Kamu Iyer graduated in architecture from the Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai, in 1957. As a practitioner since 1960 with Architects’ Combine, a firm in which he is a partner, he has built extensively in Mumbai and other parts of India. Besides teaching at various schools of architecture, he has authored Buildings That Shaped Bombay: Works of G B Mhatre, co-authored Four from the fifties—Emerging Modern Architecture in Bombay and Build a Safe House With Confined Masonry. His recent book Boombay: From Precincts to Sprawl (2014) describes his childhood spent in the areas of the Hindu and Parsee colonies in middle Mumbai. He believes that ‘a city can be judged by the way its poor live’.