The Hindu Business Line : Designer dreams

Ponni M. Concessao, a Chennai-based interior designer and architect, has a successful career going for her. Ponni's work in Chennai includes the offices of Satyam and HCL Technologies, GRT Temple Bay's cottages in Mamallapuram, the Marry Brown outlet at Ispahani Plaza. She has also worked on several projects abroad in countries such as Africa and Sri Lanka, and even designed a football stadium for the Emir of Qatar.

Today architecture may no longer be a male bastion, but it was no mean task for architect Ponni to gain initial acceptability in a profession where the elements of planning, engineering, including manipulating space, volume, light, texture and shadow, were considered the exclusive preserves of men. In fact, when she set out to do her under-graduation in architecture 20 years ago at REC, Tiruchi, she was one of the first few women in her department to pass out of the college's portals. "All eyebrows shot up when I first walked into the college. REC had not seen a woman in architecture for 30 years. It was very tough to study initially, but I got used to it."

She next went to Cornell University for a Masters Degree in Design and later Harvard for Advanced Professional Studies, to hone her architectural skills and gain international exposure. "Both the universities are very liberal in their thinking and my education there was an eye-opener in design. Being very disciplined courses, there was a lot of research required for the papers we presented, with stress on organised and original thinking," she says. Ponni worked for a while in New York city where she came in contact with some of the best brains in the world of American architecture, including Edward Barnes, a pioneer of the European modern movement.

Ponni is married to a fellow architect, Oscar. After working in the US for nearly four years, the couple headed back to India to set up shop in Chennai in 1995. "We loved India and it seemed like the most obvious choice," she reminisces.

Describing the architectural scene in the 1990s, Ponni says people's taste was "either stingy or loud." As a woman, it took her double the effort to get people to accept her work or trust her with their projects. "But over the years I have learnt to deal with such situations. In fact, I am known to be nasty, taking people to task if I am not satisfied with their work. I go to the site often to ensure that everything is going as planned. I need to be doubly aggressive to get things done," she says.

Ponni and Oscar work together on projects, where he handles architecture issues and she does the interiors. And, yes, they have occasional ego clashes. "But our professional differences benefit the client," she says, citing the example of the new Post Tension system she introduced at the Technology Park in Chennai, which won the President's award. "I was against the numerous columns in the structure which Oscar proposed in the project. So, I came up with this new system that was entirely column free and the client was also happy," she says.

With her experience of working in India over the past 11 years, Ponni notes a marked change in the past five years towards architects in general and Indian architects, in particular, who are now being recognised on par with their foreign counterparts. This is helping the profession as a whole and encouraging more women to enter it, she adds.

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