IF ASSAM WERE A BUILDING, HOW would it breathe? How would it handle light? How would it welcome people? How would it respond to rain, weather and earthquakes?
These were the questions architect Nuru Karim set out to answer in Guwahati Airport’s new Terminal 2. The result is a 1.3 million sq ft terminal of sweeping bamboo-inspired forms, biophilic gardens and a design language rooted in Assam’s landscapes and craft traditions, recently named one of the World’s Most Beautiful Airports 2026 by Prix Versailles, among architecture’s highest international honours. In the UNESCO-supported award’s decade-long history, only three other Indian projects have featured across its various categories.
For the 52-year-old founder of the Mumbai-based practice NUDES, the recognition represents something larger than a personal or professional milestone. “It is a validation that Indian architecture can find global relevance while being rooted in its own cultural and ecological context,” Karim tells Esquire India. “We have our own stories, traditions, materials, culture and climate. That itself can be a reservoir for innovation.” He believes the challenge today is not to imitate international design movements, but to reinterpret indigenous knowledge for a contemporary world.
Karim’s journey to architecture was hardly preordained. A fifth-generation resident of Bandra, he grew up in a business family with no history of architects, artists or designers. Yet, while most of his peers gravitated towards medicine, engineering or business, Karim had already made up his mind. By the age of 12 or 13, he knew architecture was all he wanted to do, though even today he struggles to explain exactly why. “There was no Plan B. It was architecture or nothing,” he recalls. The fascination, he says, only began to make intellectual sense once he entered architecture school. It was there that he discovered the relationship between mathematics, nature and design, and, as he puts it, learnt to “see, perceive, listen intuitively, and then question the obvious.”
His journey took him from Mumbai’s Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture to scholarships in Montreal and later the Architectural Association in London. A stint at British architecture and design firm Zaha Hadid Architects followed, but rather than adopting the visual language of his mentors, Karim became fascinated by the relationship between mathematics, nature and design, and how architecture could learn from living systems rather than impose itself upon them.
Returning to India in 2005, Karim founded NUDES at a time when rapidly expanding Indian cities were filling up with generic glass-and-concrete structures. From the outset, he was interested in a different question: “Could architecture behave less like a machine and more like a living system?” Today, his work sits at the intersection of technology, ecology and culture, often drawing inspiration from nature, biomimicry and circular design principles. “A question we often ask ourselves at NUDES is how we might unlearn centuries of designing against nature,” he shares. For Karim, architecture is not simply about creating objects, but ecosystems that respond to their environment and the people who inhabit them.
That thinking runs through much of NUDES’ work, from a proposed biophilic school in Pune to the unbuilt People’s Tower in San Jose, California, envisioned as a living landmark grown collectively from thousands of planted pods. Different in form but united in intent, these projects reflect Karim’s belief that architecture should generate social and environmental value, not merely visual spectacle.
All of those ideas find their fullest expression in Guwahati Airport’s Terminal 2. The resulting design draws from the state’s landscapes, bamboo traditions, indigenous craft practices and the kopou orchid, whose petals inspired the terminal’s sweeping roof forms.
Bamboo, in particular, became both material and metaphor. “I saw it everywhere—in homes, furniture, baskets, fishing traps, agriculture, even food,” says Karim. “People often think of bamboo as a cheap material. I think it’s an intelligent, diverse material that has withstood the test of time and transcends socio-economic boundaries.”
Translating those ideas into a 1.3 million sq ft airport, however, was far from straightforward. Located in one of India’s most seismically active and flood-prone regions, the terminal had to meet stringent requirements for fire safety, structural performance and passenger movement. Bamboo could not simply be used in its raw form; it had to be extensively tested, treated and integrated into a hybrid system with steel and concrete. The challenge, Karim says, was to build an airport that could meet the exacting demands of modern aviation while still feeling unmistakably Assamese.
That may ultimately be what distinguishes Karim’s work. In an era obsessed with icons and spectacle, he remains more invested in ecosystems than objects, in context rather than trends, and in what architecture can give back to the communities and landscapes from which it emerges. Guwahati Airport may be his most celebrated project yet, but it is also the clearest articulation of a philosophy he has spent two decades refining.
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