Jindal School of Art and Architecture

Biography

Priya Gupta is an architect, academic, and researcher whose work examines the intersections of modernism, regulation, and everyday urban life in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from CEPT University, Ahmedabad, where she studied the contested legacies of Chandigarh’s regulated Marla houses and their transformations since inception. She describes these as the “modern Marla”—a living archive in which the city’s most ubiquitous urban form, the private house, is shaped both by planning intent and the contingencies of postcolonial modernity.

Her work has been presented at the Design History Society (UK, 2023), IIT Bhilai (2024), and the CEPT University Symposium (2025), and selected for the Docomomo Conference in Santiago (2024). Her broader research interests include twentieth-century South Asian modernism, urbanism, material historiographies, and revisionist histories of Chandigarh. She seeks to shift the focus from Chandigarh’s imagined modernist ideals to its lived domestic spaces, while curating a regulatory archive of the city and an archive of the Marla house, and examining contemporary negotiations of regulation.

With over a decade of academic and professional experience, she has taught and researched at the Chandigarh College of Architecture and CEPT University. Her teaching spans undergraduate design studios, a master’s-level urban design studio, and courses on twentieth-century modern architecture, sustainable environments, theory of design, design sociology and psychology, art and architecture, history of urban form, and research methodology. She has also mentored theses, contributed to curriculum development, and engaged in public initiatives such as heritage interpretation and tourism planning for the Capitol Complex (2015), as well as hands-on workshops in clay, bamboo, and collaborative design charrettes at CCA. She enjoys walking, is keen to return to pottery, and has embraced fountain pens.