Rajnarayan Subbarayalu

Introduction

Rajnarayan Subbarayalu

Commercial Designer | Design Technologist

I design spaces, then I ask why they work.

Commercial spaces, and the coordination and delivery that gets them built.

Design / Research / Ottawa

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About

I grew up on construction sites. I work on the space and on the process that produces it.

Rajnarayan Subbarayalu

Ottawa, Canada

My father has built more than a hundred telecom towers. I grew up on his sites, looking at structures before I knew the word for what I was looking at.

His advice: after school, go somewhere your family isn’t. You will fail and you will choose wrong, and the failures are the part that shapes you. I have been taking it ever since.

A master’s at CEPT, twenty seats from about a thousand applicants, then an exchange place in Stuttgart. CEPT is where I learnt that design can be research.

Three and a half years at DT Studio in Bengaluru, a workplace design practice. In India you pitch before you win the work, so the concept has to be strong and the design has to fit the client rather than the portfolio.

I came to Ottawa to study BIM and project management, and stayed. What I found here was a market that runs on hours. Nobody is against good design, but when every decision is measured against a timesheet, the time design needs is the first thing to go.

I could stop here and say this is it, this is the one way of doing it. That would be good for a business. It is not good for a growing mindset, so the search is still on.

Work

Selected from the master's portfolio

Surface Generation

Design as Research · CEPT University, Ahmedabad

A studio brief run as an experiment. Magnets organised on a loaded surface, the results mapped and graphed, then the rule that emerged used to generate a nine metre pavilion. The question came first and the form came out of the evidence.

Watch the documentation(opens in a new tab)

BIM Tools for Building Performance

Summer school · CEPT University, Ahmedabad

Where the interest in BIM actually started, years before it became a job. Using the model to test building energy performance rather than only to document geometry.

Water Pavilion

Building energy efficiency · CEPT University, Ahmedabad

A meditation pavilion optimised for daylight, with skylights tilted eighty degrees to the north. The section is the argument.

Minicoy Lighthouse Beach Resort

Undergraduate thesis · Minicoy, Lakshadweep

A resort around a historic lighthouse, designed without felling a single tree on the site. Local Minicoy building traditions carried into the interior rather than decorating it.

Read the full thesis(opens in a new tab)

Multispeciality Hospital

Studio · OMR, Chennai

Six floors of clinical planning. The kind of project where circulation is not a diagram, it is the difference between a functioning department and a dangerous one.

Boutique Design

Studio · Ooty

Retail interiors for four Indian fashion designers, each with its own customisation room. The closest of the student work to the commercial practice that followed.

Revel Urban Winery

International workshop · exchange programme

Interior and branding treated as one problem. The door graphic, the transformable furniture and the terrace read as a single decision rather than a fit-out with a logo applied afterwards.

Watch the proposal(opens in a new tab)

Lamp Shade

Product design · CEPT University, Ahmedabad

A particle-binding joinery that locks the product rigid and lets it turn in moving air. Small enough to actually build, which is the point of building it.

Professional work is available on request.

Practice

Four areas, one way of working

Space

  • Commercial Design
  • Workplace
  • Human Experience
  • Accessibility
  • Materiality

Where the questions start.

System

  • BIM
  • Information Management
  • Design Technology
  • Digital Workflows

How the answers hold together.

Intelligence

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Automation
  • AI-assisted Design Processes
  • Emerging Technology

What removes the work nobody should be doing.

People

  • Leadership
  • Mentoring
  • Community
  • Collaboration
  • Entrepreneurship

Who any of it is actually for.

Fig. 04. The rules are the point. Each area is a way into the others.

Design as Research

Learnt at CEPT, not invented for a website

“That’s how it has always been done” has never been a convincing answer to me.

Every project is a chance to observe, question and test how people actually use a space. That means looking past the aesthetics into behaviour, movement, accessibility and the systems that carry the work.

My background is in commercial design, and that way of thinking is what took me into BIM, coordination and the tools the work depends on. Technology is part of the practice, not a second one.

What I look at first

Movement

A circulation path is not just a line on a plan. It shapes encounters, privacy, efficiency and experience.

Behaviour

People adapt a room within a week of moving in. What they change tells you more than any brief did.

Accessibility

Accessibility should influence the design from the first decision rather than appear as a compliance layer at the end.

Systems

A building is designed once and operated for decades. The system that carries the information outlives the drawing.

The process deserves as much design attention as the outcome.

Experiments

Open questions, and where I have got to on each

AI + Design

How can artificial intelligence remove repetitive work without removing human judgement?

Where I have got to

The line I keep testing is decision authority. A tool that informs a decision is useful. A tool that makes one has taken the designer’s responsibility with it.

BIM + Information

How can project information become easier to find, understand and act on?

Where I have got to

Most projects do not lack information. They lack a way to reach the right piece of it at the moment somebody has to decide something.

Human Experience

How can observed movement and behaviour shape the next set of spatial decisions?

Where I have got to

Post-occupancy is usually a report nobody reads. Treated as evidence, it is the only feedback loop the profession has.

Delivery

Where is design time being lost to the process rather than the design?

Where I have got to

Rarely in the design work. Usually in handoffs, in re-entering the same data, and in drawings that exist to satisfy a step nobody has questioned.

Outside the Studio

Different professions.
Different perspectives.

Where ideas
collide.

JCI gives me access to rooms I would never encounter through design alone. Different professions, cultures and ways of thinking challenge assumptions and change how I look at problems.

Different ideas get tested. Perspectives shift.

President, JCI Ottawa

2026

The presidency is one year. The perspective stays much longer.

If you are a young professional looking to meet people beyond your field and grow through different perspectives, JCI is worth exploring.

Curious about JCI? Let’s talk.
  • Design
  • Engineering
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Marketing
  • Education
  • Community

Field Notes

Working notes. Revised as the thinking changes.

Practice

The drawing was never the deliverable

A century spent perfecting the document, and comparatively little on the decision it was meant to record.

Open

BIM

Coordination is a communication problem

Clash detection finds geometry meeting geometry. It has never once found two people holding different assumptions.

Open

Material

Specification as a sensory decision

A finish schedule is read as a list of products. It is experienced as temperature, sound and touch.

Drafting

Mentoring

Mentoring is the fastest way to fill the gap

Judgement used to accumulate through years of repetition. Mentoring is how it transfers without waiting for the years.

Open

Connect

Let’s exchange ideas.

I enjoy conversations with designers, builders, technologists, entrepreneurs and people questioning how things could work better.

Connect on LinkedIn(opens in a new tab)ar.rajnarayan@gmail.com
WELL APLEED Green Associate