ANUPAMA KUNDOO. Abundance not Capital

What does it mean to build without exploitation—of people, of nature, of resources? The exhibition Anupama Kundoo. Abundance not Capital at the Architekturzentrum Wien takes this question as its starting point and unfolds the work of one of India’s most visionary architects. Through conversations between architect Anupama Kundoo, Az W director Angelika Fitz, and curator Elke Krasny, the film offers a profound encounter with an architecture that redefines wealth—not as accumulation, but as knowledge, consciousness, and human ingenuity.

Born in Mumbai in 1967, Kundoo chose an unconventional path early in her career. Rather than joining the booming urban building industry, she moved to Auroville in South India, where she began developing an architecture rooted in experimentation, community, and care. Her work there—ranging from the celebrated Wall House to inventive low-tech structures—demonstrates how local materials and traditional skills can generate solutions that are both technically sophisticated and socially responsive.

Kundoo’s practice resists nostalgia while reclaiming the intelligence embedded in craft. A brick, she reminds us, is never just a brick—it embodies histories of labor, extraction, and transformation. Her architecture is a call to rethink materiality as a dialogue between human and natural resources, between engineering precision and the poetry of making.

Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny frame this approach as a “radical alternative beyond the logic of capital”—a vision of abundance that challenges the myths of scarcity and growth on which our current systems depend. The exhibition, and this film, invite viewers not only to see architecture differently but to feel it: through 1:1 reconstructions, material samples, and spaces that shift from public to intimate, echoing Kundoo’s own understanding of architecture as a practice of peace, curiosity, and generosity.

This film offers a true insight into the oeuvre and thinking of an architect who has chosen to build not for capital, but for human beings.

https://www.azw.at/

Interviewee: Anupama Kundoo, Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny
Artworks by: Anupama Kundoo

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Helmut Feier, Wolfgang Haas, Ewa Stern, Melvin Urregg,
Production country: Austria, Vienna