It's amazing how the accident of life can turn a career—and in this case, perhaps reshape the way a city of more than 16 million looks at both its ruins and some of its future buildings. In the case of Ratish Nanda, it happened when a professor at a New Delhi college asked him and other students to write a paper on urban villages near their homes. During his research, Nanda discovered that he was living amid the ruins of a dynasty but didn't know it.

He fell in love with those ruins, which were in the Kotla Mubarakpur area in South Delhi, a 15th century village dotted with tombs and mosques of the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties—particularly their architecture.