Catherine Outram Desai

Catherine graduated with First Class Honours from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has many years of practice experience in India, Australia and the UK where she has worked for BV Doshi, Sen Kapadia and Hopkins Architects as well as in private practice. Significant projects include a temporary school in Mumbai for Gujarat Research Society and at while at Hopkins, a new courtyard and modifications to the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Catherine has been in academia since 2017. She leads studios in Masters and Undergraduate programs and teaches undergraduate history courses. Her Masters studio focusses on the significance of the architectural object in the writing of history and uses drawing as means of analysing buildings in order to expand and question established historic and critical ideas. Her Undergraduate studio has since 2023 examined how speculative design can be used to address problems of climatic resilience in informal settlements in India, contexts of great need. She is also involved in developing and prototyping retrofit proposals beyond the studio context, with the first constructed in 2025 as part of the CEPT SWS program. Catherine is the author of three books on Modern Indian architecture, and her writing has been widely published in national and international journals and in conference proceedings.