A conversation with Madhav Raman, the Principal and Co-Founder of Anagram Architects

Standing as one of the most enduring debates in 20th-21st century design, the sustainability vs. techno-solutionism debate asks: Should architecture primarily serve environmental and social performance, or should it pursue its own disciplinary logic and aesthetic independence?

The seeds of this debate were sown in the 19th century as industrialization accelerated. Two sensibilities emerged: romantic critique and techno-optimism. Thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement argued for craftsmanship, local materials, and harmony with nature. These became the early forms of what would later be called sustainability. Meanwhile, engineers and avant-garde architects embraced industrial progress. The Bauhaus, Constructivists, and Futurists saw technology as liberating, something that enabled new forms and social utopias.

By mid-century, Modernism had institutionalized the belief that technology and rational planning could solve social problems, but often at the cost of local context and ecological sensitivity.

The 1960s marked the turning point. Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate (1963) formalized bioclimatic architecture while Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) became a manifesto for ecological planning. Both insisted that architecture must work with natural systems.

In stark contrast, Buckminster Fuller championed techno-solutionism, arguing that advanced engineering could solve global problems. Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment* (1969) celebrated HVAC and mechanical systems as enablers of architectural freedom, even at high energy cost.

It was in the 1980s-90s when Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism offered a middle path: engage local climate and culture while selectively using modern technology. After this, high-tech architects like Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw embraced an eco-technic approach. They used exposed structured, smart systems, and energy-efficient technologies merged with performance with spectacle. Sustainability was treated as a technical challenge solvable through innovation often without questioning consumption patterns or cultural context.

In the present day, the conversation between sustainability and techno-solutionism operates on the middle ground. Regenerative design goes beyond ‘less harm’ to actively restore ecosystems and connect buildings to human sensory and ecological needs.

To get a perspective on the current state of the debate, we spoke to Madhav Raman, the Principal and Co-Founder of Anagram Architects.

Raman’s shift from sustainability to resilience isn’t just semantic. He points to the wind patterns over Delhi that architects were taught 20 years ago. But these patterns no longer hold: monsoon winds that once arrived reliably from the east now arrive stronger and earlier from the southwest. He says contemporary architects have the same knowledge system that needs to update with time. For Raman, ‘sustainability’ assumes a stable baseline worth preserving but resilience assumes the baseline has already moved, and architecture’s job is to keep functioning anyway. Techno-solutionism, in his account, isn't a rival ideology to sustainability. It's what sustainability becomes once the climate stops holding still.

That same skepticism toward fixed ideology shapes how Raman talks about certification. Green ratings, he says, “is like taking a report card home to your parents. Instead, you take a rating home to your client." He isn’t dismissing the data behind these systems but the idea that a platinum rating is the finish line. The critique lands closer to Reyner Banham’s techno-optimism than to Ruskin’s romanticism, except Raman inverts it: technology and data are useful only as a way of thinking, never as a substitute for it.

Quashing any arguments about how being environmentally conscious as an architect restricts aesthetic autonomy, he says that,

He traces this back to a version of postmodernism's follies, structures built purely as spectacle, and argues they failed not because they were ugly but because no one needed to inhabit them. Architecture, in his framing, "is not subjective... it's visceral. It kicks you in the stomach.

When asked to describe what the middle ground looks like between the two sides, he says, “it’s a telescopic domain that I can keep extending, how big or small I want to keep my perspective." Commit too fully to one end of the argument, he warns, and architecture becomes microscopic, more specialized, more niche, more certain, right up until the moment the specialization disappears overnight and leaves everyone with nothing to stand on.

Neither romantic critique nor techno-optimism ever fully won, because neither was built to survive contact with an unstable climate on its own. Olgyay and McHarg’s insistence on working with natural systems Foster and Grimshaw’s work on eco-tech stayed. Maybe architecture was never asked to choose sides. All it was asked to do is to keep people sheltered, fed, and gathered together.