Architect Balkrishna Doshi Has Designed Buildings for India for More Than 60 Years. He's Also Been Defining What a Good Life Means for the Country

"He never repeated a design — every project was an experiment"

At 90, Balkrishna Doshi still keeps to the same daily routine: up early, yoga, meditation. He has practiced architecture for more than 60 years, and all that time he has kept putting one question to himself — what kind of buildings, streets and cities does India need?

The Power Station of Art in Shanghai recently looked back over the work of this master of modern Indian architecture. His granddaughter, Khushnu Hoof, curated the show. In the galleries, brightly colored miniature paintings and background music gave it an exotic beauty.

Whenever Doshi comes up, though, everyone asks about his early years in the studio of the French architect Le Corbusier, as if collecting enough details could buy them the feeling of "I knew Le Corbusier too." It has been that way ever since Doshi came home to India in 1954.

"Everyone is so eager to understand Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn through him," Hoof told QDaily. As a child she heard those two names countless times in her grandfather's studio. "Those stories became the background music of my childhood. I feel as if I knew Le Corbusier myself."

The Master Le Corbusier Couldn't Design "Life" Into India

In 1950, Doshi, then in London, talked his way into a meeting of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). The subject was Le Corbusier's plan for a new Indian city, Chandigarh. Doshi was the only Indian in the room. People warned him that "Le Corbusier is very difficult to work with," and he joined the Chandigarh project anyway.

It was a meeting of two newcomers. Doshi was 23, knew nothing about Le Corbusier's buildings and did not even speak French. He would watch, curious, as this tireless designer sat alone like a monk in an office measuring 226 by 226 centimeters, drawing, thinking, writing. Their early exchanges played out like a silent film. Chandigarh was also Le Corbusier's first project in India.

Doshi remembered a sketch Le Corbusier gave a friend, with three figures in it: Don Quixote, the Trojan Horse and a donkey. A person needs Don Quixote's fighting spirit, forever battling darkness and the forces that drag him down; for that he must exhaust every scheme, even build a Trojan Horse if he has to. And all of it takes work that never stops, like a donkey that never stops turning the millstone.

Le Corbusier once wrote a poem called "The Acrobat": "Not a puppet on strings / thrown into the acrobatics / phenomena all around / he does everything he can / all manner of difficult feats… / The result: not a single mistake! / He can do what others cannot." The poem is also read as a self-portrait of this technologically optimistic master.

For the Mill Owners' Association Building in Ahmedabad, India, Le Corbusier designed an unusually roomy interior — and gave it a bathroom door only 70 centimeters wide. When the client objected, he wrote back: "Gentlemen, you will find that a pregnant woman carrying two suitcases can easily pass through a train corridor no wider than 70 centimeters, so I am confident that no matter how large you are, you will be able to pass through this door."

But not every client was so "meek." He once ran into a difficult one in Paris who asked him to change the height of a kitchen. In Doshi's memory the master was furious: "I told them, in 25 years of work I have never given in on anything. I would rather not build this at all. Goodbye!" When Doshi asked what he would do next, Le Corbusier said: "One thing I've learned from life is that you take revenge on failure by working twice as hard."

In 1950 that self-assurance met a newly independent India. After Partition, the border between India and Pakistan cut the Punjab region in two, and the old regional capital ended up on the Pakistani side. India needed a modern new capital for Punjab in a hurry, to announce to the world that an independent India had arrived. Prime Minister Nehru marked out a tract of land at the foot of the Himalayas, 270 kilometers from New Delhi. "Chandi" is the name of the presiding deity of a temple below that mountain, a goddess of power; "garh" means "fortress."

Nehru had first hired an American engineer to design the new city, but the engineer withdrew after his partner died in a plane crash. Soon afterward the invitation reached Le Corbusier. From the country's leaders to its designers to ordinary people, everyone was rushing eagerly toward an unknown place called "modernization."

In his plan, a government plaza of enormous scale sat at the city's northeast corner, ringed by the Assembly building, the High Court, the Secretariat and the Governor's residence. To get from one building to another you had to cross the plaza and its lawns — not a pleasant distance in India's scorching heat.

Le Corbusier designed a layered road network, with streets built for fast, medium and slow traffic. In a 1986 interview, Doshi said this was not a design that belonged to India; India "has not yet developed to the level of a civilization dominated by traffic." "I don't think Chandigarh will even be seen as an Indian city for twenty years from now [1986]. What we experience here is Le Corbusier's idea of the life of the future, not Indian life."

In Doshi's view, another big reason the plan failed was a government that gazed up at Western modernization, deferred blindly to designers from developed countries, and had not yet grasped how much the local mattered. Traditional Indian society, he argued, was organized around groups and communities, with constant social activity, and it needed more shaded public space for life outdoors. In Chandigarh that Indian way of socializing was never seriously considered. The city had streets, wide open areas and vast residential districts, "but there is no life here!"

A Long Apprenticeship in the Local

In 1954, Doshi "graduated" from Le Corbusier's studio. In 2014, on the 60th anniversary of that graduation, the National Gallery of Modern Art in India staged a retrospective for him. He called it a long journey of sixty years, spent wandering and asking himself what architecture has to do with society, and above all with an independent India.

In Doshi's memory the farewell carried the undertone of India's national independence. "At the time people suspected that even though the country was independent, Indians could not shake off the servility of colonial rule," he said. He privately swore never simply to reuse Le Corbusier's elements or forms. "He didn't want me to imitate him or to keep repeating one building after another. He wanted me to invent, to look for new ways of expression." Doshi even took a photograph of Le Corbusier away with him and hung it on his wall as a check on himself.

The India he came home to was hungry for modernization, and commissions arrived in quantity from public bodies at both the central and local levels. The Institute of Indology building of 1966 was his first public building. To protect precious Jain manuscripts and original paintings, Doshi designed a half-buried structure, the whole design gathered into a "great ship" of reinforced concrete. For it he borrowed from the haveli, a traditional South Asian house form.

For CEPT University's School of Architecture and its Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Doshi designed a campus with no gate: a brick-kiln structure raised on an open ground floor, with no perimeter wall, so that ordinary residents could walk in and join in what was happening. It is worth noting that Doshi founded the school himself. Alongside the standard curriculum they set up research programs devoted to India's environment, cities and culture. That work also laid the foundation for Vastu Shilpa, the environmental design practice Doshi would run later.

In 1980, Doshi designed Sangath, the studio for his own practice, and one of his best-known works abroad. Following the plinth and structure of traditional Indian temples, several long vaulted volumes enclose an open-air courtyard. Inside the vaults the work areas are sunk half a level below ground. "We don't need heavy-duty air conditioning. We get through India's heat, which regularly tops 50 degrees Celsius, without it," Hoof said.

The Power Station of Art also showed how Sangath is built. Broken porcelain shards cover the roof and walls, reflecting sunlight so the building absorbs less heat. The vaults collect rainwater and channel it into the inner courtyard, cooling the building and making a landscape of their own.

"He never repeated a design — every project was an experiment," said Hoof, describing a grandfather who often looked up at the photograph of Le Corbusier on the wall. Amdavad ni Gufa, the cave gallery, is another case. Unlike his public work, it came from a private client. Today it looks like a neighborhood activity center, made of several interlocking domes. Doshi took his cue from ancient Indian Buddhist art — the round and semicircular forms inside the Ajanta and Ellora caves — and the shapes also recall the domes over Indian shrines to Shiva. The gallery was a collaboration with the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain, who painted murals inside this underground cave, where light falls through perforated windows into a dim space.

To build it, Doshi used computer modeling in 1994, but no local contractor would take the job. He had to find tribal craftsmen, who "molded" the gallery by hand, the way they would build a thatched hut.

The cave gallery worked, and the client was delighted with it. "It seems to have become a project that will never end," Hoof said. In recent years she has taken a number of "orders" from Doshi's old clients, among them a commission to design landscaping and new art space for the area expanding around the cave gallery. Her challenge, she says, is to find the smallest changes that will hold the new construction and the existing design together.

Houses for People With Little Money

The statement Doshi wrote for his 2014 retrospective was unusually poetic, and he titled it Give Time a Break. He did not talk about his own buildings at all. He began with a few traditional Indian temples. Religion is not some lofty fiction; in India, religion means daily life and real space.

He described a group of Islamic buildings from 1466 — a summer palace, a mosque and several tombs, built around a water tank. The site became the public space the whole city visited most: to make offerings, to pray, or just to cool off. It was never fenced in and turned into a museum; on the steps beside the tank, people from nearby bathe and wash clothes every day. Areas that were never assigned a use became loose, flexible places where people danced and did whatever else came to them. It was physically close to the neighborhoods around it, and just as close psychologically and socially.

Building housing for people with little money is a large part of Doshi's work. Aranya Low Cost Housing was a project he went out and got for himself in 1982. Hoof told us a client had originally invited Doshi to design a wealthy neighborhood near the city of Indore. Surveying the site, Doshi noticed an open stretch of land across the way and was told it was public land the government had set aside for housing for "Economically Weaker Sections" (EWS) — where people now living in slums would eventually move.

"A lot of people have very romantic ideas about slums," Hoof said. The Vastu Shilpa Foundation, where she works now, studies India's slums every year. Its International Habitat Studio, half Indian students and half students from abroad, picks a site to observe, study or redesign.

Architects are often startled that a slum can work as a self-sustaining city in miniature. "How people use limited money and materials to build both a physical 'structure' and a life — that is creativity worth admiring," Hoof said. But she also pointed out that many slums, for all the footing they give newcomers, offer no security at all: no land title, no basic power or sewage, bad sanitation, infectious disease, and gangs on top of that.

The Aranya houses Doshi designed are simply built. Each household got a plot of 30 square meters, a brick foundation, a toilet to match, and drainage and electricity.

To prove the design would work, the government first had Doshi build 60 model houses as a pilot. The central axis was the main commercial street, with six relatively self-contained blocks on either side, each with its own infrastructure. At the Power Station of Art, a finely detailed drawing showed what a mature block looks like: lanes that are not wide, houses facing each other across them, plants growing in the gaps between houses, bicycles threading through, cars kept to the commercial strip on the central axis. Every block has its own cluster of vendors. Roofs can become gardens, or places to dry laundry, or the start of another story.

Doshi called this a design that "trades time for space." It was not meant to be finished in one go. The Indian government and development banks together offered low-interest loans to low-income buyers, and applicants chose their fittings according to what they could afford to repay. The most basic package was a small room and a plinth, to be built on later. The options included a water tap, a rainwater-harvesting system, a sewer connection, street lighting and so on.

People in Aranya built in stages: a structure of the cheapest materials first, then brick and cement to strengthen it, then more room. In the end the temporary shelters became solid buildings people could live in for good. The retrospective used Lego bricks to get the idea across — a simple structure that can keep growing.

"But as we found when we studied slums, improving how people live is not just a matter of moving them into a new place," Hoof said. "A lot of government public-housing schemes think that's enough. In the new housing, people are cut off from the social ties they had, and there is no new public space where they can get to know their new neighbors."

Doshi imagined traditional street life. He laid out streets that followed the existing terrain instead of running straight, so people could use these spaces — varying in width, bending here and there — however they liked, while motor vehicles stayed on the commercial strip along the central axis. Formal shopfronts sat near the main road; informal vendors could trade in the narrow lanes and open areas, out of the way of traffic.

By 1988 the town of Aranya had taken shape. McGill University in Canada once worked with Doshi's Vastu Shilpa practice to revisit it. Their tests of whether the low-cost housing had succeeded included how solid the houses were, how much people used the open spaces, and whether the design fit the way residents lived.

In Aranya's small and even tiny public spaces they found shrines and platforms to rest on, and everyday celebrations happening there too. There were disappointments as well: some of the large open spaces sat idle, and a few had become dumps for rubbish.

Many of Doshi's projects came from the Indian government, and like their counterparts in China, he and his team faced every kind of change from the client — a change of administration, for instance. "If you're unlucky the whole project gets shelved," Hoof told us. "But sometimes you have to thank the client for the change, because it lets Doshi go back and fix problems he had found in the last round and hadn't solved."

Vastu Shilpa still designs for people with little money. Hoof worked on rebuilding projects in areas hit by India's 2016 earthquake. She remembers sitting in a circle with residents, nearly drowned by everyone talking at once. They did not know architecture and did not follow the technical terms. In the end she and her colleagues took out paper and drew what people needed: who was whose neighbor, which facilities had to be restored or added. It brought back the visitors she used to meet as a child in her grandfather's studio — neighbors dropping in to ask Doshi for a little "advice" about building something, and staying half a day to discuss it. Facing the same kind of visitor now, Hoof finds the hardest part is talking to ordinary people. "Because you have to use the simplest language you can, not arm yourself with jargon. And before that, of course, you have to be clear about what it is you're actually trying to do."

Cover image: Institute of Indology (Image / Vinay Panjwani)