Can architecture ever transcend the exploitative economies that sustain it? The Architekturzentrum Wien showcases Anupama Kundoo’s practice as an answer to this dilemma.
Text: Alexandra Fixl
AK Sangamam © Javier-Callejas
Emerging from India’s post-liberalization milieu the architect Anupama Kundoo established a practice, that even in its early stages, rejected the ‘form-follows-money’ mandate that governs much of contemporary building. By 1989, Kundoo had relocated to the experimental township of Auroville in southern India, whose socio-material and spiritual ethos underpin her practice and serve as a base for Anupama Kundoo Architects. Through her private residence Wall House she explored strategies of abundance. The floor plan of the building is reflected in the Viennese exhibition “Anupama Kundoo: Abundance Not Capital”, curated by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny. Kundoo currently operates from offices in Berlin and Mumbai, she has lectured internationally, and completed over a hundred buildings, concentrated in Auroville and Puducherry, India.
Creativity Co-Housing, ©Javier-Callejas
The house as hypothesis
Set at 1:1 scale, the exhibition at Architekturzentrum Wien opens with a shelter made from untreated casuarina logs bound with coconut rope—a reconstruction of Kundoo’s early Hut Petite Ferme. Visitors continue along terracotta paths with mirrored inlays to a low table, wicker chairs, and traditional craft objects, including 19th-century Chettinad furniture such as tables, carved benches, and suspended swings. Original punctured concrete walls and 2.5 cm-thick hand-crafted Achakal clay-bricks form the two-story wing that gives the Wall House its name. They demonstrate Kundoo’s approach of coupling innovative techniques with locally available materials, bypassing the hollow metrics of so-called industrial perfection. Her buildings combine low- and high-tech approaches, lightweight construction, passive cooling, and regional material cycles that sustain traditional knowledge and local economies. Potted plants stand in the exhibition for trees, while models, material samples, and a film tracing Wall House’s realization extend the narrative beyond the architecture itself. The house stages fundamental questions that lie the focus of the exhibition: How might architecture produce sufficiency rather than scarcity? How could construction escape speculation, commodification, and waste? Does growth alone guarantee prosperity? Kundoo suggests that all resources—materials, techniques, spatial knowledge, and collective capacities—already exist. The challenge is their activation.
Terracotta © Andreas Deffner
Pillars of abundance
The curators of the exhibition structured Kundoo’s typologies of abundance strategies into eight conceptual pillars—knowledge, materials, solutions, aspirations, differences, generosity, nature, and regeneration. Contrasts that are often treated as mutually exclusive intersect in her work, where hybridity and egalitarianism inform design. Rather than replicating international modernism, she exposes the repeated failures of grand master plans, which are conceived by celebrated planners but executed by technocrats, erasing communities from participation. Kundoo’s architecture resists the narcissism of individualized societies, revealing the nexus of site, occupants, labor, capital, and environment across scales. It proposes social and ecological transformation, though without political anchors, the vision risks remaining utopian. Nevertheless, the pillars of abundance represent a shift: from refinement to responsibility, efficiency to care and production to collaboration.
Library NLP, © Javier-Callejas
Reading the catalogue
Visitors can enhance their experience by consulting catalogue, which contains essays that explore the structural entanglements of architecture with extractive logics. Contributors form their analyses around architectural theory, questions of social justice, capitalist systems, environmental sustainability, and decolonial feminist thought. They examine architectures of care and how Kundoo’s work challenges prevailing paradigms. “Abundance Not Capital” uses existing resources to propose an alternative “way of being”, independent of accumulation and consumerism. The imperative is clear: we must build, but differently.
“Abundance Not Capital. The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo”; Angelika Fitz & Elke Krasny (edd.), published on the occasion of the exhibition at Architekturzentrum Wien, 18 September 2025 until 16 February 2026, book design: Alexander Ach Schuh, The MIT Press 2025, paperback, 304 pp., 180 color illustrations, ISBN: 9780262553124
