Water taught me to design

Some architects learn from books, others from buildings, but a few learn directly from the land around them.

For Amala Babu, growing up in Kerala meant growing up with water. The monsoon was more than a season: it shaped daily life, decided how spaces were used, and showed her that architecture could work with the climate instead of against it. Those early lessons became the base of her design approach and have guided her work as an architect and urban designer across many parts of India.

In this conversation with Studio Matrx, Amala shares memories of rainy days, lessons from Kerala's traditional architecture, and explains why resilience is a mindset, not a feature. She moves between her own life and her practice, showing how water still shapes the way she reads sites, designs cities, and thinks about a future built to respond to the climate.

Childhood & early influences

A conversation about memory, place, and the quiet lessons of growing up with water.

A home was never static. It responded to its ever-changing environment.

You grew up in Kerala, a place where rain is not an event but a season. What are your earliest memories of the monsoon, and how did they shape your understanding of home and shelter?

My earliest memory of the monsoon was sensory rather than consciously architectural. Growing up in Kerala, rain wasn't something that simply arrived — the season slowly took over our lives, a routine guest we expected every year. I still remember the sound of rain on the Mangalore-tiled roof of my ancestral house, the way daylight flattened into a soft grey even at noon. Each school year began with the monsoon, and that brought a specific rhythm to life: clothes drying indoors, windows opening and closing, a constant negotiation with wind and rain.

I began to associate shelter with performance rather than permanence. A home was never static; it responded to its ever-changing environment. Verandas were transitional spaces where you could feel the softness of the rain from within the safety of the house. The raised plinth was never an aesthetic feature — it was a quiet response to the monsoon.

Later, when I became more aware of architecture, I realised the ideas I had absorbed instinctively were the basics of sustainable design. In hindsight, that is where my understanding of ‘home' began — not as protection from the weather, but as a calibrated relationship with it.

Looking back, do you think growing up amidst rain unconsciously influenced your architectural thinking?

Yes, of course — in a very gradual, almost unnoticed way. It didn't feel like an influence then; it was simply the way of life. Growing up in Kerala, you develop a spatial awareness of water and the environment. You start reading terrain, slopes, thresholds and materials differently. Tiled roofs, deep overhangs, courtyards — these weren't design moves I learned in school. They were things I had already seen working, in real time, every monsoon. Later, in my studies and practice, I began to put into words what I had noticed without realising it. So the monsoon didn't just influence how I think about architecture — it was the foundation for it.

What led you to architecture, and were there mentors, buildings or experiences that shaped your early design philosophy?

My path to architecture was a slow accumulation of curiosity, observation and exposure. As a child I was drawn to the built environment, not in a technical sense but in terms of atmosphere and memory — how a space made me feel. The architecture books and magazines in my father's library shaped my early imagination; they introduced architecture as something visual and cultural, not merely functional.

A strong early influence was encountering Laurie Baker's work on trips to Trivandrum. His buildings were radically honest — low-cost, climate-responsive, vernacular — and their commitment to climate and to people stayed with me. Later, discovering Charles Correa and Geoffrey Bawa expanded that understanding. So there wasn't a single mentor; a set of influences collectively shaped how I began to think of design as something responsible and responsive.

Building in a land of rain

When climate is no longer a challenge to overcome, but a foundation for design thinking.

Water is not an obstacle to architecture; it is one of its greatest teachers.

During your education and early professional years, when did you first realise that climate and water needed to be central to the design process rather than secondary?

Designing in Kerala feels fundamentally different because climate is not an external condition — it is an active, almost continuous presence that shapes everyday life and spatial behaviour. The most immediate factor is rain and humidity. Unlike other parts of India where the monsoon is a short season, in Kerala and the Western Ghats water is constant, intense and persistent. It changes how buildings age, how materials perform, how spaces are used over time. You cannot treat water as occasional stress — it has to be the baseline of your design. Compared with other regions I've worked in, such as Himachal and Delhi, where climate often pushes towards insulation or enclosure, Kerala demands openness and adaptability.

At what stage of a project do you begin thinking about water, drainage and rainfall?

For me, water is not a technical layer added later. It is part of the site's first reading. Even before form and programme are discussed in detail, I try to understand how water behaves there — reading the contours, the soil, the existing drainage patterns, which reveal how the site negotiates with rainfall. From there, water shapes the planning itself: where the buildings sit, how open spaces are formed, how circulation is structured. Even in urban-design projects this scales up — water becomes part of the larger landscape strategy, linking public spaces, shaping edges, and building resilience rather than mere mitigation.

Do you see rain as a challenge to overcome, or as a design opportunity?

I don't see rain as a challenge — framing it that way leads to rigid, unresponsive design. For me rain is a design condition you learn to work with, and once you see it that way it becomes generative. It informs how spaces are arranged, how you move between them, how materials are selected. I'd call rain a material, and a time-based layer of design.

Water taught me to design

Growing up with the monsoon, studying vulnerable landscapes and working across diverse terrains gradually turned water from an environmental condition into a design philosophy.

Water taught me to think in gradients, rather than boundaries.

The title of this interview is “Water taught me to design.” What does that phrase mean to you personally?

It's a reflection of how I learned to read and respond to space. Water taught me to be grounded in my design. You can't fully control it; if you fight it with rigid design, it will eventually find its way through. The flooding our cities now experience after even short spells of rain speaks volumes — Bengaluru and Delhi, where years of planning tried to bypass natural drainage systems like ponds and rivers, have seen the consequences in harsh floods.

Water also taught me to think in gradients rather than boundaries. It doesn't recognise the clean edges our drawings do; it moves through transitions. That shifted how I understand architecture — as a set of negotiated thresholds between different conditions. Over time this became a lens through which I structure the whole design process, rather than just a problem to solve.

Over the years, what are the most important lessons water has taught you as an architect?

A few quiet fundamentals. The first: you cannot design against natural systems for long — water never moves along the rigid lines of our drawings, and breaking those boundaries ends in destruction. The second: buildings and cities are never finished products. They keep changing, so you have to think in terms of performance over time, anticipating how a building ages and weathers.

It has also taught me about equity. In one academic project, working with the fishing community of Chellanam in Kerala, flooding was not just a technical issue — it affected livelihoods, safety and dignity directly. Designing with water also means asking who is most vulnerable to it, and how spatial decisions can reduce or amplify that vulnerability.

Has there ever been a project where rain exposed a flaw in your assumptions and changed the way you design?

Working on heavily contoured sites in Himachal, where water has a fiercer face, I had to relearn what Kerala and Delhi's flatter terrain had taught me. On such slopes a heavy spell can trigger landslides, and a small obstruction — a building blocking natural drainage — can cause a sizeable man-made calamity. Those lessons will help me re-examine Kerala's built environment under climate change, where we expect heavier, more sudden monsoons and longer summers.

Water is patient, adaptive and persistent. Are these qualities relevant to architecture?

I'd go further and say they are necessary. Architecture demands patience — in understanding a site, testing ideas, letting decisions mature; water reminds us the most enduring systems are rarely the fastest. Adaptability is the most directly relevant quality: buildings and cities are never quite what the paper said, constantly reinterpreted by people, weather and changing needs, and if architecture is too rigid it fails under pressure. And persistence teaches us to think beyond the moment of completion, to the changes a building is bound to undergo later.

Learning from Kerala

From sloping roofs and raised plinths to canals, ponds and interconnected ecosystems, the region offers lessons that reach far beyond architecture.

Read the landscape closely enough and it will teach you the design.

Traditional Kerala architecture is admired for its climate responsiveness. What lessons from vernacular architecture remain most relevant today?

In Kerala's vernacular, climate responsiveness isn't an added layer — it is the core logic of how spaces are formed. The passive-cooling lessons still matter: the orientation of the building, the sloped roofs, deep overhangs, the nadumuttam or central courtyard, the placement of functions, the careful orientation of openings. These aren't stylistic elements; they are functional responses to heat and rain. Contemporary architecture tends to lean on mechanical services, but the vernacular reminds us that comfort can largely be achieved through form, orientation and material intelligence.

The materials are deeply contextual too — timber, laterite, Mangalore tiles — and they age well in a wet climate when used properly, letting buildings absorb age rather than resist it aggressively. Above all the vernacular is observant. It doesn't impose abstract ideas on the climate; it listens to it. That is something we still need to return to, even as our technologies and scales change.

What mistakes do contemporary architects make when they borrow traditional forms without understanding their climatic logic?

The most common is treating traditional architecture as a visual language rather than a climatic, spatial system. Sloped roofs and courtyards are lifted as aesthetic references, but their performance logic isn't carried forward — a sloped roof in concrete or GI sheet defeats the very purposes it once served: shedding heavy rain and cooling through breathable clay tiles.

Another mistake is extracting a fragment and neglecting the system that supported it. A nadumuttam is not just an open-to-sky void; it is part of a larger environmental network of light, ventilation, rainwater management and social structure. Placed in a different climate or plan without adaptation, it becomes symbolic rather than functional. And there's a tendency to romanticise the vernacular as static or nostalgic, when traditional systems are in fact highly adaptive and context-specific — freezing them into style removes that flexibility. The deeper problem is not understanding why these forms exist. So the lesson, for me, is that if we borrow, we also have to translate.

Are there traditional materials or construction practices that still outperform many modern alternatives?

Yes. Laterite is an excellent example — used correctly it performs beautifully in Kerala's humidity, breathable and locally available, weathering in a way that feels like gradual ageing rather than decay. Against some high-embodied-energy modern bricks that trap moisture or need frequent replacement, it often proves more stable over the long term. Timber such as teak, jackwood and rosewood is another: it outperforms synthetic substitutes in thermal comfort, and traditional joinery allows repair and replacement at the component level rather than full demolition — a maintainability we often lose today. What matters is that these materials work as part of an integrated system; extract them without that systemic understanding and you lose much of their effectiveness.

Floods, resilience & the future

As cities grow and climate patterns become less predictable, architects must rethink how they design, plan and build.

Resilience is not about resisting water — it is about learning to live with it.

How did the 2018 Kerala floods influence architectural thinking, both in the profession and in your own practice?

The 2018 floods were pivotal in opening up the conversation on Kerala's urban resilience and disaster mitigation. Architects, planners and policymakers began placing far more emphasis on resilience, sustainability and climate adaptation, and the Rebuild Kerala Development Programme of 2019 set out a strategic roadmap in the aftermath. Within the profession the conversation shifted decisively towards climate resilience — a renewed focus on sustainable land use, on disaster-risk reduction, and a growing interest in local knowledge and traditional practice. Even in academia, water began to appear not just as a hydrological layer but as a central urban-design question.

Personally, it inspired my architectural thesis. The flood fell hardest on vulnerable communities — the one I studied, the fishing community of Chellanam, living close to the water, was hit in their lives and their livelihoods. I used that as an opportunity to explore how resilience could be achieved for the community, through architecture, technology and traditional construction methods together.

What does a truly climate-resilient house look like in Kerala today?

It's less about a specific look and more about how it performs across seasons — especially against persistent rain, humidity and rising climate uncertainty. It elevates what matters above the water, keeps the ground free to flood, ventilates and lights itself without leaning on machinery, uses breathable local materials that age well, and is detailed so it can be maintained and repaired rather than replaced. Resilience is measured over decades, not on the day it is photographed.

After decades of watching rain fall on your buildings, if the monsoon itself could speak to architects, what do you think it would say?

I think it would be a gentle reminder — some advice for building a better future of coexistence with nature. It might say: “I should never be an afterthought in your designs. Let me be part of the system.” Because the most resilient environments are not the ones that try to exclude water completely, but the ones that understand how to absorb it, slow it down, redirect it, and live with it.