B.V. DOSHI, A MODERN MASTER
In the early 1980s, decades before his consideration for the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour, I had a chance encounter with B.V. Doshi, who had just constructed his office, ‘Sangath’, on the outskirts. An unusual composition of concrete vaults, the new office and studio stretched along a slim deep site, forcing the visitor along a tortuous garden periphery to an entrance hidden at the end of the building. He explained that the meandering, elongated journey to enter was the initiation required by the visitor to visually comprehend the plan. “Once you are made to experience this elaborate sequence,” he said, “you become keenly aware of your orientation in the larger scheme of things.”
Doshi’s other architectural works, like Sangath, have benefited from the architect’s visual sensibility—always remaining personal, and at variance with current trends. In a career spanning six decades, Doshi has influenced as much as he himself has been influenced. He spent four years in the Paris studio of French architect Le Corbusier and was closely aligned to the construction activity at the first Indian Institute of Management project at Ahmedabad with Louis Kahn. Doshi, now in his 90s, has been teacher and practitioner, writer and artist, much like his two mentors. Born in Pune, his professional practice oscillated between the stark brutalism of his early years when he was involved in the construction of Chandigarh, as well as the twisting turning sequences of the National Institute of Fashion Technology campus in New Delhi in the 1990s.
Though his major commissions include utility buildings, Doshi is better known for his work in Ahmedabad: the monsoon-stained concrete walls of the Tagore Hall and the tree-lined campus of the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology. A collaboration with M.F. Husain on the same campus resulted in an organic profusion of domes bubbling out of the ground; known as the HusainDoshi Gufa, the cave-like structure is a departure from conventional architecture practices.
It is often hard to derive connections between such disparate work in a life that stretches between art, painting, music and architecture. Perhaps its most convincing explanation comes from Doshi himself. “I have memories of living in villages and small towns, in traditional houses, along fields of agriculture. I also remember my life in Paris, working in Corbusier’s studio, and very different impressions of western artistic attitudes to urban life. Between these two realms lies my architecture, between rural and metropolitan. In my life and work, the effort has been to combine the virtues of both and find a balance,” says Doshi.
A low-profile profession, architecture rarely figures in critical cultural debates. In fact, its significance in India is often measured only in relation to statistical problems—low-cost housing, the numbers of new government schemes and infrastructure. Winning the Pritzker Architecture Prize—the Nobel of the profession—this month is doubtless a great personal achievement for Doshi. The award will also elevate the profession’s status in India, and give credible boost to Indian architecture abroad.