03 · 2026Essay
On building in Zone IV
A working note on detailing for seismic resilience in mountain construction — and why ductile detailing is the cheapest insurance a hill house can buy.
Read →Monograph · Vol. I
2018 →
Sankalp Lama
Essays, photographs, films, designs — and the built work of my studio. A long look inward, made visible.
The range at dusk
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The index
Two lives, equal weight
The Personal
01
Essays & field notes
01 · 2026Journal
The slow geometry of the monsoon roof
Eaves, valleys, gutters — reading the eastern Himalayan roof as a hundred years of slow refinement against the rain.
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11 · 2025Essay
Six people, twelve sites: how a small studio scales
Notes from running a six-person design-build practice in Darjeeling — on systems, drawings, and trust as the only real budget.
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09 · 2025Field
Cement, road, and weather
How a single closed road in the monsoon redraws an entire procurement plan, and why we now build a two-week material buffer in.
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07 · 2025Reading
Reading Lund Hagem from a hill in Bengal
What a Norwegian fjord-side practice has to say to a Darjeeling slope. On siting, weather, restraint, and the long line of the section drawing.
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05 · 2025Essay
A small field manual for the first-year engineer
Things I wish someone had told me on my first site: how to read a contractor, the politics of the pour card, and the patience of concrete.
Read →The Personal
02
Photography — studies
Street — a hill town
Ongoing · 2022 →
The Personal
03
Movies — moving image
The Personal
04
Fitness & wellness
Strength you can carry up a hill, and the breath to enjoy the view once you’re there. I teach calisthenics and yoga — two halves of one practice.
Most of my own training happens outdoors, on the same slopes I build on. Teaching grew out of that: a handful of early-morning sessions on Chowrasta that turned into regular classes for friends, then for anyone who turned up.
The approach is plain — bodyweight strength, honest mobility, and a breath practice that travels. No mirrors, no machines, just the floor, the bar, and the hill.
i
Calisthenics
Bodyweight strength from the first push-up to the first muscle-up — progressions anyone can start, scaled to the body in front of me.
ii
Yoga
A steady Hatha-led practice for mobility, balance, and recovery — the counterweight that keeps the strength work sustainable.
iii
Breath & mobility
Short, repeatable routines for breath control and joint health — the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible.
Family studio
Sumitra Yogashala
The yoga shala my mother runs — and the practice this whole side of my life grew out of. A quieter, gentler studio, with its own home on the web.
Visit Sumitra Yogashala →05
Built work
Engineering & infrastructure
IKO Trinity ↗Before the studio, years underground — tunnel boring, segment casting and metro works across India and the Gulf.
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Architecture — elsewhere
06
About
I make words, images, films, and buildings from Darjeeling, in the Eastern Himalayas. Most of what is here began as a curiosity about how the hill, the weather, and the people of this place shape what gets built and lived in.
By training I am a civil engineer. I founded IKO Trinity in 2018 — a small design-build studio of six, working across architecture, structural and MEP engineering, procurement, and site supervision in Seismic Zone IV. That work lives under the Studio.
Outside the firm I write essays, photograph the slow erosion of hill towns, and make short films about the Eastern Himalayas. This site is the one place all of it lives together.