Architecture's "Oscar" Goes to Balkrishna Doshi, Who Has Spent a Lifetime Defining the "Good Life" for India

Some architects have bluntly complained that judging by "social concern" has made the Pritzker ever more "politically correct."

On March 8, 2018, the Pritzker Architecture Prize went to Balkrishna Doshi, a 91-year-old Indian architect.

Across a career of more than sixty years, he has built all over India: public buildings, public housing for low-income families, private homes, art galleries.

Doshi was born in 1927 in Pune, into a family that had been in the furniture trade for two generations. In 1947 he entered the Sir J.J. School of Architecture in Mumbai. That same year India threw off colonial rule and set out to modernize on every front; in architecture and city building, it turned its eyes to the West.

Like other young men of his generation from India's middle and upper classes, Doshi went to England. There he met the French architect Le Corbusier, who would shape the rest of his career and who had just been invited to design a new city for India, Chandigarh. A few years later Doshi came home to run Le Corbusier's projects in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, and he later became a partner of another master of modern architecture, Louis Kahn. The mark of both men is still visible in Doshi's early buildings.

Le Corbusier's failure at Chandigarh started Doshi thinking about what buildings, streets and cities India actually needed. Study in the West, build at home, then question what is local — many architects besides Doshi have followed that arc. In the 1930s the Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa carried the ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus back to Japan. In China in the 1980s, the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei worked the vocabulary of Suzhou's classical gardens into the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing.

The Pritzker praised exactly that turn toward the local: "for his understanding of Indian architectural traditions, combining prefabrication with local craft to develop an architectural language in harmony with India's history, culture and local traditions."

The Pritzker's criteria, it is worth noting, have divided the profession in recent years. Toyo Ito of Japan (2013), Shigeru Ban (2014) and the South American architect Alejandro Aravena (2016) all run practices with a strong social bent — turning up at post-disaster reconstruction sites, or designing homes for people with little money. Some architects have bluntly complained that judging by "social concern" has made the Pritzker ever more "politically correct." The loudest example is Patrick Schumacher, once Zaha Hadid's partner.

Wang Shu, who joined the Pritzker jury for the first time this year, said in an interview that this is a change in architecture itself: people increasingly value the variety and difference that come with different places and cultures.

QDaily ran the article below on August 3, 2017. We hope it introduces you to this great architect once again.

Chandigarh, the "Failure" of a New City

In 1950, living in London, Doshi talked his way into the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), where the subject on the table happened to be Chandigarh, the new city Le Corbusier was planning for India. Doshi was the only Indian in the room. People warned him that "Le Corbusier is very hard to work with." He joined the Chandigarh project anyway.

It was a meeting of two newcomers. Doshi, then 23, did not know Le Corbusier's buildings and did not even speak French. He often watched, curious, as this tireless designer shut himself away like a monk in an office 226 centimeters on each side, drawing, thinking and writing. Their first exchanges were a kind of silent film. Chandigarh was Le Corbusier's first project in India.

Doshi remembers a sketch Le Corbusier once gave a friend, with three figures on it: Don Quixote, the Trojan Horse and a donkey. A person needs Don Quixote's fighting spirit, forever at war with darkness and inertia; that takes every trick available, even building a Trojan Horse; and all of it takes work that never stops, like a donkey turning a mill.

Le Corbusier once wrote a poem called "The Acrobatic": "Not a marionette / throwing himself into the acrobatic act / phenomena arise all around / he does everything he can to complete / each difficult feat... Result: not a hair out of place! He does what others cannot." The poem is usually read as a self-portrait of this technological optimist.

For the Mill Owners' Association Building in Ahmedabad, Le Corbusier designed an unusually generous interior and then fitted it with toilet doors just 70 centimeters wide. When the client objected, he wrote back: "Gentlemen, you will find that a pregnant woman carrying two suitcases can pass easily through a train-carriage aisle no wider than 70 centimeters, so I am quite certain that, however stout you may be, you can get through this door."

Not every client was so docile. In Paris he once ran into an awkward one who wanted the height of a kitchen changed. As Doshi remembers it, the master was furious: "I just told them, in 25 years of work I have never changed a thing. I would rather not build this at all. Goodbye!" When Doshi asked what they were supposed to do next, Le Corbusier said: "One thing I have learned from life is to take revenge on failure by working twice as hard."

In 1950 this confidence met an India that had been independent for barely three years. Partition had cut Punjab in two along the India-Pakistan border, leaving the old provincial capital on the Pakistani side. India needed a modern new capital for Punjab in a hurry — one that would announce to the world the arrival of a new and independent country. Prime Minister Nehru marked out a tract of land 270 kilometers from New Delhi, at the foot of the Himalayas. "Chandi" is the name of the goddess of power worshipped at the temple below the mountains; "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. Le Corbusier was invited soon afterward. Leaders, designers and ordinary people alike rushed eagerly toward an unknown place called "modernization."

In his plan, the northeastern corner of the city held a government plaza of enormous size, ringed by the assembly building, the courts, the secretariat and the governor's residence. To get from one building to another you had to walk across the plaza and its lawns — hardly a comfortable distance in India's heat.

Le Corbusier designed a layered road network, building the city around streets for fast, medium and slow traffic. In a 1986 interview Doshi said this was not a design that belonged to India, that India "has not yet developed to the level of a traffic-dominated civilization." "I think that twenty years from now (1986), Chandigarh will not even be seen as an Indian city. What we get here is Le Corbusier's idea of future living, not Indian living."

Doshi blamed the failure of the plan partly on a government that looked up to Western modernization without question, fawned on designers from rich countries and had yet to see the value of its own ground. Traditional Indian society, he argued, is organized around groups and communities and lives a great deal of its life in public; people need shaded outdoor space among trees. Chandigarh never took that seriously. It had streets, broad open areas and large housing districts — "but there is no life here!"

The Long Search for a Local Architecture

In 1954 Doshi "graduated" from Le Corbusier's studio. Sixty years later, in 2014, the National Gallery of Modern Art in India mounted a retrospective of his work. He called it a sixty-year journey of wandering and self-interrogation: what does architecture have to do with society, and above all with an independent India?

That parting carried, in his memory, the tone of national independence. "At the time people wondered whether Indians, even with an independent country, could ever shake off the servility of being colonized." He quietly promised himself that he would stop borrowing Le Corbusier's elements and forms outright. "He did not want me to imitate, or to repeat one building after another; he wanted me to invent, to look for new ways of expression." Doshi even took away a photograph of Le Corbusier and hung it on his wall as a check on himself.

The India he came home to was still an India hungry for modernization, and he won a stream of commissions from public bodies at both the central and local level. The Institute of Indology building, from 1966, was his first public building. To protect precious Jain manuscripts and paintings, Doshi designed a half-buried structure, concentrating the whole scheme into a reinforced-concrete "great ship." For this project he borrowed from the haveli, a traditional South Asian house type.

For CEPT University — its School of Architecture and its Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology — Doshi designed "a campus without a gate": brick-kiln structures raised on pilotis, no walls anywhere, so that ordinary residents could walk in and join what was going on. He was, it should be said, the school's founder. Alongside the standard curriculum, the school ran research programs on India's environment, cities and culture. That work became the foundation of Vastu Shilpa, Doshi's environmental design practice.

In 1980 Doshi designed his own studio, Sangath, one of his best-known buildings abroad. Taking the plinth and structure of a traditional Indian temple as a reference, several long vaulted volumes wrap around an open courtyard. Inside the vaults, the work areas are sunk half a level below ground. Broken ceramic tile covers the roofs and walls, bouncing sunlight away so the building absorbs less heat. The vaults also gather rainwater and send it into the courtyard, cooling the building and making a small landscape of running water.

"We don't need a high-powered air conditioner; we get through Indian heat that regularly passes 50°C quite comfortably," says Khushnu Hoof, Doshi's granddaughter. In 2017 she curated a retrospective of his career at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

"He never repeated a design. Every project was an experiment," Hoof says of her grandfather. The cave gallery Amdavad ni Gufa is another case. Unlike his public work, it came from a private client. Today it looks rather like a neighborhood community center, made of several spheres nested into one another. Doshi drew on the round and half-round forms inside the Ajanta and Ellora caves of ancient Indian Buddhist art; the shapes also echo the dome of a Shiva shrine. The gallery is a collaboration with the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain, who painted murals in the underground cave, where light falls through small round openings into the gloom.

To build it, Doshi used computer modeling in 1994 — and then found that no local contractor would take the job. He had to go to tribal craftsmen, who shaped the gallery by hand, much as they would build a thatched hut.

The gallery was a success, and the client was so pleased that "it seems to have become a project that will never end," Hoof says. Orders from this old client still arrive; the latest asks for a landscape and new art spaces on the ground around the cave gallery. Her own challenge, she says, is to make the new work sit with the old while changing as little as possible.

Housing for People With Little Money

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

He describes an Islamic complex built in 1466 — a summer palace, a mosque and several tombs set around a water tank — which has become the most visited public space in the whole city, whether people come to make offerings, to pray, or simply to get out of the heat. It has not been fenced off as a museum: on the steps beside the water, people from nearby bathe and wash their clothes. Areas with no assigned use become loose venues for whatever people start on their own, dancing included. The complex is close to the houses around it, physically and also psychologically and socially.

Building homes for people with little money is a large part of Doshi's work. Aranya Low Cost Housing, in 1982, was a job he went after himself. Hoof tells us that Doshi had originally been asked to design a rich neighborhood near the city of Indore. Surveying the site, he noticed an open stretch of land opposite and was told it was public land set aside for government housing for the "Economically Weaker Sections" (EWS) — people then living in slums would eventually move there.

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

In recent years architects and sociologists have been startled to find that a slum can work as a self-sustaining miniature city. "The way people make physical 'buildings' and a life out of very little money and material is creativity you have to admire." But Hoof also points out that many slums, whatever foothold they give newcomers, offer no security: no title to the land, no electricity or sewage to speak of, alarming sanitation, disease that spreads, and sometimes gangs.

The houses Doshi designed at Aranya are simple. Each household got a plot of 30 square meters with a brick foundation, a toilet, drainage and electricity.

To prove the design would work, the government first had Doshi build 60 demonstration houses. Among them, a central spine forms the main commercial street, with six fairly self-contained blocks on either side, each with its own services. At the Power Station of Art show, one finely drawn plan laid out what a mature block looks like: narrow inner streets, houses facing each other across them, plants growing in the gaps between houses, bicycles threading through, cars kept to the commercial spine, and in every block a place where the vendors gather. Roofs can become gardens, drying grounds for laundry, or another story.

Doshi calls this a design that "trades time for space" — nothing is finished in one go. The Indian government worked with a development bank to offer low-interest loans to low-income buyers, who could pick their fittings according to what they could afford to repay. The most basic package was a small room and a plinth to build on later. The options included a tap, a rainwater harvesting system, a sewer connection, a streetlight.

People built in stages. They started with a structure of the cheapest materials, strengthened it with brick and cement, then extended it, until the temporary shelter had become something solid enough to live in for good. The retrospective made the point with Lego: 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 somewhere new," Hoof says. "A lot of government housing programs think that is enough. In the new housing, people are cut off from the relationships they had, and there is no new public space where they can get to know the neighbors."

Doshi worked out a version of traditional street life. Following the lie of the land, he laid out streets that are not straight, so that people could take up the space as they liked, on streets of different widths that turn here and there; motor traffic stays on the commercial spine. Formal shopfronts sit near the main road, while informal hawkers can trade on the narrow inner streets and in the open areas, out of the way of vehicles.

By 1988 the town of Aranya had taken shape. McGill University in Canada worked with Doshi's Vastu Shilpa office to go back and look at it. They judged the project by how sturdy the houses were, how much use people made of the open space, and how well the design fit the way residents actually lived.

In Aranya's small and sometimes tiny public spaces they found shrines and platforms to sit on, and everyday celebrations taking place. There were disappointments too: some of the large open spaces sat empty, and a few had become dumping grounds for garbage.

Much of Doshi's work came from government, and like designers in China, his office had to live with whatever the client decided to change — a new administration, for instance. "If you are unlucky, the whole project gets shelved," Hoof tells us. "But sometimes you have to be grateful for the change, because it lets Doshi fix problems he had spotted in the last round and never managed to solve."

Vastu Shilpa still designs for people with little money. Hoof worked on reconstruction in areas hit by the 2016 earthquake in India, and remembers sitting in a circle with residents, nearly drowned by everyone talking at once. They knew nothing about architecture and nothing about the words architects use. In the end she and her colleagues took out paper and drew what people wanted: who lived next to whom, what had to be rebuilt or added. It brought back the visitors she had met as a child in her grandfather's office — neighbors who dropped in to ask Doshi for "a bit of advice" on building something, and then talked it over for half a day. The challenge has not changed: how to talk to ordinary people. "Because you have to use the plainest language, not arm yourself with jargon. And before that, of course, you have to work out what it is you actually want to do."

Cover image: courtesy of the Power Station of Art, and Wikipedia