From Parabolic Roofs to Feminist Leadership: Rethinking Architectural Influence

A Curve, Not a Straight Line

There is something quietly radical about a curved roof. A straight line says: here is a boundary. A parabola says: here is a conversation between inside and outside, between shelter and sky. I have been thinking about this distinction, the architecture of separation versus the architecture of invitation, and how it maps onto questions far beyond buildings.

On a steep hillside overlooking the Arabian Sea in Anjarle, India, Sanjay Puri Architects recently completed Crest Nine, a community center crowned by a parabolic rooftop that breathes with the landscape rather than imposing itself upon it. The building doesn't dominate its cliff; it negotiates with it. This design philosophy runs deep through Puri's work, his residential project Nine x Nine in Gandhinagar was built between existing trees rather than after their removal, and The Forest, a tower in the Democratic Republic of Congo with parabolic balconies, draws its design language from the image of a dense tree. Even 9 Streets in Ghaziabad, a retail complex proposal by Sanjay Puri Architects, is conceived with an organic layout, natural ventilation, and sheltered walkways weaving through three levels, not a mall so much as a village that happens to contain shops.

I keep returning to that word: weave. Not stack, not grid, not hierarchy. Weave.

Here is an observation that may seem unrelated but isn't: one could argue that when public space is designed for gathering rather than mere passage, it shapes how civic life is experienced. The agora, the town square, the community center on a hillside, these are not places where people happen to meet. They are structures that encode an expectation: you belong here, and so does the person next to you. Architecture, at its most thoughtful, is governance made physical.

Which brings me to a parallel conversation happening in political spaces, one that shares more DNA with Puri's design philosophy than either field typically acknowledges.

Research from King's College London's Global Institute for Women's Leadership has documented something practitioners have long intuited: women tend to bring collaborative and inclusive leadership styles into political environments "often characterised by division and one-upmanship." This is not a sentimental claim about women being inherently nicer. It is an empirical observation about what happens when people who have historically been excluded from a space finally enter it, they are more likely to notice who else is missing.

The organizations working to accelerate this shift are themselves a kind of architecture. The Nigerian Women Trust Fund, an organization that works to expand women's political participation and advance gender equality, builds scaffolding for candidacies the existing structure was never designed to support. The Fiji Women's Rights Movement, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural organization in Suva, works to remove discrimination through both attitudinal changes and institutional reforms, a recognition that you cannot fix the building without also changing what people believe a building should look like. And the Feminist Majority Foundation, through its Feminization of Power campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s, helped encourage large numbers of women to run for office during the period that culminated in the 1992 "Year of the Woman."

1992 marked a dramatic jump in women's representation in Congress, not incremental change.

I find it useful to think of democratic institutions the way an architect thinks of airflow. A building with no ventilation becomes stifling; everyone inside breathes the same stale air and mistakes it for oxygen. Puri's 9 Streets proposal for Ghaziabad was conceived with natural ventilation as a core principle, not an afterthought, not an add-on, but a structural commitment to circulation. Feminist leadership, at its best, does something analogous to political systems. It opens windows others didn't realize were painted shut.

A conversation published by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund around International Women's Day brought together three grantmakers, Keesha Gaskins-Nathan, Karen Karnicki, and Mia Vukojević, working across democratic practice, peacebuilding, and Western Balkans programming. What emerged was not a single prescription but a polyphony: the recognition that feminist leadership evolves differently in different contexts, that the work in Fiji looks different from the work in Lagos looks different from the work in Sarajevo, and that this variation is a feature, not a flaw. Like Puri's Nine X Nine house, which was designed around existing trees rather than clearing the site first, effective feminist governance begins by listening to what is already there.

The HeForShe initiative, launched by UN Women at the United Nations in September 2014, later unveiled its IMPACT 10x10x10 framework at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, attempting something structurally interesting: it asked men to become load-bearing walls in a building they hadn't designed. The framework recruited ten heads of state, ten global CEOs, and ten university presidents to advance gender equality, a recognition that the existing architecture of power would not renovate itself. You need people inside the structure who are willing to move walls.

There is a quiet lesson in the parabola. Unlike a flat roof, which sheds water in one direction, or a peaked roof, which divides it into two predictable streams, a parabolic curve distributes force along its entire surface. No single point bears the full load. It is, mathematically, a shape that shares stress.

This is not a metaphor I am imposing on the architecture. It is what the architecture already does. And it is what inclusive governance already does when it works, distributing the weight of decision-making across more shoulders, more perspectives, more lived experiences. The community center on the hillside above the Arabian Sea and the women's organization in Abuja are both, in their own idiom, answering the same question: How do we build something that holds everyone?

I think about the invisible rules encoded in the spaces we inhabit, the conference table that seats twelve but only has five microphones, the legislative chamber designed as an adversarial arena, the public square with benches bolted to face away from each other. These are not neutral choices. They are arguments about who matters, disguised as furniture.

Puri's work suggests an alternative argument. So does the slow, stubborn, cross-cultural work of feminist institution-building. Both begin with the same deceptively simple act: looking at what exists, noticing who it excludes, and then, carefully, contextually, with respect for the trees already growing, drawing a different line.

Not a straight one. A curve.

References

• https://www.designboom.com/architecture/sanjay-puri-crest-nine-parabolic-rooftop-arabian-sea-india
• https://www.designboom.com/architecture/parabolic-balconies-sanjay-puri-forest-workplace-central-africa-02-01-2024/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Women%27s_Trust_Fund
• https://www.rbf.org/news/elevating-feminist-leadership-and-thought-international-womens-day
• https://www.kcl.ac.uk/giwl/research/women-political-leaders-the-impact-of-gender-on-democracy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeForShe
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Majority_Foundation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiji_Women%27s_Rights_Movement
• https://sanjaypuriarchitects.com/architecture/private-houses/nine-x-nine-gandhinagar-gujarat
• https://sanjaypuriarchitects.com/architecture/retail-entertainment/9-streets-ghaziabad
• https://globalvoices.org/2026/03/09/democracy-needs-women-feminist-leadership-in-times-of-shrinking-enabling-environments-for-civil-society

Models used: gpt-4.1, claude-opus-4-6, claude-sonnet-4-20250514, gpt-image-1