In the New York Times magazine, Daniel Brook profiles Hafeez Contractor, India’s most commercially successful architect.

From this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of 21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched poverty that looks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.” More than anyone else, it is Contractor who is responsible for building those “islands.”

India’s economy is taking off, thanks to an army of contractors that provide cheap customer service and technical help for American companies.

India “looks like no other developing nation,” the Mumbai-born pundit Fareed Zakaria has written. “India’s G.D.P. is 50 percent services, 25 percent industry and 25 percent agricultural. The only other countries that fit this profile are Portugal and Greece — middle-income countries.”

And this economy is driving massive construction. Some nice. Some not so nice.

This is the world’s most expensive house.