Team

Gurmeet S. Rai is a conservation architect based in New Delhi, India. She graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the Chandigarh College of Architecture in 1988. Thereafter she did her Master’s in Architectural Conservation from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, in 1989-1990. In her initial years of professional practice she worked in the Architectural Heritage Department of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in New Delhi. This gave her the opportunity to observe and understand the challenges of conservation practice in the country. In 1996 she set up the Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative (CRCI), a conservation consultancy firm.

Gurmeet has been a proponent of a multidisciplinary approach to heritage conservation. Right from CRCI’s first project, which entailed the preparation of inventories of cultural heritage along the Grand Trunk Road, she realized that a cultural heritage site was an amalgam of tangible and intangible attributes. Even though a built heritage might appear to be uncared for, she found that the local community was closely linked to the site through memory and eager to participate in its conservation. Thus she felt that heritage conservation and the type of engagement it called for transcended the concern for mere conservation of the material fabric.