Born in 1965 in Mumbai, Bijoy Jain studied architecture in the United States, at Washington University in St. Louis. Between 1989 and 1995, he developed his architectural practice in Los Angeles, in Richard Maier’s model workshop, making models for the Getty Museum, while studying under Studio Works founder Robert Mangurian. He also worked in London before returning to India in 1995. That same year he created Studio Mumbai, staffed by skilled craftsmen, technicians, and draughtsmen, who design and build each project themselves. The studio is a space for research, in which creation is based in an iterative process, where ideas are explored through the production of scale models, objects, material studies, and drawings. Studio Mumbai nowadays operates internationally, in India, Japan and Europe.

Bijoy Jain’s architecture shows a deep concern for the relationship between humanity and nature, and reflects the importance of a place’s spirit, its genius loci. Each of the studio’s creations is founded in water, air, and light. The projects are developed considering the location in which they are established, mindful of the climate and seasons, and draw on traditional and ancestral skills, materials and local construction techniques. The studio places importance on economy of means, stemming from limited resources and places the human at the center of every project undertaken.

Emblematic of that approach are Studio Mumbai’s furniture. The hand-made pieces are the result of an intense and profound material research. They are motivated from the idea of acting on materials or things found in our immediate landscape. Made from stone, brick, bamboo, wood, paper, thread and alloys of metal, the methods of making are rudimentary and precise using simple tools requiring the dexterity of hand, mind, body and machine.

Bijoy Jain teaches at the Accademia di architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio, Switzerland. He also taught as a visiting professor at Yale University in the United States and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium, for his contribution to the architectural profession. In 2017, he received the RIBA International Fellowship in London. In 2020, Bijoy Jain was awarded the Alvar Aalto Medal.

Bijoy Jain’s furniture have been acquired by institutions such as Centre Pompidou, CNAP, Fondation Cartier, SFMOMA, LACMA and MAAS.