Balkrishna Doshi: ‘My architecture is a fusion of Greek and Hindu, western and eastern’

As I’m speaking to architect Balkrishna Doshi, who was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal in late 2021, I can’t help noticing a large drawing on the wall behind him. We’re talking via the pixelated horror of Teams, so the image is a little blurred, but it is clearly a complex sectional drawing of Charles Garnier’s Paris opera house. I can’t help asking him about it. “Ah yes,” he says, “it was given to me by my friend Charles Correa [another RIBA gold medal awardee] to remind me of my time in Paris.”

That time in Paris in the early 1950s was spent at the studio of one Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect who defined a moment in modernism and whose architecture has been influential ever since. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the work of Doshi, now 94, who refers to Le Corbusier as “my guru”. From a devout Hindu that is surely no faint praise.

It seems almost unbelievable to be talking to an architect still practising who was once so close to Le Corbusier, working in his Paris atelier for four years (the first eight months unpaid) on a number of influential buildings including the Mill Owners’ Association Building in Ahmedabad and the new city of Chandigarh, one of the great modernist set pieces of postcolonial Indian identity.

“I met Le Corbusier by chance in London,” he says. Doshi had gone there to study at RIBA to supplement his Indian architectural education, which he felt “a little lacking in history and theory”. He got an even better one in Paris. “Somebody suggested I apply for a job; he was working on Chandigarh and he took me in. He was a great teacher, very easy to work with, tolerant, considerate. I was like a child being taught by his grandfather.”

If Le Corbusier’s influence explains some aspects of Doshi’s architecture — the sculptural concrete, the appreciation of civic presence and public openness — another part stems from his own background in Pune. “My father had a furniture-making business. I lived actually in the workshop, on the upper floor, and all the time I was seeing things being assembled below me. The workshop was full of logs and large pieces of timber and material . . . That notion of how a plant becomes a chair or a table, that was always a wonder to me.”

After working with Le Corbusier in India, Doshi was instrumental in bringing another modernist great over to India. When Doshi was put forward for the new Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, he suggested working with Louis Kahn, whom he had met while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. “I invited him,” Doshi says, “on one pretext: that I should carry on and work with him on the project.”

Kahn, by then a revered figure in architecture, took on the project for no fee, only expenses. The result, completed in 1974, was a monumental brick complex which worked with the climate, light and shadow to create one of the great landmarks of late modernism. “I learnt from him the sacredness of space, its nature, and about form,” says Doshi. “I was like an apprentice to him and he asked these fundamental questions, ‘What is a door?’ or ‘What is a window?’ There was a reverence for architecture and climate. Most importantly, he wanted an architecture that was meaningful.”

Doshi was working on his own projects too. He founded a practice, Vastu Shilpa, deriving its name from vastu shastra, the ancient Indian science of planning a home for maximum comfort and flow of energy a little akin to feng shui. Among the best known of his buildings is another Indian Institute of Management (1962-74), this one in Bangalore. A striking landscaped campus, its concrete buildings are structured around cool courtyards and shaded colonnades. Trees grow inside up above the roofline and plants tumble down the raw concrete arcades. Its walkways, internal streets and stairs are open to the elements, very different from the air-conditioned, enclosed, globalised and anonymous buildings that were fashionable at the time.

It has the flavours of both Le Corbusier and Kahn, but Doshi’s distinctive attempts to integrate nature into the architecture and use breeze and shade to make the building comfortable, easy and cheap to maintain are always present. “You are living in an Indian culture,” he says, “but trying to build for the contemporary world. I learnt about the importance of shadows for the first time, shade, the cool.”

Then there was his own office, Sangath (1979-80), a distinctive landscape of terraces and steps leading to a series of structures defined by open concrete vaults, drawing air through the interiors. The office appears almost as a village with a stepped, sunken piazza at its centre. There is much of Kahn here but also echoes of some of the more radical and eccentric architectures of Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti in the Arizona desert and Yona Friedman’s designs for refugee housing using concrete pipes.

Much of his work has been relatively unsung, an architecture for the poor and for workers. His appreciation of the way an Indian city works in real life — its complexity and layering, the way public space is appropriated for living — and, above all, his empathy are ingrained in his buildings.

Despite his success, Doshi did not take the path of the global architect, designing extravagant structures in ambitious cities. Instead, he stuck to developing an architecture carefully tailored for the climate and culture of India. “My architecture is an amalgam,” he says, “a fusion of Greek and Hindu, western and eastern and of course what I learnt from Le Corbusier and Kahn — like India. India is not a recent thing; any walk through an Indian city might take you past an Islamic building, a Hindu temple and a TV centre, it’s a fusion over centuries.”

Despite confining himself to his own continent, global recognition has come nevertheless. In 2018, he was awarded the Pritzker prize, the first Indian architect to win, and now, more than 70 years after he came to the RIBA library to expand his education, he has been honoured with its gold medal, personally approved by the Queen. He still works in his office every day and, with his slim build, full head of hair and modest, charming demeanour, he does not betray his age. “I don’t feel old,” he says. “I’m still a child. Architecture is about being happy and giving people a place where they are able to smile. It is a celebration of life. And life must be celebrated.” He smiles broadly to sign off. “And that is my final answer.”

sangath.org