Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People

“If you want to be free, you must liberate yourself from conventional norms. You must become a child, look at things anew, work more with feelings than with intellect or rational thinking, for they are filled and shaped by other people to make you one of them. Look at how children paint, draw figures, how they perceive and place colors – they connect nothing with absolute reality. For reality is also an illusion. But your education and age have made you think otherwise. Reality is what you and others perceive externally and similarly. For example, how can form, color, structure, or order be perceived, because that’s how historians have told us. Liberate yourself from these rules. Forget about history books. Return to your inner perception. Look at things as if you are seeing them for the first time. Only then will you be able to create something of your own.”
By the end of June, visitors to Vienna's AzW could view an exhibition dedicated to the first Indian recipient of the Pritzker Prize. The exhibit tracing the more than sixty-year career of Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi is accompanied by an extensive four-hundred-page catalog published on the occasion of last year's premiere of the exhibition “Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People” at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany's Weil am Rhein. This was the architect's first retrospective on the European continent. The Vienna reprise, which was originally to last a quarter of a year, was shortened to just a month due to the global pandemic. The experience of the exhibit was all the more intense, as you were enveloped by the spirit of a man who, after India's independence, collaborated in the 1950s and 1960s with Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier on a number of Indian projects. Le Corbusier, with whom Doshi worked for four years in his Paris studio and subsequently participated for another five years in his commissions in India, literally liberated Doshi's mind. From this architectural legend, he also learned to effectively incorporate local climatic conditions and modern technological processes into his buildings. Doshi views buildings as living beings that do not overlook any aspect. Architecture is for him a fully-fledged extension of life.
Balkrishna Doshi can rightly be considered the founder of modern Indian architecture, having designed not only a number of urban plans for social housing (for a total of 80,000 people), university campuses, and cultural institutions in a country poised to have the highest population in the world. In his sixty-year career, he has built over a hundred buildings. At the age of forty-one, he founded an architecture school (renamed in 2002 to CEPT University) in Ahmedabad, which has since educated several generations of Indian architects.
Balkrishna Doshi created architecture relying on a sensitive acceptance and translation of modern architecture into Indian contexts. His interest in environmental and urban issues makes him an exceptional philosopher and teacher. Most of his works radiate a sense of architectural scale, form, and space. Doshi's architecture is one of the most important examples of modern Indian architecture.
Those who missed the spring premiere last year at the Vitra Design Museum, the fall reprise at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, or this year’s installation at Architekturzentrum Wien, can head to the Chicago gallery Wrightwood 659 after the summer holidays, where Doshi's works will be exhibited in a historic environment reconstructed by Tadao Ando in the same year that Balkrishna Doshi received the Pritzker Prize awarded by the Chicago Hyatt Foundation. The circle is thus complete.

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