Jaskran Singh Kalirai is a British architect, son of Punjabi parents, who arrived in Ecuador in 2002.
Jazz received a remarkable academic training at Leeds University, England, and the University of Pennsylvania, United States. During his training, he had the opportunity to be a student of great architects such as Enrique Norten and Daniel Libeskind, with whom he worked on the World Trade Center Memorial project, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York. In the same city, Kalirai worked as a corporate project designer at the international architecture firm KPF.
His interest in sustainable architecture stems from two important experiences during his postgraduate studies at University of Pennsylvania. The first was to personally meet Ian McHarg, landscape architect and inventor of the milhoja method of territorial analysis (forerunner of Geographic Information Systems), whose book Design With Nature (1969) marked his vision of architecture. The second experience was to participate in the summer program in Japan, where he performed in traditional carpentry workshops and discovered new ways of projecting architecture: respectful of man and his natural environment.
