PART 1 ARCHITECTURAL ASSISTANT · OXFORD BROOKES · EX-OLGIATI, MENDRISIO
Architecture, physics and philosophy,
held in the same hand.
Arshay Kathpalia is a Part 1 architectural assistant working at the point where philosophy, physics, and architecture meet. Trained under Valerio Olgiati at Mendrisio and shaped by thinkers like Pallasmaa, Zumthor, and Merleau-Ponty, he treats buildings as arguments about how space is felt, not only how it is built. He also writes the tools that let that thinking scale, from automated site data pipelines to computational spatial analysis.
01Selected works
02The other half
The physics and philosophy are not a hobby running alongside the architecture. Feynman, Deutsch and Popper set the method — bold guesses, honest attempts to break them. Pallasmaa, Zumthor and Merleau-Ponty set the subject — how space is felt, not only how it is built. The dissertation put both to work at once: Space Syntax analysis and phenomenological fieldwork across three Dubai sites, nominated for the RIBA Architecture Today Prize.
03Tools I build
The discipline should build more of its own tools rather than only using the ones it is handed. SiteGrab turns an area name alone into a working Rhino model or a layered CAD file — geocoding, projection detection, OSM extraction, all automated.