Didi Contractor, the American-born architect who spent decades working in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh building homes from local materials using traditional techniques, became one of the more articulate critics of a phenomenon she watched develop around her over fifty years: the systematic replacement of building traditions that had evolved over centuries to suit specific climates and materials with concrete and steel constructions that suited no climate and used materials sourced from elsewhere.

Her argument was not sentimental. It was practical. The traditional architecture of the Kangra Valley — mud walls with deep overhangs, orientation designed to capture winter sun and exclude summer glare, materials that breathed and regulated humidity — functioned in the valley's climate in ways that concrete construction did not. The mud house was cool in summer and warm in winter. The concrete house was hot in summer and cold in winter, requiring energy expenditure that the mud house did not.

The abandonment of these techniques was driven by a status signaling that associated concrete and steel with modernity and mud with poverty. The aspiring middle class in Kangra, like aspiring middle classes across the developing world, wanted homes that looked like the homes they associated with prosperity — regardless of whether those homes functioned better or worse in their specific context. Concrete was not chosen because it was superior; it was chosen because it was legible as progress.

Contractor's response was to keep building in mud, to document the techniques, to train local craftspeople whose skills were disappearing, and to demonstrate through the buildings themselves that traditional materials and methods were capable of producing homes of beauty and sophistication. The buildings she made are, by any objective measure, better adapted to their context than their concrete neighbors. They are also more beautiful.