Paths Uncharted

4 ideas

1. From Le Corbusier's Atelier to Ahmedabad

   In the early 1950s the young Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi joined Le Corbusier's Paris studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, working first with little or no pay, and spent about four years on the Chandigarh and Ahmedabad commissions. He then returned to India to supervise those buildings on site, which forced him to reconcile drawings made in Paris with Indian heat, monsoon, materials and labour. The case shows modernism being imported and then adapted by the person who had to make it stand in India.

2. Seeing Home After Foreign Training

   An education abroad gives a practitioner a trained eye that at first makes his own surroundings invisible or look deficient. Recovering sight means treating local climate, craft traditions and daily habits as primary design inputs instead of obstacles to an imported ideal. Doshi uses this lens to reread verandahs, courtyards, deep shade and hand labour as tested solutions rather than backwardness.

3. Triangulating a Voice Between Two Masters

   Working closely under two strong masters with opposed methods lets an apprentice find his own position in the gap between them, where one master would only produce a copyist. Le Corbusier worked from sensuous, pragmatic form-making. Louis Kahn, at IIM Ahmedabad, questioned what an institution fundamentally 'wants to be'. Doshi's own practice came from absorbing both and filtering each through Indian conditions.

4. Buildings Should Be Completed by Life

   Architecture succeeds when it provides a framework that users can occupy, alter and extend through their own rituals and informal activity, not when it is a finished object imposed on them. In Indian conditions, flexible, incremental and partly open-ended design serves people better than a fixed modernist composition. Low-cost housing is the clearest example, where a basic structure is supplied and residents build out the rest over time.

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