Riyaz Tayyibji

Architect, Researcher

Riyaz Tayyibji is a practicing architect and partner at Anthill Design, a studio-based practice that has designed and built projects across the country. The practice is keenly interested in the particularities of program, locality and the potentials of building incrementally to slowly inhabit and nurture place.

Riyaz is actively involved in architectural documentation and research. He has been an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University and the Co-ordinator of the Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission set up to document the buildings made by and related to the life of M.K. Gandhi. He has written on Gandhi’s buildings and their implications for an alternative reading of modern Indian architecture. He has also restored a bicycle used by Mr. Gandhi.

Riyaz has curated exhibitions on the architecture and urbanity of Ahmedabad that have opened both internationally and in India. The most recent of these is The Stepwells of Ahmedabad: A Conversation between Water and Heritage, which opened at the Kanoria Centre for Arts and the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad in 2016. He has recently published a guide to the city’s architecture.

He is presently leads a team at the National Institute of Urban Affairs for the Ahmedabad World Heritage City Project, mandated to prepare a heritage conservation plan for its medieval walled city.