multi-storied #24: The architect
For a good few years, beginning around 2010, I was stricken with a love for reading about architecture, and about Indian urban architecture in particular. This was born from an idle conversation with my agent, when we were spitballing book ideas, and she mentioned how great it would be to write a history of modern India purely told through its urban architectural progress. Part of that sustained spell of reading involved an encounter with the ideas of BV Doshi. When he won the Pritzker Prize in 2018, I wrote about him for the New Yorker.
This morning, I learned that he’d passed away, at the grand age of 95. It reminded me of another short piece I’d written about Doshi, for the exhibition catalogue of a Doshi-centric show at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. It gave me a great chance to spend even more time with him on the phone, talking about his life and work. Here’s the piece, with footnotes all in place:
The coincidence is too delicious to ignore. In 1947, the year India became independent, Balkrishna Doshi began his studies in architecture. He had grown up in an older quarter of the city of Pune, where the streets were crowded and the buildings could appear haphazard. The Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, where Doshi enrolled, was housed in a stately neo-Gothic pile, and its campus held a fine, calm garden. He wandered through that area of southern Bombay and absorbed the multiplicity of influences: some buildings obviously colonial, others with finials and domes that marked them as India, some status brought in from Persia, others crafted in India. The images overlapped in his mind.
In the classroom, everyone wanted to talk about style: the Islamic style, the Greek style, the Saracenic style. There wasn’t any conversation about space, or form, or structure, or technology, and Doshi found this unsatisfying. Then, in his third year, a friend in London wrote him a letter, inviting him to England to write the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) examination. Impulsively, Doshi dropped out of university and went to London.
How an Indian dropout then joined Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris has become a part of the Doshi legend, but it’s worth retelling, just to illustrate his chutzpah and his eagerness to learn. At a modernists’ congress in England, a member of Le Corbusier’s team mentioned to Doshi that they had just been chosen to design the new Indian city of Chandigarh. Doshi, still waiting to write the RIBA exam, asked: Can I join the team? A week or two later, he received a letter in French from Le Corbusier, inviting him to Paris, but warning him that he would be an unpaid trainee for the first eight months. “Eight months with olives and cheese and bread, that’s all,” Doshi said, in a documentary about his life in 2009 [1]. He was put to work drawing plans and cross-sections, but his French was non-existent. So Le Corbusier sat with him, sketching and explaining. Once, in discussing a diagram of a parapet, Le Corbusier drew a human hand upon the parapet. “Do you see how the hand is rested upon the parapet?” he asked Doshi [2]. That was when Doshi first understood what scale and proportions truly meant to Le Corbusier—understood the expanse of his architectural ideas.
Chandigarh was a tabula rasa, a city that had to be created because the state of Punjab needed a capital. It was a project of planning and architecture, but it was also a project of political thought. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was in a hurry to move his country into a new, secular, scientific age. He wanted to urbanize India’s villages; he seeded engineering colleges across the land; inaugurating a dam, he called it one of the “temples of modern India.” “The static condition in regard to architecture in India for the last 200 or 300 years...really was a reflection of the static condition of the Indian mind or Indian conditions,” Nehru said in 1959 [3]. He aspired for Chandigarh to be a city “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.” [4] The Corbusian aesthetic—its bold designs dreamed up in concrete, its international spirit, its muscular industrial look, its utter newness in India—matched Nehru’s vision. To his mind, modernism equalled modernization.
Like Nehru, Le Corbusier diagnosed that “India had, and always has, a peasant culture... But India hasn’t yet created an architecture for modern civilization (offices, factories, buildings).” [5] This was what he set about creating, in his own vein, in Chandigarh. On a grid of broad avenues, he placed the buildings and spaces of the democratic age: a high court, a legislative assembly, a secretariat, piazzas, and museums. Everything was monumental, everything wore a hard carapace of concrete. The scale seemed calibrated to Nehru’s ambition for India. Of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Aditya Prakash, one of his colleagues, said in 1982: “It is a place for the gods to play; it’s not for humans.” [6]
Doshi absorbed many lessons from Le Corbusier’s designs. He learned how buildings should naturally guide people through their plans, how spaces interact with each other, and how function determines form. But the new city wasn’t an unqualified success. The massive volumes of Le Corbusier’s structures daunted citizens and dwarfed them. Their concrete shells blazed with heat during the fierce Punjab summers. Their facades wore down in northern India’s extreme seasonal oscillations. The buildings reflected nothing of the land they stood in; they had no context. The Corbusian plan cut out mixed-income and mixed-use neighbourhoods, eliminating the bustle and intimacy of Indian towns—the kind Doshi was so familiar with from his childhood in Pune. To its critics, like the American architects Philip Johnson and Peter Blake, Chandigarh came to resemble a museum piece, impressive to look at but shorn of life. [7] [8]
Doshi came to recognize some of these niggles himself. “I have the feeling that there are lots of problems in the [Legislative] Assembly,” he said in an interview in 1986 [9]. “While it was an absolute success in formal terms it was not the same in practical terms.” The secretariat, he added, “fails, fails totally, as an office building,” and since the plan offered no potential for mixed living, “you have streets, open spaces, houses—but you have no life.” [10] Still, he admired Le Corbusier’s forms, his grasp of space, and the allegorical power of his buildings. He set up an independent practice in 1956, and his first few projects inclined in Corbusian directions. The Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad, a manuscript archive finished in 1962, was a prime example. Its appearance was that of a grand, rectangular concrete spaceship hovering above a neat park, very similar to Le Corbusier’s plan for a governor’s estate in Chandigarh, which remained unbuilt. Into this design, he incorporated elements of the traditional houses of the old city of Ahmedabad, as well as influences from Japanese architecture.
Of this design and others, Doshi would later say:
I have gradually discovered that the buildings that I have designed seem somewhat foreign and out of milieu; they do not appear to have their roots in the soil. With the experience of my work over the years and my own observation, I am trying to understand a little about my people, their traditions, and social customs, and their philosophy of life. [11]
Doshi’s career thus became a programme to rework the principles of Modernism for India. “It had to suit the climate,” he said. “It had to be sustainable, which is really an old Indian idea. We’re a frugal people, out of necessity. My clients have always automatically said: ‘Do something that isn’t expensive to maintain, and that is made of something that’s easily available.’ And it had to be identify with the culture, which mean inventing things that were suitable for a particular place, and that had a particular context... That is what I have been following for the past 50 years.” [12]
One of Doshi’s solutions rested in the question of proportion. He reduced the magnitude of Corbusian modernism, bringing them closer to the dimensions of regular life. The architect Nimish Patel, a student of Doshi’s first batch at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad (CEPT), searched for a word to describe Doshi’s buildings and settled on “humane”—kind and accommodating to the people who passed through them. [13] The campuses of two universities—CEPT, and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore—hold buildings that are slung low, that seem accessible rather than forbidding. Doshi also looked to techniques and materials more familiar to India than pure, blocky concrete. He absorbed how people interact through the spaces of traditional Indian architecture: “the subtle significance of the porches, verandahs, staircases, open spaces, balconies, terraces, etc... Seen in their depth, they show the relations of classes and communities, their mutual actions and reactions. In short, the whole web of life.” [14] In CEPT, the walls wear red brick. In IIM Bangalore, Doshi used local grey granite, a choice inspired by the old temples of southern India. He opened his spaces up dramatically, in part to ventilate them but also to recall how Indian structures have always communed with the natural world. Le Corbusier’s plazas were naked concrete; Doshi dressed his open spaces in trees or lawns. In CEPT, he subtracted walls and added skylights and public squares; the sense of a classroom, he said, “must be all over, outside as well as inside the building.” [15] The halls of IIM Bangalore are located amidst groves of trees and bushes, as if the university is a remote hermitage filled with wise men who have removed themselves from their material lives.
Even the most radical aspect of Doshi’s architecture has been one that he has, in fact, drawn from Indian urban traditions. His portfolio includes two planned townships: one near Jaipur, and another, called Aranya, in Indore. In the latter, Doshi delineated plots for 8,000 low-income homes. (“It seems that I should take an oath and remember it for my life-time: to provide the lowest class with the proper dwelling,” Doshi had written in his diary in 1954.) [16] But then he suppressed the architect’s innate impulse: He built a small batch of model homes, but he offered families the opportunity to alter them in any way they desired, for their own purposes. Some houses were humbler than others; some were taller, where bigger families added a floor or two on top; some incorporated workshops or shops or garages within them; some were sold on for profit. Very rapidly, Aranya began to feel like an organic Indian neighbourhood—a mohalla, where life was often lived in the alleys, where families with varying degrees of wealth resided next to each other, and where the boundaries between residential and commercial spaces dissolved. “In our cities, everything is always mixed,” Doshi said. “That is our character.” [17] He didn’t mind that his ideas were taken over, built upon, or even sometimes erased. He welcomed it; he wanted people to feel like they truly owned his buildings.
Doshi regards this prizing of the personal experience as an act of empathy. That quality, he thinks, is missing the kind of architecture now populating modern Indian cities. Public projects have dried up; ever since India’s economy opened up nearly 30 years ago, commissions have come from private clients, who are eager to replicate the spaces of their peers in London, New York and Hong Kong. The urban landscape fills with towers of glass and metal, which heat up quickly in the Indian weather and therefore have to be air-conditioned every minute of the day. The artificiality of their appearance is the very point of their design. They are profoundly divisive, determining which kind of Indian gets to enter and which kind must stay outside the door—the polar opposite effect to that created by Doshi’s welcoming public spaces. Once again, as in Nehru’s time, the vision that powerful Indians hold for their country has shifted. Nehru thought that constructing India meant constructing vast, strong public institutions; today, politicians and businessmen think that constructing India means constructing vast, deep reserves of private wealth.
Doshi’s departure from the Nehruvian and Corbusian sensibility did not detach him from their nation-building spirit. In fact, quite the opposite: His work grew only more closely and convincingly aligned with the project of India. The vast majority of his creations have been public commissions, paid for by the government in part or in full, to fulfill the state’s vision of itself. By articulating these buildings in a version of Modernism suited to the country, Doshi exemplified India’s ability to think and act for itself—to study global ideas and fit them to its needs rather than to fit itself to them. And by centering the buildings around the people who would use them—by shrinking their scale, by synchronizing them with the traditions and rhythms of local life—Doshi brought into focus the most vital element of the republic: the Indian citizen.
[1] Doshi (dir. Premjit Ramachandran, Hundredhands, 2009)
[2] Interview with Balkrishna Doshi, August 2018.
[3] Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches: September 1957-April 1963, Vol. 4, pp. 175-176
[4] Quoted in Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002, p.10
[5] Quoted in Kalia, 2006
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/travel/le-corbusier-s-chandigarh.html, accessed Sep. 27, 2018
[7] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/architecture-indias-oddest-city-under-threat-chandigarh-the-punjabi-capital-designed-by-le-corbusier-1413551.html, accessed on October 06, 2018
[8] Sunil Khilnani, “The Idea of India,” New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1997), p. 134
[9] https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-166223, accessed on October 06, 2018
[10] Ibid.
[11] Balkrishna Doshi, “Le Corbusier and Louis I. Kahn: The Acrobat and the Yogi of Architecture (Interviews)”, Ahmedabad: Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design (1990)
[12] Interview with Balkrishna Doshi, August 2018
[13] Interview with Nimish Patel, March 2018
[14] William J. R. Curtis, “Balkrishna Doshi: An Architecture for India,” Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing (2015), p. 24
[15] Curtis, p.27
[16] Quoted in Curtis, p. 14
[17] Interview with Balkrishna Doshi, March 2018