Mannat Singh™

Studies on the contemporary Indian condition—through both the archive and the workshop—to understand how the historical persists within the present. Rather than reconstructing history or defining an essence, the inquiry focuses on tendencies that remain embedded in everyday constructions but often go unnoticed. Through processes of making, these tendencies are worked with, and engaged architecturally

Mannat Singh is an architect based in Chandigarh. He graduated with a gold medal from the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University, where he also served as a program ambassador and was the founding chief editor of the college newsletter. He is currently leading projects at Imarat Architects, a practice engaged with questions of material culture and construction.

His work extends across buildings, furniture, objects, and garments he constructs for himself—approaching each as a way of thinking through material, construction, and use. Alongside this, his drawings and writings return to historical environments and their transformations over time, treating them as active sites of inquiry rather than static references.

He is currently working with schools of architecture across the country and undertaking documentation of relevant sites, developing these inquiries through a self-directed research practice. This has taken form as MISAAL, a research-based making studio that brings together processes of redrawing and construction to study and rework architectural intelligence into contemporary projects and artefacts.

misaal (modern indian studies on art architecture and life) attempts to discover architecture from outside the discipline, in objects, habits and fictions. The knowledge that surfaces is translated into design - across scales, from the intimate to the inhabitable.

Misaal incorporates a two-pronged method of study and making.

It studies the Indian imagination as it is located across paintings, places—both historical and contemporary—habits, and objects. And then examines them across five lenses: composition, construction, context, intent, and chromatics; in order to isolate the architectural intelligence embedded within them.

These extracted intelligibilities are reworked into projects and artefacts, developed in close collaboration with artisans and informed equally by contemporary and historical material cultures; varying in scale but rooted in inquiry.

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