This is a major monographic exhibition about the philosophy, work and material culture of leading architect and educator, Anupama Kundoo. The large temporary exhibition gallery of the Architektur Zentrum Wien is remade to evoke the atmospheres and material techniques of Kundoo’s Wall House of 2000 built in Auroville where the architect lived until 2002 and where most of her work has been built.

A preponderance of timber and earthen materials engages positively with the existing worn timber floor of the gallery and creates a calm and still atmosphere that resonates with the themes of caring and craft that are frequently cited in the gallery texts and in the architect’s quotes. At the centre of the gallery is a biographical video showing Kundoo’s professional passage from Mumbai where she was born and studied architecture, to Auroville and finally, accompanied by her two children, to Germany where she now lives and teaches. The Wall House, which was famously rebuilt in the Arsenale for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, is undoubtedly a compelling work and embodies the architects’ belief in craftsmanship as a social and material antidote to contemporary society’s addiction to consumption, the ‘abundance’ of the exhibition’s title.

But this project, or rather its Viennese avatar, is here framed as both object and manifesto. The texts, captions and videos argue for this work as a paradigm, and that Kundoo’s support and use of craft and crafts people in a specific rural context in India is somehow an instrument for a wider liberation from the tyranny of capital that we all are burdened by in 2025. In the absence of more developed social and political models, for instance those discussed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), I found it difficult to make the leap from the natural and caring atmosphere of Auroville to a more significant project of emancipation.