Thinlars Residence

At the crossroads of High Asia, Ladakh shaped an architecture of endurance — mud, stone, sun and season woven into an agro-pastoral life. Built knowledge once passed through generations now stands fragile, as rapid urbanisation and industrial habits begin to replace climate wisdom in this trans-Himalayan desert. Across villages and settlements, Field Architects works quietly within this landscape, restoring old homes, crafting passive-solar dwellings, and even designing furniture rooted in local material logic. Each intervention is about continuity, where comfort emerges from understanding terrain rather than resisting it. This film becomes a concise case study of practice in a cold region: architecture as listening. Not preservation as nostalgia, but adaptation as survival — showing how building traditions can evolve without losing memory, and how the future of living in Ladakh may depend on remembering how it always lived.