B V Doshi's architecture is a sum of shapes that have won Pritzker Prize

Balkrishna Doshi was known to invite students of architecture to his home in Ahmedabad. As the founder director of the School of Architecture (now known as CEPT, or Centre for Environment and Planning Technology, of which he is dean-emeritus), the privilege he accorded his acolytes was often their first exposure to “modern” architecture. And they either loved it or hated it, a reaction Doshi probably aimed for in these interactions. It was a lesson beyond anything he could offer in a classroom, and it piqued the curiosity of even the most jaded appetites.
 
That the elegant and sparsely built Doshi has retained that ability to surprise is not unusual for those who know him. For he has been anything but conventional in his approach to his work. Known for his sensitivity to materials and space, Doshi could as often break from tradition to create something radical and controversial. When he teamed up with artist M F Husain to design Amdavad ni Gufa (also known as Husain-Doshi Gufa, before Husain’s fall from grace), it was a marriage made in heaven, and it is difficult to tell where the architect ends and the artist takes over. With its quirky, flowing lines and domes, it upturned the very notion of a gallery/museum as a white cube space. In the end, it served little purpose even if it managed to draw global architectural attention — a little like Husain’s films that weren’t films in the truest sense — which may have been the intent all along.
 
Now, in his 90th year, Doshi has become the 45th recipient of the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most respected architectural award. Though he served on the Pritzker jury from 2005 to 2007, the win itself is a first for an Indian architect, and it celebrates his many influences as well as his association with the city of Ahmedabad. What Le Corbusier is to Chandigarh, Balkrishna — or B V, as he is better known — is to Ahmedabad, a city identified with several celebrated architects such as Corbusier himself, and Louis Kahn. But if anyone has defined its skyline, that person is Doshi.
 

School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad. Photo: wikimedia commons

To say that Doshi was influenced by Corbusier would be an understatement. He was trained at the J J School of Architecture and went on to apprentice in Paris between 1951  and 1954 under Corbusier, a man he acknowledges as his “guru”. It was Corbusier’s slant of modernism that he chose as his own leitmotif, the raw concrete and “industrial” nature of his buildings becoming the hallmarks of his house that would confound his students. What Doshi describes as “organic”, the young architects would find stark and raw, the barebones of architecture, as it were, invested with honesty rather than guile. Any wonder it is a lesson they remember decades after graduating from Doshi’s class.
 
In Ahmedabad, he set up his firm, Vastushilpa, in 1956, and went on to supervise both Corbusier’s and Louis Kahn’s projects before endowing the city with his own structures. Elsewhere, he went on to invest institutional structures with an Asian (or Indian) soul, as in the playful Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, the leafy campus of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi, Sawai Gandharva in Pune, a township for IFFCO in Kalol and Vidyadhar Nagar in Jaipur. His Aranya Low Cost Housing project in Indore won him the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. And both France and India have honoured him with state awards.
 
Doshi is a delight to interview. He rarely talks in architectural terms and, on the few occasions I met him, he would take a childlike pleasure in offering up reasons for the architectural spaces he created — a uniquely Indian interpretation of modernism in which the interplay of light and shadows, of narrow lanes and expansive spaces representative of community architecture in India — played a piquant role. His solutions for buildings could include submerged ground levels to keep them cool (such as in his own office, Sangath, in Ahmedabad) or feature deep verandahs to eliminate the effects of harsh sunlight (as in the Institute of Indology, also in Ahmedabad). I remember him being insistent that architecture must be a response to a society’s need for how it lives. No wonder his own work was interpretive of public and private spaces melding seamlessly together.
 

Aranya Low Cost Housing, Indore

Looking back to those occasions when I met him, I remember most his evocation that a building must be an “experience”. “You must discover it,” he implored me. Perhaps this is what the Pritzker jury was indicating when they referred to his work as “serious, never flashy or a follower of trends”. The latter — his departure (though never quite elimination) of Western modernism in favour of solutions that are deeply, and logically, vernacular, has made his practice stand out. Doshi himself acknowledged this in his response to the award when he said that Corbusier’s “teachings led me to question identity and compelled me to discover new regionally adopted contemporary expression for a sustainable holistic habitat”.
 
We usually tend to view architects’ works through their projects, not as renderings (which are reserved for clients). Therefore, few of us knew of Doshi’s ability to convert his architectural drawings into miniature-like paintings, glowing with life akin to works of art. No wonder those architectural renditions — drawings, renderings, models — were the subject of a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in 2014 and, again, at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in 2017. On two separate occasions, I saw students of architecture crowding around the displays. “He’s God,” gasped a mesmerised viewer.
 
The award could not have come at a better time for an Indian architect — or for India. Indian cities have been experiencing hormonal growth that is haphazard and blindly imitative of the West in its quest for global cities. With misplaced enthusiasm, glass-encased shells have lent a quality of sameness to Indian cities, once characterised by their distinctive skylines and architectural styles. The Pritzker — and Doshi — could help open our eyes to how — and why — architecture must play a more imaginative, rooted role if India is to be part of a global dialogue.