PRACTICE PROFILE
AUR is an international architecture practice that aims for cultural significance and social relevance. The work critically aims to provide ‘temporal continuity’ and ‘spatial specificity.’
It provides services in architecture, interior design, and urban design. It was founded by Aurgho Jyoti, operates out of New York and New Delhi, and is currently led by Aurgho Jyoti and Subhradip Roy.
AUR’s work includes cultural, social, institutional projects, technology campus, mixed-use development, office buildings, urban housing, and single-family residence. Some notable projects include Wuhan Technology Campus, Buddhist Cultural Heritage projects with the World Bank in Lumbini and Sarnath, Dining Hall for Monks in Berkeley, House in California, Urban Housing High Rise in Bangalore, Office and Apartment Building in Delhi, Storm Shelter, Health Centre, and Agricultural Community Centre in Sundarban, and the Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum.
AUR Founder and Creative Director Aurgho Jyoti was educated as an architect at Harvard, Cornell, and SPA Delhi. He previously worked as a Project Lead and Senior Architect for internationally acclaimed and Pritzker Laureate offices, which include SOM, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Gehry Technologies, Studio Fuksas, and 3Gatti Architecture Studio. His built projects include high rises, institutional, and cultural buildings located in the US, China, Italy, and India. Subhradip Roy, as Director in India, was trained at SPA Delhi, and leads design development and construction documentation of projects, merging local materials with contemporary building technologies. He has extensive experience in residential, commercial, cultural, and landscape projects in India.
PRACTICE PHILOSOPHY
AUR works with ‘time’ in architecture by preserving the collective memory of society to reinforce historical and cultural continuity, by capturing atmospheric phenomena to induce a sense of time, and by accommodating material change as tactile evidence of time. The work is influenced by parallel research in history, sociology, and anthropology.
AUR, और in Hindi, holds multiple meanings. For us, it signals a ‘prompt’ and signifies the ‘other’. AUR is invested in the shifting identities of the 'other' and 'other architectures', working on social and community projects with subaltern marginalised communities of the Indian sub-continent.
AUR’s work engages in critical mediation between architecture, culture, and time, creating interventions that provide ‘spatial specificity’ and ‘temporal continuity.’ Architecture, a cultural production in itself, is perceived as a facilitator for other cultural production.
AUR’s work has a distinct interest in materiality and light, expressed through the interaction of fundamental elements, both natural and architectural. The work addresses traditional domains of site, context, and program, through the dichotomies of the global-local and the urban-rural condition. The work is grounded by an anthropological interest in the sensorial and how people use and move through space, and in turn, get consciously and subconsciously influenced.
