B.Arch
Gold Medal
M.Arch
Gold Medal
Vandana grew up in a hill town in the Western Ghats. Art there arrived from the landscape before it arrived from any intention. The hillside chose its own contour. Water found its own level. The forest arranged itself by light. She spent years looking for the line between what nature made and what design could add.
She never found one. That became the work.
She went on to study and practice across Bahrain and Dubai.
The scale was different — hundreds of hectares at a time, cities being drawn from scratch. The question was the same one she had asked in the Ghats: what does this place want?
Her M.Arch thesis brought the question home.The Blue-Green Vein concept ecological corridors threaded through Indian cities earned her the gold medal.
A city, like a forest,works best when it knows where its water goes.
She returned to India in 2005. Since then, the practice has applied the same approach across scales — from a 5-acre wetland in Begumpet to a 60-kilometre river corridor, a golf course with relocated 400-year-old trees, and a temple shaped through mulasutra before construction.
Vandana leads Vanzscape from Hyderabad - a city she has shaped in ways that aren't always visible. Which is how she prefers it.
The method she brought back from the Ghats hasn't changed: find the thought first. Everything else follows.
