New York-based architect Arzan Sam Wadia helped design One Bryant Park, Bank of America’s headquarters and the world’s first LEED Platinum skyscraper. Raised in Mumbai’s middle-class, low-rise Tardeo, he recently revisited the area and was startled to see skyscrapers crowding its narrow lanes. In a conversation with
Nauzer K Bharucha, he reflects on New York’s lessons, why the tower-ground relationship matters, and why Mumbai’s rapid vertical growth risks outpacing streets, services, safety, and long-term resilience.
Q) Your personal experience with skyscrapers in NYC
A) I still remember my first day: walking down Park Avenue and instinctively looking up the whole time, almost unable to process how the buildings shape the street into these canyon-like rooms. It isn’t just height; it’s the feeling that the city is “made” by its towers, and that the public realm—the sidewalk, the avenue, the light between buildings—is inseparable from the skyline. As an architect, that initial awe eventually turns into a different kind of respect: you start noticing the discipline behind a tall building that works. I spent many years working on One Bryant Park, the Bank of America headquarters—a roughly 2.1-million-square-foot tower that became the world’s first LEED Platinum skyscraper.
On paper, it’s a tall building; in reality, the hardest part is often where the tower meets the ground. That interface—how you handle the base, the edges, the entries, the relationship to the sidewalk, the transition in scale—determines whether the building contributes to the city or simply occupies it. One Bryant Park sits directly across from Bryant Park, so everything about the lower levels had to be considered with extra care: the way people arrive, how the building gives back to the street, and how it behaves as part of a busy, intensely used public environment.
Q) Your thoughts on skyscrapers sprouting up in Mumbai
A) When I look at Mumbai’s current wave of skyscrapers, I have mixed feelings. Mumbai has every right to build tall. In theory, density concentrated vertically can be efficient: more people housed on less land, potentially better support for services and transit, and less sprawl. Skyscrapers themselves aren’t the enemy.
The concern is the mismatch between vertical growth and the capacity of the city to support it. When towers rise primarily because redevelopment is financially attractive—to residents cashing out old homes, to developers extracting value—without corresponding upgrades to streets, water, sewage, power, storm drainage, transit, and emergency access, the result is dysfunctional density. My sense is that a large share of these buildings—maybe 60 to 75%—are going up in places that would not meet globally accepted planning and urban design standards, especially with respect to road widths, service access, and carrying capacity. If you take a neighbourhood that can barely handle its existing population and then multiply the occupancy on the same footprint by several times, without adding commensurate infrastructure, you get predictable outcomes: traffic that locks up, chronic parking conflicts, weak water pressure, stressed sewers, worse flooding during monsoons, and serious questions about fire and emergency response on narrow lanes. The tragedy is that these failures don’t always show immediately; they reveal themselves a decade or two later, after the construction phase ends and the area must live with the consequences every day.
Q) You grew up in Tardeo. How has the skyline changed in this once low-rise locality?
A) Tardeo is a very vivid example for me because I grew up there when it was fundamentally low-rise and human-scaled—older community housing, mid-century apartment blocks, bungalows, and streets that felt proportionate to the buildings around them. Over time, automobiles increased dramatically, and the street/parking equation began to break. On my own street, Wadia Street, the change has been startling. In a short span, multiple 25-plus-storey buildings came up, and now the count has climbed further. Put 30-storey towers on a street that is roughly 30 feet wide, where the earlier context was three- to four-storey buildings, and the street effectively collapses as a functional public space. It becomes a paradox: apartments worth crores stacked above, while at street level, two cars can’t pass without one reversing to find a gap between parked vehicles. That’s not simply “growth”—it’s a breakdown of scale, access, and everyday usability. And it isn’t limited to one lane. There are supertall proposals and constructions in similarly constrained stretches—behind Bhatia Hospital, across from Swati Snacks, and talk of major complexes being razed for new towers. Each individual project may look “world-class” in isolation, but collectively they can turn a once legible neighbourhood into a maze of overloaded lanes and shadowed, congested streets.
Q) Mumbai’s liberal construction laws are now allowing skyscrapers anywhere and everywhere, including close to the coast and on narrow roads. Is this sustainable? What are the perils?
Regulatory changes have enabled much of this: higher
FSI under DCPR 2034, fungible FSI that effectively expands saleable area, TDR mechanisms that shift development rights around the city, and redevelopment frameworks like cluster redevelopment and SRA that bring large FSI incentives. In coastal areas, changes to CRZ rules have also loosened buffers, which adds another layer of long-term risk in a city already vulnerable to flooding and sea-level pressures. So my view is: Mumbai’s vertical ambition isn’t wrong—but without serious, enforced, area-by-area planning tied to infrastructure upgrades and street capacity, the skyscraper boom becomes less a symbol of progress and more a slow-moving urban liability.
