Language. Architecture. Body.

A laboratory for crafting architecture—inventive in design, rigorous in execution, and sensitive in space.

L.A.B. is a design-led practice of over forty architects based in Mumbai and Florence. We design educational and cultural institutions, healthcare facilities, workplaces, and homes across the Indian subcontinent—projects that bring together performance and meaning.

Each project is guided by poetic sensibility, scientific rigour, and human purpose—creating architecture that shapes the ways people learn, heal, work, and live.

Language. is the narrative that connects place, people, and culture.  It is the voice of context — the site, the brief, the framework.
We believe that form follows culture: the building should speak to the spirit of the project. Design becomes a dialogue — between what exists and the potential.

Architecture. is an act of response — an intervention in the physical and social world.
It is a catalyst that shapes human behavior and renews environments.
We see architecture as a living ecology — designing balance within the cycles of climate, energy, and place.
We design connections — between material and landscape, structure and light, purpose and beauty.

Body. is the act of inhabitation — the lived experience of space.
 Our work seeks to broker a meaningful relationship between humans and their environments, between movement and stillness, intimacy and community.
 The body feels before it understands; architecture becomes its vessel — an embodiment of the designed ecology.

Shonan Purie Trehan

Shonan Purie Trehan is the founder and principal architect of Language.Architecture.Body (L.A.B.), Her work is grounded in the construction of relationships between narrative, environment, and habitation; shaping buildings that are both purposeful and poetic.

Shonan holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a Master’s in Advanced Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Built Environment, UCL, London. She previously worked with Eisenman Architects in New York City and Le Groupe Arcop in Montreal.

Alongside practice, Shonan has been a part-time faculty member at KRVIA and a mentor with the Sustainable Futures Program (JSW and ISDI). She continues to engage in architectural education and discourse, contributing as a critic, lecturer, and mentor.

STUDIO

The Architecture studio took seed in Mumbai in late 2010. It has grown into a vibrant practice of 30 bright Architects. The team works through design strategies in a collaborative process, pooling together extensive knowledge.