Tallulah D’Silva and the architecture of constraint

Tallulah treats soil as raw material, sure, but also as narrative and actor. To work with it, she argues, one must observe it across seasons, test its moods, ask it questions, honour its resistance. For her, the survey drawing is but a clue. Where the profession often seeks repeatability—standardisation as efficiency—Tallulah insists on hyper-local responsiveness. Designing in Goa, for Tallulah, is not about planting a structure on a site—it is about planting oneself there. Time is method, climate a collaborator, and design an iterative response to it all.

Material as Method, Not Moodboard

Tallulah works almost exclusively with site-specific natural materials—mud, clay, laterite, stone, timber—and plays with multiple in-situ experiments to understand how they behave. These are ethical, ecological, and epistemological choices that also tend to (re)define an aesthetic of sustainability that lingers.

Too often, the language of “green design” is used to aestheticize rusticity. Mud becomes a moodboard texture; bamboo is bent into Instagrammable arches. But materiality, in Tallulah’s hands, is never just a visual cue—it’s a non-negotiable method of building with instead of against. A wall made of laterite is red, rough, and local, as it breathes, insulates, and remembers rain.

At a tiny house in Cujira, the roof rests at an exaggerated angle, like a leaf responding to rain. Made from stabilised earth blocks and locally found stone masonry, the columns and walls are assembled as if arising from within the site and its offerings. The advocacy in sturdiness and weather resistance is evident from the strategic positions of bulk and void in the structure. Ventilation comes through channeled breezeways lined with local flora, karvi, tulsi, and vetiver. In another residence built along the Mapusa river, a narrow topography dictated a house that snakes instead of stands, with openings aligned to riverine light instead of compulsive symmetry and order. To build with mud, laterite, and lime here is to respond to hydrology, humidity, weight, wear etc. Materials behave. They swell, shrink, resist. Tallulah doesn’t fight them. She reads them and translates them into buildings.

Teaching Against the Grain

As a professor at the Goa College of Architecture, Tallulah brings this ethos into her pedagogy. Her studios are grounded in material experimentation, ecological analysis, and on-site learning. Students are encouraged to make before they model, to observe before they render.

She hires interns from these classrooms, integrates them into real projects, and shows them how to design not for a portfolio, but for people and place. This stands in direct challenge to the sleek, render-heavy presentations that dominate architectural education across India—where climate, context, and material reality are often abstracted into symbols.

Reverence and Refusal

If there is a single thread that binds Tallulah’s work—her buildings, her pedagogy, her politics—it is reverence. In a climate-ravaged world where architecture continues to serve real estate over resilience, she offers a counter-practice grounded in refusal.

Refusal to overdraw. Refusal to overwrite. Refusal to extract. Refusal to dominate. Refusal to speak without listening.

Tallulah does not claim to reverse the climate crisis. She knows that’s impossible. But she does ask: how can we minimise harm? How can we stay accountable? How can we make buildings that belong—not just visually, but materially, culturally, climatically?