THEORY OF DESIGN-V

ASSIGNMENT-

SUBMITTED BY

HARSH KUMAR GUPTA

13/18
Independence in 1947 brought forth a bewildering range of
problems, opportunities, expectations and dreams. The partition of
the country caused a refugee problem that involved millions of
families. All eyes were on a newly formed people and its leaders as
the nation settled down to doing what had to be done to set the
wheels of development in motion. At first there was no time for
elaborate building plans. Hectic building activity occurred because
millions had to be re-settled all over Punjab, in Delhi, in West Bengal.

Just as architects were beginning to size up the enormous challenges

of construction that lay ahead, the old debate on style erupted again.
The central question in the debates on style in the decades before
Independence was;
How much indigenisation of style could the British afford to indulge
in without appearing to be making political concessions to a subject
people?
After Independence, the question changed to: How much
indigenisation could a newly independent nation afford without
appearing backward and weak in both its own eyes and in the
image it presented to the rest of the world? New phrase and
slogans entered the debate.

Nationalism, a widespread and understandable sentiment in the first

flush of freedom, was sought to be expressed through Revivalism in
all forms of cultural expression, including architecture. Building styles
born of the Modern Movement and the colonial experience were
perceived as foreign and hence anti-national. Some of the tallest
political leaders in the land lent their support to the revivalists, who
sought to reach back a thousand years for architectural forms and
details which symbolised various classical eras and golden ages of
Indian culture.
Battle of Architectural Ideologies

To move forward, a basic question was meant to be answered that

what should be the tools and principles that were meant to be
followed as they were separated on 3 major ideologies and that was
– Continuity, Revivalism, and Modernism.

1. Continuity of ideology would mean to carry on the principles that

were left by the British that includes the local techniques and
design ideology such the Indo- British ideology whose example is
the Supreme Court of India located in New Delhi, designed in this
way by the chief Indian architect, Ganesh Bhikaji Deolalikar, also
the first Indian to head the Central Public Works Department.

2. Revivalist ideology is to bring back the old legacy of the

architectural principles which had deep sentimental roots with
the people of that region like the Vidhan Soudha in Bangalore,
which revived the Neo- Dravidian style of architecture to revive
the history and claim regional Identity of the people. It was
designed by B.R. Manickam and the First and Second Chief
ministers of Karnataka started in 1951 and competed in 1956.

3. Modernism, the most influential and popular Ideology, not just

in India, but all around the world originated from the west. The
principle it contained breeds the new and most successful
generation of architects in India. Not just architects but the
leaders themselves were heavily influenced by modernism and
were sceptical about modernism being the right identity for
India, and then the prime minister’s vision for cities and
infrastructures of urban India, modernism was the most
preferred choice for which he invited architects from around the
world.
While the debate on style raged throughout the decade, the 1950s
also saw a significant expansion of architectural education. In 1947,
there were three schools: at Baroda, Bombay and Delhi. Some of
the architects came back to India after education and training in
western countries like Charles Correa, B.V. Doshi, Raj Rewal, and
Achyut Kanvinde which resulted in strong architectural character.
Five distinct approaches of architectural expressions in India were
identified during the Post-Independence period.
They are:
1. Plastic or geometric forms exploiting the potential of concrete
used to express distinct and bold forms, volumes and shapes
growing out of functional needs.
2. New language of exposed brick and concrete
3. Bold and aggressive articulation of structural elements- an
expression of Brutalism like Kenzo Tange, James Sterling, Moshe
Safdie
4. Sensitive approach to harmonizing with the micro environment
that is reminiscent of the best traditions of F.L.Wright and Richard
Neutra.
5. Regionalism – an amalgamation of modernism with traditional
experience of town planning, neighbourhood clustering, harmonize
with nature, climate control and using local materials.
The role of Indian Architects A P Kanvinde, Charles Correa and B.V.
Doshi in the post-independence modern architecture of India.

1. Balkrishna Doshi

In 1955, a young Indian was often pictured in group photos taken in

Le Corbusier’s studio in Paris. Hovering behind Le Corbusier or at a
drawing table discussion, it was hard to predict that half a century
later; this young man would be as influential and dominant as the
French master himself, if not on the world stage, at least in
India. Balkrishna Doshi, along with Mumbai’s Charles Correa and
Delhi’s Raj Rewal, has without a doubt been a remarkable force in
Indian architecture since Independence.
In the six decades since then, Mr Doshi has played the role of
practitioner and educator, artist and teacher, producing buildings
that were as much architectural as social and cultural — projects
aligned to prevailing movements, as well as highly personal. “I
learned from Le Corbusier to observe and react to climate, to
tradition, to function, to structure, to economy and to the
landscape,” he admits.

Understanding of context
Obviously, few architects can single-handedly effect any
significant change in society. Thus to say that Mr Doshi, recipient
of the Pritzker architecture prize, has changed or radically altered
the course of Indian architecture would be inaccurate. But in his
collective of works, in various projects, built and un-built, there
are clues to help define the kinds of settings we would like to live
in, to make an architecture for India.
In buildings that derive a great deal from traditional living
patterns, his interest in designing and constructing is not merely
to fulfil the requirements of a house or an office, a factory or
school, but through material, assembly and planning, light and
texture, to draw the user into a thoughtful collusion with space.

IIM Bangalore
In his architecture, Mr Doshi has consciously crafted elements
that establish links to local methods of design and detail.
Historical references are used not simply to recall a cultural
memory, but to suggest a deeper understanding of context.
Architecturally, these profiles are represented in a consistent
reinterpretation of traditional spaces: courtyards, verandas and
loggias, where the link between ground and sky, breeze and
shadow, all become elements to explore the poetic resolve of the
architecture. There is of course nothing new about courtyards
and loggias, light wells and space open to the sky.
Throughout history such elements have been used to organise
space, from medieval complexes at Fatehpur Sikri and Mandu, to
the humbler designs of a house. But their transformation to
contemporary usage becomes an expression of Mr Doshi’s
artistry. And a persistent refrain in his work that never bends to
stylistic trends and fashions.
Doshi’s significant contribution to not only Indian Architecture but
also to its development and growth:

Aranya Low-Cost Housing Development

In the early 1980's India was facing a shortage of housing. It was

estimated that around 51,000 families were either homeless or living
in illegal settlements.
To help tackle this Indore Development Authority decided to initiate
an affordable housing project. There was only one man for the job in
their minds.
The result was the Aranya housing project in Indore. B. V. Doshi
would later recall that this one of his favourite housing design
projects.
He would later recall in a press release that "Here I knew that the
houses would be occupied by several generations of the same family,
that they would identify with it, that there will be a strong sense of
belonging and that their needs will change, and that they may
modify parts of it".

Aranya Low Cost Housing, Indore

This scheme was to provide 6,500 homes that were intended to
house 80,000 low to middle-income occupants. This system of
houses, courtyards, and labyrinthine internal pathways is one the
most famous housing schemes in India.
The house designs are typical of B. V. Doshi's architectural style. Each
one features a range of housing options ranging from one-room units
to spacious houses able to accommodate a range of incomes.
“They are not houses but homes where a happy community lives.
That is what finally matters.” –B.V. Doshi.

Doshi’s Contribution in Indian Architectural Education in post-

independent India:
Balkrishna Doshi is not just famed the world over for his architecture.
He is also equally known as an educator and institution creator.
He founded the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad in 1962 and
served as its director until 1972. He also founded the School of
Planning in 1972 and served as its director until 1979.
Doshi was also the first founder Dean of the Centre for
Environmental Planning and Technology between 1972 and 1981.
This centre was intended to evolve Indian design and planning
standards for the built environment sympathetic to indigenous
culture, societal factors and its environment.
He was also the founder member of the Visual Arts Centre,
Ahmedabad and first founder Director of the Kanoria Centre for Arts,
Ahmedabad.
Balkrishna also established and has been instrumental in building,
the internationally acclaimed research institute, Vastu-Shilpa
Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design.
This institution has been a pioneer in developing low-cost housing
and city planning. Doshi's work and that of his the institution is
considered noteworthy for its contributions to low-income housing.

CEPT Ahmedabad

Sangath,Ahmedabad
A quiet, lank-haired man of ninety, Doshi is no star architect. He
hasn’t dreamed up opera houses and museums in cities around the
world; he hasn’t even designed airport terminals or skyscrapers in
India. Instead, in a career that has spanned seventy years, he has
focussed on public institutions: universities, libraries, performance-
art centres, and low-cost housing complexes. He committed early
to sustainability—not necessarily out of any premonition about the
environment but because to be sustainable was to be local. Doshi
wanted his buildings, above everything, to be of the place where
they reside, of its weather and its vegetation, and of the rhythms of
its people’s lives. That’s his contribution in post-independence
Indian Architecture.
2. Achyut P Kanvinde

Post-independence architecture of India has been much

discussed and documented in a variety of local and
international publications. By now a celebrated and legendary
architect of twentieth century India, Achyut Kanvinde is
somewhat an unfamiliar figure worldwide. While most of the
publications about post-independence Indian architecture have
acknowledged his work, at best it remains fragmented and
scattered." Having built over four hundred buildings along with
his two partners, Shaukat Rai and Murad Choudhary and over
hundred buildings for which he is primarily responsible, it is
surprising that his contribution has not received much critical
attention.
 Kanvinde’s sensitivity towards local issues resulted in a unique
vocabulary as seen through two of his key projects: Indian
Institute of Technology at Kanpur (1960-1966) and National
Insurance Academy, Pune (1980-84).

While his commitment to principles of modern architecture is

discernable, his buildings are strongly rooted in their context,
which forms the analytical focus. Also the span of these two
campuses offers a longer perspective; the architect’s approach
to campus as building type through changing times and
campuses as rooted in the larger social context.

It is difficult to explain Kanvinde’s role in Post-independent

Indian Architecture in words however, certain understandings
can be drawn from his buildings:

 Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (1960-1966)

Site plan IIT, Kanpur

The IITK was one of the five technical universities established by the
Indian government with assistance from United States to provide
high quality technological education in order to support the
industrial growth.

In other university campuses built during the period under similar

aspirations, like the IIT Kharagpur (1956 onwards), IIT- Madras (1961
onwards), IIT-Delhi (1963 onwards) some key unresolved issues
emerge for example: at IIT Delhi the monumental academic block in
Corbusier language lacks human scale; rigid zoning and lack of
movement clarity at IIT- Madras and a lack of cohesive planning at
IIT-Kharagpur which makes IITK distinctive in many respects.

Visuals from IIT Kanpu

Due to the absence of any strong physical context, the larger context
of post-independence progressive aspirations came into play at IITK.
With a fresh beginning, the problem was to create a context - an
educational hub or a small university town, and with the American
involvement, a more obvious American university model became a
reference point. Individual buildings set within landscape aside from
the city; anchored by library building, unified with local materials and
fostering a sense of community were translated in the local Indian
idiom.

At the same time, Kanvinde was aware of the traditional models of

university campuses in the country – the Buddhist monastic Nalanda
University (300BC - 1200AD) – a clustered community around a
central stupa temple in stone, Ajanta Cave monastery (200BC -
700AD) – a rock hewn series of chambers completely integrated in
the nature by a singular approach; Aligarh Muslim University (1921)
– a grand Islamic garden campus but largely disintegrated due to lack
of a master plan; and Benares Hindu University (1917) – a
progressive university planned geometrically in semi-circular arcs
radiating from a unified centre but an overarching Hindu style
imposed on buildings and over-rigidity of geometry defy the original
intentions.
Along with the lessons learnt from the traditional and western
models, a notion of responding to one’s time and place etched
itself on Kanvinde’s mind. Thus Kanvinde played the role not
only of an interpreter of Nehru’s vision of progress but also
reinterpreted the imported model of modern architecture
based on local context thus setting up precedents for various
educational buildings and housing schemes in the following
decade.

Recent scholarship on the ‘entangled’ elements of modernity

could thus be observed in Kanvinde’s architecture.

As seen through his projects, there is a definite blurring

between the boundaries of modern and postmodern, the
universal and the local, reflecting a unique regional sensibility.
Thus context plays a pivotal role in Kanvinde’s architecture
and the way it gets woven in or challenged proves to be a
useful framework for its analysis

Thus, it could be argued that a study of Kanvinde’s ‘Indian’

buildings - how he subtly reconfigured the modernist
language without resorting to popular trends, provides an
alternative understanding of the history of modern
architecture in India.
 3. Charles Mark Correa

Post-Independence India was devoid of a distinctive architectural

style. Years of foreign rule had taken away all that traditionally
belonged to this vast country, and the early architects were not keen
on adopting Colonial Architecture – it was reminder of our
imprisonment. As a result, contemporary trends of the West were
dominating the look of new buildings. The architects were mostly
conformist or rebel.

Then came a man, a visionary, who had deep-rooted traditional

values along with a vision that went far beyond his contemporaries.
Born on 1 September, 1930 in Secunderabad, Charles Mark Correa
was not just a great architect and an exceptional urban planner, but
an activist who was celebrated for his sensitive outlook to the needs
of the urban poor and planning his buildings based on age-old
traditional concepts bringing them closer to the pe

Correa’s work was unique in the sense that there was always an
established relationship between the spaces; the form of his
buildings always created itself from a concept, mostly a traditional
concept. He studied a lot to understand the practices and traditions
followed by the Indians, and it was his mission to recreate those old
values in the modern context, an endeavor that gave his architecture
a different style, a different flavor.

Born in an era when Indians only took pride in following what their
foreign rulers did, Correa was a fearless designer who knew the value
of Indian methods and practices, and understood the need to give
these a modern makeover. He played a pivotal role in creating a new
post-Independence style of Indian architecture through his
innovative and inspiring designs. His genius was so evident in the
way he extended the courtyard planning of a traditional Indian
abode as a concept to the community planning while involved in the
design of New Bombay (Navi Mumbai). As a designer, he always
placed special emphasis on prevailing resources, energy and climate
as major determinants while creating and shaping the spaces. A
visionary, Correa was trying to design green spaces much before the
concept of green architecture even originated. That makes him a
contemporary architect for the world in a true sense.

Charles Correa produced several remarkable buildings and wrote

some breathtaking books in his long and illustrious career. The list is
so long, it almost seems endless. Some of the buildings created by
the master around the world are Champalimaud Centre for the
Unknown, Lisbon; Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Museum at the
Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad; the Kanchanjunga Apartment
Tower, Mumbai; the Parumala Church; the Jawahar Kala Kendra,
Jaipur; Vidhan Bhawan building and Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal; MIT’s
Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center, Cambridge, and of course the
planning of Navi Mumbai. There are so many other landmarks, it’s
simply not possible to list them all here, but we shall take up his
great works in our future posts to let you know the kind of work that
has been produced by the master over the years.

Some of his Works:

Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad

One of the most important conditions for him was to rely on

natural, passive techniques of heating and cooling a building
that would reduce costs substantially. Learning from the local
vernacular architecture, Correa strongly believed that
architecture had to be responsive to the particular climatic
conditions in which it was built.
The Artists’ Village, Belapur

The Artists’ Village project also demonstrates another

important facet of Correa’s ideas for housing in India,
'incrementally’. Recognising that in the third world context the
house is a constantly evolving entity, he tries to create a
system through which this house will grow as the family and
the income of the family changes. The houses are designed to
occupy only part of the plot, and there are ways in which each
home can expand. He specifies two party walls along which the
houses can grow to meet growing needs but still allow for the
open space structure to stay intact.

According to him, this allows for local masons and contractors

to be involved in the development process. It ensures the
participation of the end user in the design process and
generates income at the local level too.
Kanchenjunga Apartments, Mumbai

Another imagining of ‘space as a resource’ can be seen in the

prolific use of the open-to-sky terrace or the balcony in his
work. Often covered with a pergola, the open-to-sky terrace
space is seen as an extension of the interior space when the
weather allows.

Correa’s contribution to the imagination of housing in India has

been enormous. He had a unique ability to create simple, yet
profound ideas to address the unique needs of the Indian city.
However, for his ideas to be made concrete they had to
emerge within the Nehruvian mode of state-controlled
enterprise and industry .
Charles Correa’s interest in urbanism and especially the city of
Mumbai continued throughout his career in different ways. He
was involved in setting up the Urban Design Research Institute
in Bombay as a space that till date continues its research and
activism on architecture and urbanism in Bombay. His interest
in urbanism continued till the last years of his life when he was
instrumental in organizing conferences and workshops on
housing and urbanism.

He continued to believe in cities as the cradles of culture and

civilization. He recognized that they were spaces where
migrant labourers could find opportunities to transform their
lives, yet he ruled the fact that so many of these cities were
overburdened and unable to create positive physical
environments for their inhabitants.

Yet, he never lost faith in the redemptive power of cities.

In Housing and Urbanisation, he declares ‘An Urban
Manifesto’: 'I believe in the cities of India. Like the wheat
fields of the Punjab, and the coal fields of Bihar, they are a
crucial part of the national wealth.'
Identity of Post-Independence India in modernism:

Although we see a major metamorphosis of architecture ever since

1950 towards modernism, inspired by the renowned International
architects Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, the identity of Indian
architecture is not pure modernism.

Most of the successful Indian architects including Charles Correa,

Achyut Kanvinde and B.V.Doshi blended vernacular elements into
modernism giving it a rich flavour that demarcates the identity of
Indian architecture. They used deep overhangs, courtyards, shading
devices, pergolas, jaali screens to create an aesthetically appealing
climate responsive design.

Charles Correa has a deep understanding of cultural values,

mythological spaces and historical architecture of India. He
emphatically blended the Navagraha mandalas in two of his projects
where the traditional elements cannot be separated from
modernism.

Achyut Kanvinde brought various ideas from foreign yet blended it

with traditional methods of Indian Architecture and its climate.

The magnificence of spaces in the projects of B. V. Doshi, especially

IIM, Bangalore adds a sensational aroma to Indian modernism which
includes the play of light and shade, covered, semi-covered and open
quadrangles, and integration of landscape in to the buildings.

Indian Modernism is not just about form, function, materials,

structure but it adds another fourth dimension which is the feel of
fresh air and nature inside the aesthetically profound spaces.
Indian modernism is not just architecture of the rich but of the poor
with intricate cultural details assimilated like Aranya housing by
B.V. Doshi and Belapur housing by Charles Correa.
Indian architecture is a fine mix of modernism with traditional
insights identified as Critical Regionalism like IIT Kanpur by
Kanvinde, having a more functional and rational approach to design
which is the main language of modernism while incorporating the
social spaces, regional vocabulary, economical possibilities, climate
responsive, integration of architecture with landscape, energy
efficiency and using locally available materials, which gives a strong
identity to Indian Modernism architecture.

Hence, are the roles of these architects in defining post-

independent Indian Architecture .