Aditya Mandlik

Aditya Mandlik is a Mumbai-based architect and the founder of Studio Aditya Mandlik (SAM), a practice working across buildings, interiors and environments rooted in ecology. His research treats living organisms as collaborators rather than constraints, asking how growth, decay and non-human intelligence can shape the way architecture is drawn, built and eventually taken apart.

Factory 5.0 made that argument physical at Dutch Design Week’s 25th edition in Eindhoven, where it was one of the large public installations: a timber pavilion inhabited by ten thousand mealworms that eat through polystyrene, so the structure is designed to change and decompose instead of lasting. Mandlik writes and lectures on ecological gradients and material cycles, teaches as visiting faculty, and runs the studio’s projects from Mumbai.