SPASM Design ruminates on 30 years of practice with a Two Point Perspective

With STIR as programme partner, SPASM Design’s ‘wordless’ retrospective mapped intuition-led practice, material craft and 30 projects realised over 30 years.

Retrospectives are strange beasts, carrying a peculiar gravity. They pause to look backwards, but are about the future, gathering years of labour and learning into a singular spatial narrative. In architecture, these are deliberate, often insular events, moments when practice is coalesced and made visible, when buildings that usually exist—dispersed across geographies and time zones—are temporarily brought together through drawings, photographs, models and memory. Think of the retrospective exhibition I.M. Pei: ‘Life in Architecture’ at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong (2024), or Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat (2019) at MASP, São Paulo. These are archival. They recalibrate. They ask what endures and why, or what didn’t. Moreover, it inevitably tables space for what’s to come, contextualising, learning, unlearning.

For Mumbai-based studio SPASM Design, Two Point Perspective marked such a moment of pause. Held from December 5 – 7, 2025, at G5A, a creative hub for artists, audiences and communities housed in a repurposed warehouse in the mill district of central Mumbai, the special exhibition traced three decades of practice led by its founders, Sangeeta Merchant and Sanjeev Panjabi. Rather than presenting a strictly chronological archive, the showcase, with STIR as programme partner, unfolded as a simple spatial composition, one that invited visitors to encounter SPASM’s architecture as an evolving language of intuition, material engagement and making, across residential, institutional, exhibition and experimental typologies.

What made this milestone particularly striking was its precision: over thirty years, SPASM Design has realised thirty completed architectural projects (no more, no less), each represented within the show through a dedicated model and added visual paraphernalia. The numerical symmetry ended up functioning as a conceptual condition. During the exhibition’s opening, Samta Nadeem, curatorial director at STIR, hosted a brief public talk, sharing the stage with SPASM Design and delving into subjects such as context as the first client, the act of revisiting three decades of practice in this format while speculating on what lies ahead and the enduring relevance of craftsmanship and the human hand.

Central to SPASM’s practice is what the studio describes as ‘intuitive logic’, a way of working that balances instinct with inquiry to proffer an individual expression and a cultivation of skill, over and over. “When confronted with design hurdles, we see them as stimuli to evolve past research and experience, to come up with new ways to scale them,” the Indian architects tell STIR. “There are always myriad ways to solve issues. The poetic lies in the choices you make and how cohesive the whole and the part are.” Over time, this balancing act—between macro and micro, ease and resistance, repetition and refinement—has shaped a body of work that resists stylistic fixation while remaining recognisably grounded in material intelligence and craftsmanship.

The sensibility threads across their 30 realised projects to date. This includes the terracotta-clad Sarvasva home (2024), where a 12-storey residential architecture became an exploration of contextual sustainability, tactile surfaces, climate-responsive design and familial intimacy; the Sanskriti Vihara at the KJ Somaiya Educational Trust Campus in Mumbai as an Indian stepwell-inspired educational building with spatially layered learning environments; and the Brick Kiln House in Alibaug (2011), where raw brick construction and climatic responsiveness structure daily inhabitation.

Also among these are the House with the Gabion (2017), which integrates stone-filled cages as both structure and landscape gesture and the Parikrama House in Marud (2021), which demonstrates the studio’s interest in terrain-responsive design, where movement through landscape becomes an experience. And more recently, their public-facing pavilion design at the ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025, titled There Is No Planet B, further extends SPASM’s architectural oeuvre into environmental discourse, interweaving nature, culture and architecture.

The architectural exhibition translated this diversity of work into a deliberately restrained spatial language. Conceived as a ‘wordless exhibit,’ Two Point Perspective avoided explanatory text altogether. Instead, thirty brass block models—each corresponding to a project—formed the core known as the ‘SPASM Island’, positioned centrally within the presentation, and surrounded by drawings, large-scale maquettes, short films and material mock-ups. The exhibition design itself was conceived as a ‘black box’, stripped of colour and visual noise, offering a neutral setting against which form, shadow and material could speak.

“Architecture, more than any art, is one of silence,” the founders reflect on this decision. “Buildings cannot be explained, only experienced. Every interpretation is valid. Words get in the way of pure reaction.” The audience’s response, according to the studio, was telling. Students leaned close to the miniature models, professionals studied scaled-up sectional details and others stood before slow fades of projected films. The insistence and emphasis on physical artefacts, particularly these models, reasserts the discipline’s reliance on hand, scale, weight and spatial intuition. “Some whispered, ‘Why make so many models when you can render?’” Merchant and Panjabi recall. “But it was gratifying to see visitors immerse themselves into the truths of the projects.”

The retrospective functioned as a moment of recalibration as well. “This was a stop and ponder,” SPASM Design relays. “Like a marathon runner glancing up before focusing back on the run.” Looking ahead, the studio speaks of expanding scale and program while continuing to cultivate what they describe as an ‘Indian-soulful’ architectural language, one rooted in craft, climate and context.

This momentum already finds parallel expression in ONCE, the young, bespoke lifestyle design brand led by industrial designer Sumher Panjabi, which was formally pre-launched at the exhibition. Positioned between artisanal production and industrial manufacturing, ONCE experiments with hybrid processes that combine CNC machining, robotic fabrication and human craftsmanship. “ONCE is our attempt at a radical middle ground,” Sumher explains. “Robots handle precision tasks, while craftspeople focus on assembly, finishing and judgment. This frees skilled labour from repetitive work and allows refinement to emerge.”

The Salara Bar Cart, among ONCE’s earliest product designs, was presented alongside newer objects in a glass-encased upper wing accessed by a staircase, offering a clear articulation of this hybrid design approach. Constructed from marble, aged brass, hardwood and stainless steel, it is conceived as an enduring artefact. “These are materials of memory, not landfill,” Sumher clarifies. The brand’s name itself gestures toward longevity, drawing from the storytelling cadence of ‘once upon a time’ and the ethic of ‘buy once, cry once’: a philosophy of investing in objects that are to be lived with, looked after, repaired and passed on.

Two Point Perspective, then, operated across multiple binary registers: retrospective and propositional, archival and speculative. The exhibition’s title carried layered resonance, referencing drawing technique, as well as the act of holding two temporal views together. One looks back at 30 years of architectural production; the other looks forward, toward evolving practices of building and approaching. Between these two points lies SPASM Design’s continuing commitment to intuition, materiality and spatial thought: an architectural practice shaped as much by experience as by excitement, by authenticity and momentum.