Who we are, and how the studio actually works
Written as history rather than manifesto — when it started, what has changed, and what the practice does not take on.
01 / THE STUDIO
Section & Ground was founded in Pune in 2011, initially out of a room above a printers on Prabhat Road. The first commission was a 60 m² extension to a house in Erandwane that took fourteen months and made almost no money, but it established the two habits the practice still works by: the section gets drawn before the plan is resolved, and every drawing that leaves the office is one somebody could build from.
There are five of us. That number has been deliberate — the work is done by the people whose names are on it, and a project you commission from Aditi or Nachiket is drawn by Aditi or Nachiket, not handed to a team you never meet. All documentation is produced in-house. On a typical construction stage we are on site once a fortnight, and weekly through the finishing trades.
Roughly half the work is houses, and the rest is split between small workplaces, schools and public buildings. We take on projects where the constraints are genuinely difficult — tight plots, phased budgets, existing structures worth keeping — because those are the ones where the drawing does real work. We do not take on interior fit-outs of buildings we did not design, we do not do speculative residential towers, and we have twice declined projects that required removing mature trees the client was permitted to remove.
FIG 01The studio on Prabhat Road. The wall is where Tuesday reviews happen.
02 / DESIGN POSITION
04 PROPOSITIONS- 01
We design in section before we design in plan
A plan tells you how a building is organised. A section tells you how tall the rooms are, where the light comes from, how the air moves and whether the whole thing will be pleasant to stand inside. Most of the decisions a client actually feels every day are made in section, so it gets drawn first — and on this site it gets published.
- 02
Budget and regulation are the brief, not obstacles to it
Every project has a number and a set of development control rules, and the useful response is to treat them as given and design against them from the first sketch. A scheme that only works if the budget grows or a rule is relaxed is not a design; it is a wish. We would rather show you a smaller building we can actually deliver.
- 03
Build with what the local trades already know
Load-bearing brick, in-situ concrete, bolted steel, lime render. Not out of nostalgia, but because a building made from what the masons within a kilometre can already do gets built better, gets repaired for the next forty years, and survives a change of contractor mid-project — which happens more often than anyone plans for.
- 04
Publish the drawings, including the ones that did not get built
Architecture is a drawing discipline. A practice that shows only photographs is asking to be judged on the same terms as a photographer, and a portfolio that shows only completed projects gives a false account of how practice actually goes. Every project here carries its set, and the unbuilt work sits in the same index as the rest.
03 / THE TEAM
05 PEOPLE
Aditi Raikar
Principal Architect
CoA CA/2011/54308
Aditi founded the practice in 2011 after seven years in a large Mumbai office, where she ran documentation on hospital projects and learned to distrust anything that could not be drawn at 1:5. She leads the houses and the public work, and does the first section on every project herself.
Nachiket Bhave
Associate
CoA CA/2013/48891 · IGBC AP
Nachiket joined in 2015 and became an associate in 2019. He runs the commercial and industrial projects and holds the practice's relationships with the structural and services consultants. He is the person who finds the thing that will not build a month before anyone else notices it.
Sanya Qureshi
Architect
CoA CA/2018/71204
Sanya joined in 2019 from a conservation practice in Ahmedabad. She ran the Mula Riverfront Pavilion from schematic design to completion and leads the practice's model-making, which on most projects starts before the first plan does.
Rohan Mistry
Architectural Assistant
Rohan studied at BNCA and joined in 2023. He works across documentation on the houses and is currently on site at Kothrud twice a week, which is roughly twice as often as anyone was at his stage a decade ago, and deliberately so.
Prerna Shinde
Studio Manager
Prerna has run the studio's contracts, invoicing and programme since 2017. If you are a client, she is the person you will speak to most, and the one who will tell you honestly whether a date is realistic.
04 / REGISTRATION
Registration with the Council of Architecture is mandatory to practise architecture and to use the title “architect” in India. It is the first thing a careful client checks.
- Council of Architecture
- CA/2011/54308
- Registered Principal
- Aditi Raikar
- Membership
- Indian Institute of Architects, Pune Centre — Member
- Membership
- IGBC Accredited Professional — Nachiket Bhave