaborative, Chennai-based Urban Design Collective and Bogotá-based Arquitectura Expandida, among others. On the other hand, the duo’s professional involvement with universities, as faculties, has provided opportunities for them to examine divergent thought processes and ideas, some of which are derived from books such as F Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973); Miguel Sicart’s Play Matters (2014); Jeremy Till, Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider's Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011); Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends (2009); and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968).

These inspirations culminate in a practice that aims at reengineering infrastructural systems across scales and outcomes and between the speculative and the practical to reimagine the contexts that we inhabit, administer solutional propositions, and undertake revitalisation via infrastructural inserts. “We understand infrastructures as the techno-political spaces and processes that allow settlements to work and can range from movable devices, inserts and architectures, to urban and ecological systems,” delineates an autobiographical description of the studio. Further, the studio, owing to its geographical and historical positioning, enquires into the “issues and potentialities particular to Global South urbanisms as templates for global imaginations”.

Chaal.Chaal.Agency designates the studio’s work under two dominant heads: Design-Build and Research-Design. While the former is a “material-oriented transformative intelligence” employed in cognisance of underlying and often unnoticed processes and agencies in the city, the latter is centred around knowledge production and actionable explorations to nurture participatory forms of design thinking.

Over the years, the studio has designed various light infrastructures such as Tehbazari Futures, which seeks to reimagine hawking spaces as a potential field of innovation; Kitaab Khaana, a reading space for children; Portable Otla, an ad-hoc gathering space; and Public Wall Catalizer, an infrastructural insertion to activate the proximal space around tall compound walls.

Amongst some customisable carts built by the studio is the Stree Cart, which is a movable structure designed with modular volumes, hence opening up the possibility to arrange and rearrange the cart; Apni Lari 2.0, conceived as transitional infrastructure for immediate response to humanitarian emergencies; Madam Narangi, a transformable device for street vendors; Pani Lari, a movable public water-filtering system; and Nano, Vachlo and Motto Laris, three distinctly sized carts for street vendors. While Nano is designed to serve as an alternative to pots and buckets carried by women on their heads, Vachlo improves on conventional street carts with a novel steering system and spaces provided for rest and repose. The Motto Lari, on the other hand, is an adaptable street cart with ample space and adjustable side levels for garment display.

Some spatial activations include Gyaan Ashray, a pop-up classroom constructed using minimum resources and energy, and CEPT’s Kavaad, conceived as a spatially shifting architectural object capable of framing myriad stories.

More recently, the studio developed Foraging in the City, an installation conceived for Serendipity Arts Festival 2024. Installed in Panjim, Goa, the project is inspired by Guy Debord's psychogeography and situationist mapping and was undertaken to challenge consumption-driven systems that alienate urban experiences. Shah and Trujillo-Torres scoured Panjim to acquire various overlooked objects in the city and later recomposed them within a hollow cube display space for visitors to levy attention. On the other hand, Chaal.Chaal.Agency’s Of Portable Toolsheds is a participatory project that culminated in a series of portable toolsheds that gamify the processes of surveying, mapping, designing and building.

Additionally, Shah and Trujillo-Torres undertake various speculative projects to encourage design thinking. This often includes documenting and mapping present urban infrastructures and features in order to speculate on the futures they offer. In the realm of pedagogical contributions, the architects additionally dabble in graphic design, illustrations and book layout for various infrastructurally led publications.

In nearly all projects undertaken by the studio, one can find palpable issues being acknowledged and addressed, albeit not without the involvement of key stakeholders. Devoid of the glitz and hedonism that often overwrites functionality in conventional designs, Chaal.Chaal.Agency’s work subtly responds to overlooked issues within urban domains without being afflicted by the need to replicate or replace Occidental and Oriental icons. Instead, it thrives and inspires with its restrained, ideologically amenable and conscientious approach towards intervening in any given context.

Shah and Trujillo-Torres’s trajectory, marked by a calm and consistent pulse, reminded me of Geeta Rao’s character from the Hindi film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005). In a retrospective interview, the film’s director, Sudhir Mishra, quipped, “If somebody asks me who I am in the film, I would say Geeta. [...] I am not a fixer. Geeta is a person who doesn't expect the world to change because she wishes it to. That's why she is the only one left sane and standing in the end. She is not ideologically savage.” Mirroring this gentle tenet, the designers divulge their larger aspiration of developing a novel design vocabulary—defamiliarised from canonical architectural vocabularies and scales—as a lifetime project.

Click on the cover video for a deep dive into the duo's practice and ideologies, and how they subvert the becoming of community architecture in meaningful ways.