Madhusudhan Chalasani

MADe produces architecture through open competitions. Since 2007, competitions for public projects have been the practice’s sole means of sourcing work. This is a deliberate position, taken for the freedom it affords: no client precedes the idea, and the public realm is the only brief. The studio works on one competition at a time. It does not take on residential work.

No project at MADe belongs to an individual. Each begins as a conversation between two people, in which the programme is dissected and its limits identified before anything is drawn. A catalogue of possibilities emerges. The team grows to four or five as the options are tested, weeded out, and tested again. The process repeats until a single idea remains. Drawing begins only when the concept can carry the final image. Even then, the output is deliberately limited: a minimum number of drawings, fixing a fraction of the project with precision and consciously leaving the rest open to development over time.

Each competition informs the next. Much of the work remains unrealised, and the practice does not regard this as a loss. An unbuilt proposition is an argument, and arguments persist. The exhibitions the studio periodically mounts, of which this is the third, are part of the same method: a way of examining its own positions in public.

MADe was founded in 2007 by Madhusudhan Chalasani and operates between India and Spain, drawing on a long-standing network of collaborators - architects, landscape architects, graphic artists, and researchers - across India, Spain, and South Korea. The core of this network has remained constant for over a decade. Continuity is the practice’s method as much as its subject.