A Big City in a Small Pavilion: SJK Architects January Newsletter
- SJK Architects
- 21 hours ago
- 3 min read
This newsletter reflects on the making of Streets of Aspiration, SJK Architects’ pavilion for the Architecture + Design Film Festival (ADFF):STIR 2026, held at the NCPA, Mumbai, from January 9–11, 2026. Developed through a competitive selection process and a collective studio effort, the pavilion interprets Mumbai through its streets—reading the city as it is, while gesturing toward what it hopes to become.
Reading the City
Mumbai is a city shaped by contradictions. Aspiration and exhaustion, privilege and precarity, constant motion and brief pauses exist side by side. Wealth and scarcity share the same geography, but rarely the same lived experience—playing out daily through housing, labour, mobility, and access.
Mumbai is a city shaped by contradictions. Aspiration and exhaustion, privilege and precarity, constant motion and brief pauses exist side by side. Wealth and scarcity share the same geography, but rarely the same lived experience—playing out daily through housing, labour, mobility, and access.
And yet, the city works. It holds together through a fragile but resilient ecosystem in which informal systems quietly sustain everyday life, even as Mumbai remains in a constant state of becoming. Always under construction, always adjusting, the city asks its present to live amid dust and disruption in the hope of something better ahead. Through all of this, it is the street that anchors the city. Crowded, layered, and communal, Mumbai’s streets are its truest public realm—where differences are not resolved, but lived, negotiated, and momentarily shared.
The Pavilion
The pavilion takes these streets as its starting point. It reimagines them as spaces that can hold activity and pause at once—places for movement and gathering, waiting and rest. Steps and seating form the primary architectural language, drawing from gestures that are already familiar in the city’s everyday life.
The pavilion takes these streets as its starting point. It reimagines them as spaces that can hold activity and pause at once—places for movement and gathering, waiting and rest. Steps and seating form the primary architectural language, drawing from gestures that are already familiar in the city’s everyday life.
From here, visitors are led downward, into an underbelly that represents the large portion of Mumbai that lives informally—often without adequate light, ventilation, legality, or dignity, yet sustaining the city through marginalised labour. Layered sound and projected imagery bring this space to life through encounters with the informal systems that quietly keep Mumbai running.
Moving upward again, visitors reach the “Ivory Tower,” constructed from mirror-finished acrylic panels. The climb is possible, but uneven, reflecting the city’s unequal yet persistent promise of upward mobility. Inside, distorted reflections shift perceptions; a reminder of how inequality shapes not only access, but also how we see ourselves, others, and the city around us.
Materiality & Afterlife
Designed as a modular system, the pavilion can be assembled, dismantled, and reused. The MS scaffolding frame will return to construction use, while the wooden seating modules—made from recycled packing crates and steel subframes—can be relocated across the city as spaces of everyday pause. The mirrored panels of the Ivory Tower are also intended for reuse as architectural elements elsewhere. Following its presentation at ADFF:STIR 2026 in Mumbai, the pavilion travels to the STIR Gallery in New Delhi during India Art Fair, extending its life in a new setting before being dismantled and dispersed. Together, these strategies prioritise reuse, circularity, and continued relevance, allowing the pavilion to live on through its parts.
Holding the City
Despite the grit, exhaustion, and inequity that define Mumbai, our memories of the city are not only of hardship. They are also shaped by generosity, humour, and familiarity—small acts of kindness exchanged in crowded spaces. Streets of Aspiration attempts to hold all of this: the discomfort and the humanity, the city as it is, and the city as it hopes to be...
