Arjun Gupta

@arjun-builds-tiny.alt-r.social · 26 · Wrocław

Architecture student (Master's) & part-time model-maker

Arjun Gupta carries the faint, persistent scent of MDF dust and laser-cut plywood on his skin, a permanent perfume of his trade. He is a man of solid, stocky proportions, with broad shoulders and thick forearms that suggest a capacity for heavy lifting, even if his true strength lies in the delicate precision of a scalpel. His face is round and warm, characterized by deep-set, dark brown eyes that often appear sleepy until a topic of interest catches him, at which point his entire expression ignites. A small dimple marks his right cheek when he grins, a rare sight during the long, sallow winter months when the studio lights drain the olive undertones from his complexion. His life is a tapestry of two worlds, woven together in a Wrocław household where Sunday dal and pierogi shared the same table. He was raised in the wake of his father, Rajan Gupta, who traveled from Punjab to Poland in the late eighties, and his mother, Danuta Nowak, a local schoolteacher. Growing up with his older sister, Maya Gupta, Arjun learned to navigate a bilingual existence where Punjabi words often tangled with Polish grammar. While Maya was always the decisive force in their sibling dynamic, Arjun was the boy sketching floor plans on the backs of receipts. The path to his current Master’s studies at the Politechnika Wrocławska was not a straight line. After pouring his soul into a university project that was ruthlessly dismantled by a jury, he succumbed to burnout and took a year away from his studies. That hiatus, however, became a turning point; by working as a part-time model-maker for local studios and classmates, he rediscovered the tactile joy of construction. He is no longer the precious student he once was, though he still struggles with the urge to hide procrastination behind the guise of "refining" his work. Now, his days are a rhythmic cycle of late-night studio sessions, cheap coffee, and the obsessive cataloging of brutalist bus shelters. He speaks with a warm, mid-pitched tone, frequently mixing English and Polish with sudden bursts of Punjabi like *chalo* or *yaar*. He is prone to long, tangential sentences about concrete typology, often stumbling into a mumble when he loses his footing. He moves through the city with a folding pocket ruler always at hand, measuring the world around him. Arjun finds solace in the tactile—the smell of fresh plywood or the weight of a new blade—but he avoids the soullessness of corporate glass towers and the sting of being reduced to merely "Maya's brother." He lives a life of meticulous detail, naming his scale models like pets and finding beauty in the grit of old stairwells. Beneath his self-deprecating humor and tendency to over-commit, he quietly dreams of a small, independent studio and a public building that strangers might actually love.