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Studio Saar, Third Space, Courtesy Edmund Sumner

January 13, 2026

For Studio Saar, Architecture is about Facilitation

For the India- and UK-based studio, regenerative development starts with community advocacy and stakeholder collaboration.   

By: Debika Ray

“I never thought I’d be on cow Tinder,” says Ananya Singhal. The architect has recently spent a lot time on online livestock-breeding platforms, searching for bulls to mate with a small herd of Gir cows housed in a shed designed by his practice, Studio Saar, outside Udaipur in north-western India. The project aims to revive the native Gir breed, whose population declined when European cattle were introduced to the country during the colonial period.

It is not typical terrain for an architecture practice, but Studio Saar is not typical. Founded in 2019 by Singhal and fellow University of Bath alumnus Johnny Buckland, the studio operates between Udaipur and in Frome in the UK on a range of socially oriented projects, from factories and housing to experimental public spaces and civic advocacy.

Studio Saar, Third Space, Courtesy Ananya Singhal.
Gaushala (Cow Shed). Courtesy Eshwarya Grover.

What enables this eclecticism is the practice’s business model. Studio Saar is a subsidiary of Secure Meters, a multinational energy-meter manufacturing company owned by Singhal’s family, where he also serves as co-managing director. Rather than positioning the firm as commercially autonomous, the arrangement offers something rarer: freedom. “Secure underpins all our costs and gives us enough work that we don’t need to chase projects,” Singhal says. “It allows us to take on genuinely challenging projects and make suggestions for the future of architecture.”

Studio Saar’s work broadly falls into three categories. The first comprises projects for Secure Meters, including large-scale factories for manufacturing electronic circuit-boards that serve as testing grounds for how workplaces function, from worker welfare to long-term adaptability.

Studio Saar, Udaan Park, Courtesy Ankit Jain
Studio Saar, Udaan Park, Courtesy Ankit Jain

The second strand includes projects in the UK, primarily housing. Among them is Mayday Saxonvale, a masterplan for a large brownfield site in Frome that began as a community-led campaign to overturn a conventional, developer-driven proposal. “It’s of immense importance that a site like this contributes to the town,” Buckland says. “For us, architecture is evolving into facilitation. Regenerative development isn’t just about the final project—it’s about how you work through the design process with communities and stakeholders.

That freedom is most evident in Udaipur, where Studio Saar’s work extends well beyond conventional commissions. Here, the practice develops Secure-backed schemes that allow it to operate simultaneously as designer, researcher, and civic advocate, with a particular focus on creating gathering spaces. An early initiative, Third Space, draws on Rajasthan’s historic stepwells, which traditionally combined water infrastructure with social life. The multi-use cultural centre, organised around a sunken waterbody, brings together exhibition spaces, a playground, theatre, library and workshops, and is intended to attract people from across the city as it develops.

Studio Saar, Third Space. Courtesy Edmund Sumner.
Studio Saar, Third Space, Courtesy Ankit Jain
Studio Saar, Third Space, Courtesy Edmund Sumner.

Other projects are smaller, public interventions. These include a pocket park created on an underused site overlooking the city’s lake, now equipped with play areas and a sculptural shaded canopy formed from 60,000 handcrafted birds made with local young people.

What distinguishes Saar’s Udaipur projects is not their scale but their process. The practice has hired researchers to study how the city is actually inhabited today, arguing that official data has failed to keep pace with rapid demographic change. That research is used to challenge inherited planning assumptions—from public transport routes that no longer serve where people live and work, to parks that remain underused—and to initiate conversations with local authorities. “For me, the idea is to create a parallel planning department,” Singhal says. “To bring what we know as an architecture practice, and what’s happening around the world, and use that to empower citizens.”

Secure Sehore, Arrival View, Courtesy Hayes Davidson

Taken together, these projects point to what architecture can become when it moves beyond service provision and object-making, and towards facilitation, research, and advocacy. Studio Saar’s position is enabled by financial backing that is out of reach for most. But in operating under those conditions, it reveals what becomes possible when time, trust, and continuity are embedded in the process. If architects are increasingly expected to act as mediators between communities, institutions and social change, how could the profession shift to support such longer-term ways of working?

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