Making a difference

Combining romantic and rational, integrating built form with landscape, thinking about how people relate to buildings... these were Joseph Allen Stein’s important contributions

Joseph Allen Stein (1912-2001) was an American architect who came to India in 1952 and made an important contribution with his ‘modern and regional’ approach to architecture. Stein was enthused by the mood of solidarity and nation-building he found in 1950s India. Perhaps this contrasted with postwar America’s suspicion of ideas of social solidarity (leading up to the infamous McCarthy era) which may have made him leave his promising San Francisco practice.

Stein responded to the Indian challenge (and freedom) with an architecture that tried to express its location and was technically up-to-date. Over the next 40-odd years, he nurtured a culture of building that cared as much about good construction as about the people who used it. He was also among the earliest in the country to integrate landscape and interior design into architecture.

Work and influence
Early in Stein’s practice, buildings like the India International Centre (1962) and the Ford Foundation offices in New Delhi offered a sensuous alternative to the abstract forms being built by Le Corbusier and other modernists in Chandigarh and elsewhere. By contrast, Stein’s values can be traced back to the work of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. But they were perhaps more directly shaped by the nature loving, craftsmanlike tradition of architecture in California. This tradition contrasted with the anti-nature, anti-sentiment, machine-loving approach of European modernism represented by Le Corbusier. European modernism, though dominant, would be much modified over the 20th century in India, and Stein was to play an important role in this modification.

Unusual synthesis
The romantic and the rational come together harmoniously in Stein’s work. This is evident in individual buildings as well as in his body of work. He was rare among leading architects to have built industrial buildings that were as sensitively scaled, and as elegant, as his more famous institutional campuses. His factory for Escorts, in the National Capital Region, is built in unplastered brick (a sensuous and humane material which is rarely used in factories) and has a striking façade developed out of the sawtooth profile of high-level north-facing windows that light up the factory floors naturally.

Stein rarely went for unusual forms, unless they helped answer some specific structural or functional problem. His aesthetic was more about the ‘how’ of developing, detailing and building simple forms shaped by functional needs. The ‘how’ focused on good construction, but also how people would relate to the building. He paid great attention to the ways in which people would walk through buildings, lean on parapets, look out into open spaces. This concern with basic facts of how people dwell and how things can be built innovatively led to the dramatic courtyards of the India Habitat Centre. These courtyards are shaded with a grid of panels all hung at different angles calculated to block the summer sun and allow the winter sun into the open space. The concept as well as the construction of these panels were important innovations.

Hanging gardens
Stein was among the earliest Indian architects to pay close attention to the design of landscape around his buildings. In fact, he tried his best to integrate building and nature. Thus, many of his buildings like the Ford Foundation headquarters and Triveni Kala Sangam, both in New Delhi, have what he called ‘vertical gardens’. On the façades of buildings (external or overlooking interior courtyards), he made space for planters arranged so that a near-continuous stream of creepers or other plants could be nurtured over the surface. Few other architects anywhere in the world have welcomed nature right onto the body of the building so heartily.

Context-sensitive approach
The India International Centre reveals Stein’s commitment to using local materials and local architectural details in a modern architecture connected to its place. A combination of regularity and spontaneity is evident in his use of the local grey stone. The walls are built in what is called ‘coursed random rubble masonry’. The height of the wall is divided into a number of equal parts. Within each part (or course), randomly shaped stone blocks are used without any level horizontal or vertical joints. At the top and bottom of each ‘course’ a level bed of mortar is placed, so that the wall appears to be composed of a regular layering of panels of irregular (or ‘random’) stone masonry. This ensures a balance between the spontaneity of random rubble and the ‘order’ of normal ‘coursed’ masonry.

Stein also used the traditional north Indian jali (screen) at IIC by modifying it. He innovated by getting the jali made in blue glazed ceramic (a material to be seen occasionally in Islamic architecture in north India), since traditional stone carved ones would have been too expensive. The delicacy and bright colour of the jali contrasts with the weight, roughness and dull colour of the stone while also acknowledging the architectural traditions of the place.

 

Sense of scale

A ‘sense of scale’ is a much valued faculty among architects, and Stein was an undisputed master of it. ‘Scale’ in architecture is about the size of a building or its component parts relative to the human body. Some medium-sized buildings appear too big and imposing. Some others, which may actually be much larger, appear as if they are not outsized. The difference is made by how their scale is handled. Stein was extremely sensitive and skilled at bringing large buildings ‘down’ to human scale. He did a number of things in his designs to achieve this, things that were different from many other architects.

He emphasised the horizontality of his compositions, but also used vertical elements as counterpoints as well as to reduce the apparent height of the building. Often in his buildings, an exposed stone or brick wall panel rises up within a slender RCC frame and stops one storey or so short of the roof. The roof itself usually projects outward, creating a band of shadow on the outer face of the top storey. Put together, all these moves would make the building appear a little short of its full height and more within reach of the viewer. Stein also kept columns, fins and screens as delicate as structurally possible, which helped create a layer of delicate elements that mediated between the big built mass and the dweller.