Architect Apoorva Shroff On Consciously Building A Legacy Of Sustainable And Innovative Design

When Apoorva Shroff was a child, her mother, a banker, told her about a client of hers who would send the architects in his building firm around the world. The architects’ mission was to be inspired by the beautiful buildings they saw and to replicate them in India. The best part of the job? The architects could keep the penthouses of the buildings they made for themselves. When Shroff heard this, she was sold.

“The greed for a penthouse made me an architect,” she says.

Now running her own business, Lyth Design, which she established in January 2022, Shroff has worked with high-flying clients, including celebrities like Madhuri Dixit Nene, on destination homes and workspaces that are anchored in aesthetics, sustainable and local design solutions, and the innovative use of materials. In fact, her own family home, Airavat in Maharashtra, was nominated as a finalist at the prestigious World Architecture Festival in 2021. The project remains her proudest achievement yet.

Evolving As A Designer And Architect

When she first started out as an architect after completing a postgraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Shroff says she was ignorant about working with sustainable materials like bamboo. “I only knew sustainable as a word with absolutely no emphasis on architecture,” she admits.

Fast forward 20 years later, and Shroff found herself attending the 11-day build and design course by Bamboo U in Bali, Indonesia in 2024. The bamboo eco-architecture course attracts creatives, designers, and architects who are passionate about bamboo construction and sustainable design. But, what made her decide to take it up?

“As professionals, one needs to keep evolving. It had been two decades since I was out of school, and I wanted to learn. Bamboo has always been an area of interest, and I closely follow the work of Ellora Hardy [a Canadian designer who founded IBUKU]. When I saw an advertisement for the Bamboo U course on her page, I signed up in a heartbeat,” she says.

“I learnt about the different types of bamboo, how to grow it, harvest it and how to preserve it. Bamboo is extremely strong, versatile and elastic, making it very suitable for beautiful structures. Best of all, because of how rigorously it grows, its sustainable too.”

Shroff dismisses suggestions that sustainability in architecture is simply about being conscious about using the right materials. “It’s not necessarily about using eco-friendly materials; it’s about solving for a need with the minimum impact to our environment. In my opinion, even if you build the most iconic building with only sustainable materials, but there is no reason for its existence, then you have failed at sustainable architecture,” she says.

In Shroff’s experience, while most clients are unaware of the possibilities of sustainable design, she believes it is her profession’s job to educate them and give them conscious choices. “Every good designer is conscious today, and it’s going to be the only way forward,” she adds.

A Willingness To Grow Through Failure

Besides sustainable architecture, Shroff was instrumental in designing the Ideation Lab at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. Completed in five weeks, the brief was to design a fun, engaging space that would encourage creativity and innovation. With Shroff at the helm, the space transformed into a calm and creative oasis, with white-dyed brick walls, sleek metal shelving units, a 3D printing machine, soundproof wooden flooring and pendant lights over each desk. The design aligned with Shroff’s mantra, which she calls “conscious building. Architecture needs to be responsible as it lives on like your legacy.”

Thus, the biggest challenge for her at the moment is building a team of professionals with a firm foundation in architectural principles. “Most kids out of school today are in a rush to succeed and don’t have their basics sorted,” she says. She doesn’t believe in failure either, saying that she grows with every experience. “Each and every moment leading up to now has been a part of my growth, so it would be hard to pinpoint which was the most valuable lesson,” she says.

With her effervescent passion bursting through, Shroff plans to keep mining her inspirations (“buildings of the past”) to design structures that make people stop and stare. “There are so many times I stop and wonder how the architect must have conveyed his vision. How would this stone have found its place at the height? How does this building look timeless?” she says.

It’s a goal she keeps reaching towards one blueprint at a time.