With increasing globalization, the blank patches on the map of world architecture are slowly disappearing. More and more countries are emancipating themselves from the dogma of Western modernism and recalling their traditional roots. Forty years after the founding of the Pritzker Prize, therefore, it is only right and just that it has finally been awarded to an architect from India. Balkrishna Doshi, now 91 years of age, has played a leading role in shaping the transition from a modernism imported from the West to the work of a generation of self-assured, socially engaged Indian architects. In his 70 years of professional activity, he has implemented more than 100 schemes - from his own small-scale atelier dwelling to large housing developments for 80,000 people. But his significance in architectural history is also attributable to his teaching, his lectures and publications, and his work on juries at home and abroad.
In search of an Indian architecture
For four years, Balkrishna Doshi worked in Le Corbusier's headquarters office in the Rue de Sèvres, Paris, before implementing as chief architect from 1954 onwards the designs for the Mill Owners' Association building, the Sanskar Kendra Museum and the Villa Shodhan and Villa Sarabhai in the textile centre Ahmadabad. It was in this city that Doshi founded his office Vastu Shilpa, which means basically "environmental design". Through architecture, he furthered the development of his country to a land with its own cultural identity. As a regular guest lecturer in the US, he brought Louis Kahn to Ahmadabad to design the Indian Institute of Management, the construction of which Doshi supervised himself. Thanks largely to Balkrishna Doshi, the iconic architectural works in Ahmadabad by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn were attuned to the location, climate and culture of the Indian subcontinent.
In the designs and buildings of his own practice, Doshi moved slowly away from the architectural language of his great teachers in search of an architecture appropriate to India. In Ahmadabad, he created the main large-scale public buildings in a style of purest hermetic Brutalism: the Institute of Indology (1959), Gujarat University (1963), the Tagore Memorial Theatre and the Premabhai Hall (1975). In the School of Architecture (1966), of which he was joint founder, there is already a passage beneath the building; and in his Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1977-92), a planted strip flows under a broad pergola axis across the entire campus, linking landscape and architecture. Doshi has used the motif of the green strip on an urban scale, too. The plan for his extension of Vidyadhar Nagar in Jaipur (1984), containing 30,000 units, is modern in appearance, while also recalling the layout geometry of Hindu temple complexes. The housing in his low-budget schemes develops from extremely long, narrow layouts, reminiscent of Le Corbusier, to cluster-like cubes with accessible stepped terraces and courtyards that aid communication between neighbours and are derived from traditional typologies.
Doshi, a highly distinguished cosmopolitan, never sought the limelight. He prefers the circle of the extended family in which he lives, deriving his inspiration from light and shade, nature, historical and modern building, but above all from everyday life.
