[Print] Hyderabad: Paper to Pillars
As a young architecture student at New York’s Pratt Institute, Nilasha could scarcely have imagined that she would one day be building houses twice—first out of paper, then in brick and stone. That unlikely reality came true in 2024, when her Hyderabad-based practice, Studio Nilasha, took on a project in the city that demanded a more traditional design language than the studio was used to. Struggling at first to judge the scale and proportions of mouldings and ornamental details, the team resorted to full-scale paper mock-ups. Before long, walls were taped over with balustrades, window grilles and even stained-glass stand-ins, until, as Nilasha jokes, “we accidentally built the entire house in stationery before building it for real.”
