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Biography
Vir is an Urban Designer & Planner at APD Urban Planning and Management. With a background encompassing four years of professional experience, he has focused on fostering collaborative practice, research, and projects across scales and nature in the public realm. Vir’s diverse experiences extend into community engagement, rural upliftment, urban strategy, and architectural and landscape design. Before joining APD-U, Vir’s practice involved working with community members to design and implement projects through effective community engagement and hands-on construction techniques in remote villages of India. As a part of an International Garden Design competition, Vir and his team were selected as lead designers for four gardens surrounding the national heritage site, Matrimandir, Auroville.
After graduating with a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from GSAPP, Columbia University, he served as a Teaching Associate within the same program. He also volunteered as a research assistant in close collaboration with Dr. Geeta Mehta, co-founder at Asia Initiatives, a non-profit organization based in New York, on her new book ‘Building Social Capital through Design’.
Vir grew up in Gujarat and holds a bachelor’s in architecture from Anant National University, India in 2018. He is also a cinema enthusiast and is interested in exploring the convergence of the two disciplines: visual and spatial practices.