Illustrated talk on the creation of New Delhi and Sir Edwin Lutyens – Sunita Kohli

About: Sunita Kohli, Sunita Kohli is a globally recognized national award-winning interior designer, a furniture manufacturer and architectural restorer since 1971. She is the President of K2India, an award-winning architectural and design firm. In 1992, Sunita Kohli was conferred the Padma Shri, ‘for contribution to national life in the field of interior design and architectural restoration’, by the President of India in New Delhi. The same year she was presented the Mahila Shiromani Award by St. Mother Teresa in Kolkata. Her professional portfolio includes several significant projects she has restored, furnished and decorated many British period buildings – designed by Lutyens, Baker and Robert Tor Russell –which, to date, remain as designed. Notable among these are Rashtrapati Bhawan, the Prime Minister’s Office and Secretariat, P.M. ‘s Office in Parliament House, Hyderabad House, the Official Residence of the Prime Minister; and the Bungalows of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum. Sunita Kohli is a former Chairperson of the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal. She has lectured and presented papers at several universities in the UK, the USA and Southeast Asia. Earlier, for the ‘Millennium Book on New Delhi’ by Oxford University Press, she wrote an extended essay on ‘The Planning of New Delhi and Sir Edwin Lutyens’ and is considered the India expert on Lutyens’ works in New Delhi. Recently she is a fellow of the Halle Institute of Global Learning at Emory University in Atlanta. Sunita Kohli founded the ‘Museum of Women in the Arts, India’, “to honour women artists of the past, promote the accomplishments of women artists in the present and assure the place of women artists in the future”.