Kashyap Bhagat and Krish Shah are Indian designers and co-founders of OTLA, an architectural practice based in India focused on context-driven style and landscape-sensitive interventions. The studio’s work engages carefully with land, ecosystems, and local cultural conditions, often developing architecture that emerges from observation of site systems instead of imposed type. Through research study into material sourcing, ecological level of sensitivity, and collective dialogue with clients and neighborhoods, Bhagat and Shah pursue projects that respond straight to their ecological and social contexts. Works such as Kirubeli Cove Retreat show this technique, where locally sourced materials and restrained architectural gestures enable the built kind to incorporate with fragile coastal landscapes. Throughout Studio OTLA’s tasks, architecture is dealt with as a catalyst that exposes and celebrates existing natural and cultural systems instead of dominating them.What motivates you? I believe it’s a lot of things
. We are always attempting to find out through our observations of life, the contexts we deal with, the people we engage with, communities, cultures, land, and communities. I believe it’s extremely nuanced, as all of it includes a very rich array of scenarios, backgrounds, lifestyles, goals, set systems, and so on, and the real happiness of commemorating all of these layers is where our work emerges from.
What inspired you to become an architect?
As a child, it was just the idea of shapes and the love for drawing, but I think the inspiration grew when I really started my journey towards ending up being an architect, when I recognized the ability the occupation and the developed environment have in affecting lifestyles and society at big. I believe that is an excellent and fulfilling responsibility.
Home # 2/ OTLA © OTLA How would you explain your style approach? I can state it’s really nuanced. We tend to invest a lot of time learning more about the land, its existing communities, the people involved, the history, the customers’ goals, and so on, and after that just approach all of these layers sensitively. We attempt to look for a bigger intent to intervene there. At the same time, the style very naturally emerges out of these knowings– it informs our materials, proportions, scale, and kinds. Maps, physical designs (particularly site models), sketches, and diagrams are then the tools for us to play with these parameters and structures, which every site distinctively develops for us. The majority of the time, it’s more about ending up being catalysts or a medium of commemorating and experiencing the existing systems of the land. I believe it’s the course of least resistance. 
Interview with Kashyap Bhagat and Krish Shah of Studio OTLA 22 Interview with Kashyap Bhagat and Krish Shah of Studio OTLA 23 
Interview with Kashyap Bhagat and Krish Shah of Studio OTLA 24 Interview with Kashyap Bhagat and
Krish Shah of Studio OTLA 25 Kirubeli Cove Retreat/ OTLA © OTLA What is your favorite job? I do not believe I can select. Every job has its own set of fascinations and developments. Nevertheless, from the extremely little set of jobs continuous, I would say the house we are performing in Alibaug, close to Mumbai, presently has my heart. I think the design has actually simply emerged out of the relationship we established with the customer over the course of the project. With a mutual level of sensitivity towards the land and the surroundings, however with an affinity for stylish decorative aesthetic appeals, we were continuously pressed into our non-comfort zones, leading to disputes on human habits, beauty, light, touch, etc. A lot of our information have come out of these discussions– an extremely wholesome partnership. The home has actually wound up becoming a really light, permeable pavilion (verandah of sorts), inconspicuously nestled within the forest. The products, surfaces, and whatever attempt to make the house vanish into the background. The perfect intervention, I think, the land itself has ended up being home.
