Mumbai

January 2015 – Colours (in-flight magazine for Garuda Indonesia)

I first fell in love with Mumbai mere moments after arriving here. Stepping off the sleeper train that had brought me from Rajasthan in the north to Mumbai Central, one of the city’s major railheads, I hopped a black and yellow taxi headed toward the historic center, called Fort, where I was to meet a friend who’d moved to India a few months earlier. The taxi cut east past a blur of terra cotta-roofed houses and new concrete highrises toward an elevated highway that wound south over what I would soon come to know as Mohammed Ali Road, the deafening thoroughfare at the heart of the city’s old Muslim quarter.

Grassroots Architecture at the Maheshwar Handloom School

January 2015–Architectural Digest India

Australian architect and designer Sian Pascale first arrived in Maheshwar in July 2012 with a commission to convert a disused bus shelter into a handloom school for young weavers. Pascale had only recently relocated from her native Melbourne to Mumbai, where, through a series of off-hand introductions, she met Sally Holkar, the American woman who had spent the last 40 years revitalizing Maheshwar’s rich handloom traditions. “I met Sally at the Bombay Gym expecting to design a handbag or something for [Holkar’s NGO] WomenWeave,” Sian remembers. “I walked out with my first solo architectural project.”