Letters To A Young Architect Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Christopher Benninger (b.1942) is one of India’s most highly decorated architects. His well known award winning projects are the Mahindra United World College of India, the Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies, the “Suzlon One Earth” world headquarters, the National Ceremonial Plaza at Thimphu, Bhutan, and his own studio and residence “India House” in Pune. Each project addresses the complex issues of design, context, climate, materials, sustainability, and technology, amidst the client’s programmatic needs. Benninger studied urban planning at MIT and architecture at Harvard, where he later taught. He settled in India in 1971, founding the School of Planning at Ahmedabad as a Ford Foundation Advisor, where he continues as a Distinguished Professor. His name appears alongside Geoffrey Bawa, Charles Correa and Balkrishna Doshi as one of the six recipients of the Great Master Architect Award in India, presented every three years.

  His firm, Christopher Charles Benninger Architects, has recently been awarded India’s most sought after commissions: the Azim Premji University at Bengaluru; and the Indian Institute of Technology at Hyderabad, along with the Indian Institute of Management at Kolkata. His city and regional planning works range from Sri Lanka, across India to Bhutan. Benninger’s expansive campuses reveal an understanding of Indian “place making”, reflecting the great temple complexes and the Mogul campuses. His narrative presents a language that lies between American ideals embedded in wooded Arcadian landscapes and sacred notions enshrined within Indian courtyards, generating a unique approach to architecture and place making.

  Letters To A Young Architect

  Letters to a Young Architect is a sensitive memoir of Christopher Benninger’s life in India and his personal concerns about architectural theory and contemporary urban issues. Through the medium of articles and lectures presented over the past decade, a lucid collection of essays emerge that testify the commonality of mankind’s condition. This is a collection of autobiographical narratives and ideas reflecting a man’s journey of the spirit from America to India and the philosophical considerations that matured from his experiences. His travels are not only stories of the dusty roads he traveled on, but also of the passions and emotions of those he met along the way.

  Letters to a Young Architect reflects on the role and direction of architecture in framing a new man and a new society in the new millennium. Benninger notes his encounters with gurus like Jose Luis Sert, Walter Gropius, Arnold Toynbee and Buckminster Fuller and the manner in which their personal passion for humanity shaped the lives of others. Benninger is a strong believer in tradition, in gurus and in students and in a lineage of values, ideals, principles and practices which have been matured from generation to generation. He is concerned with the education of architects; the nature of architecture itself; and the role of urbanism and planning in the creation of a new society. The role of Indian masters like Balkrishna Doshi, who guided him in his search, is a touching tribute to the Indian “Guru-Shishya” tradition.

  Letters to a Young Architect

  Christopher Benninger

  Foreword by Balkrishna Doshi

  August 2013

  INDIA HOUSE

  Pune, India

  Createspace

  USA

  “Architecture is a curious craft!

  One structure may follow all the laws of design

  yet be worthless, while still another may break all

  the principles and be profound!

  A building may be bad without doing anything wrong,

  while yet another may have to sin against

  architecture to reach perfection!”

  Christopher Benninger

  Letters to a Young Architect

  Copyright 2011 by Christopher Benninger

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Library of Congress Number 2011907003

  Library of Congress Classification: NA737.B465 A35 2011

  ISBN 13: 978-1461123958

  Available on Kindle and through Createspace at www.amazon.com

  Available in Chinese translation from the Shandong Publishing Group, January 2013.

  Available in Gujarati translation from Sanat Mehta, July 2013.

  email: [email protected] & [email protected]

  Contact: [email protected] for further information.

  www.ccba.in

  Cover image: Photograph of the Center for Development Studies and Activities at Pune, India. Architect Christopher Benninger, 1986.

  Book Design by A. Ramprasad and Sudhaman Arputhavel

  All graphics in the book are by the author.

  To

  Ramprasad

  A Dedication

  These ‘Letters’ are a compilation of many interactions with students and young professionals across the Indian subcontinent, at venues ranging from Chandigarh to Chennai and from Ahmedabad to Kolkata, and abroad in North America, Europe and Australia. The collection includes material written over the years.

  I am a believer in tradition, lineage and gurus. I believe there are competing ‘schools of thought’ and that there are, to borrow an idiom from Hindustani Classical Music, gharanas, or chains of ideas that are passed down from teacher to student. Each gharana has its explicit and implicit values and knowledge. I believe that the teacher re-manifests into a student, continuing the tradition. The core of this tradition is composed of values, ideas, concepts and attitudes that are shared, analyzed, adapted, changed and made relevant to new contexts and problems.

  Good teachers inspire their students. Inspiration is that magical moment when one discovers something deep within oneself that has lain dormant – something that one can aspire to be; a good characteristic one can assume; or the latent talent one did not know existed, yet defines one’s future. Inspiration is the spark that ignites a flame. It also catalyzes rebellion against stereotypes and biases. It makes one question the very tradition that formed us. Good teachers spark a sense of doubt, ‘cause’ and struggle.

  I want to acknowledge the teachers who touched my heart and made me think. They made me know ‘who I am’. When I awoke to their call I began a journey that has never ended. They were surely all part of the same humanist movement. They were clear in their thoughts and passionate about their work. They were artists, architects, planners, economists, sociologists, historians and philosophers. They were deeply concerned with the contexts and societies they lived in. They were actively trying to make this world a better place to live in, and through direct contact and interaction with them I became a better person and a better architect.

  My journey began with The Natural House, a book by Frank Lloyd Wright, gifted to me on Christmas day in 1956. I was inspired. When I turned the last page, I knew I was destined to become an architect! Then I found a clear path through a young teacher called Harry Merritt who inspired me further through his wonderful designs and thoughtful questions. He advised me to leave Florida and go to Harvard. From then on good fortune introduced me to a chain of true gurus whom I would like to mention:

  Robert Tucker

  Norman Jensen

  Blair Reeves

  Turpin C. Bannister

  Charles and Ray Eames

  Paolo Soleri


  Buckminster Fuller

  Walter Gropius

  Jose Lluís Sert

  Jerzy Soltan

  Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

  Joseph Zalewski

  Mirko Basaldella

  John F. C. Turner

  Barbara Ward

  Shadrach Woods

  Dolf Schnebli

  Fumihiko Maki

  Alexander Tzonis

  Liane Lefaivre

  Yona Friedman

  Arnold Toynbee

  Margaret Mead

  Constantinos Doxiadis

  Panayis Psomopoulos

  Roger Montgomery

  Gerhard Kallmann

  Jane Drew

  Maxwell Fry

  Kevin Lynch

  Lloyd Rodwin

  Herbert Gans

  Lisa Peattie

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Charles Correa

  Piraji Sagara

  Anant Raje

  Louis Kahn

  Vikram Sarabhai

  Kurula Varkey

  Otto Koenigsberger

  Yoginder Alagh

  Hasmukh C. Patel

  Achyut Kanvinde

  Preston Andrade

  Arthur Row

  Kamla Chowdhry

  Dasho Lam Penjor

  Giri Deshingkar

  J.P. Naik

  M.V. Namjoshi

  V.M. Sirsikar

  V.M. Dandekar

  Charles Boyce

  Shiv Datt Sharma

  Dattatreya Dhanagare

  Mahendra Raj

  Most of all I owe a debt of love, knowledge and poetry to Balkrishna Doshi who has been a source of inspiration for me to be here in India, to place my footprint on this soil and to call this land my home. Were it not for him, I would not be here. He is my true guru.

  Finally, all of my fellow architects at India House who sustain me and carry forward our tradition, are part and parcel of my journey. Rahul Sathe and Daraius Choksi have been my guides, soulmates and studio leaders. Without them, my studio does not exist. My associates Deepak Kaw, Shivaji Karekar, Harsh Manrao, Madhav Joshi, Jagadeesh Taluri, Navin Ghorecha and Shashi Mohandas have each spared me valuable years of their creative lives. I must also thank Tsutomu Sato for the first layout and the continual help from my support staff, Geeta and Shantaram.

  This book would not have been possible without the persistent encouragement of my research associate, Naveen Bharathi. Vivek Khadpekar favored me by accepting the commission to edit this disparate collection. He has been a friend and source of ideas since our first meeting in 1968.

  My companion and sharer in this journey, over the past seventeen years, has been my life partner Akkisetti Ramprasad Naidu. It was he who conceptualized the idea of our successful studio and carried it forward as its Managing Director. Perhaps he alone has the energy and vision that makes us ‘be’ as a functioning entity. He created a vessel in which I could sail smoothly through stormy waters.

  Christopher Benninger

  India House, April 2011

  Foreword

  When I first visited America on a Graham Foundation scholarship in 1959, I turned to Le Corbusier to introduce me to a guide in that complex land. He wrote to Jose Lluís Sert, Dean at Harvard, who was kind enough to advise me. Several years later Sert introduced me to a young man in his mid-twenties who was coming to India on a Fulbright Fellowship. I suggested that he be with me in Ahmedabad at the School of Architecture. It was in the spirit of our ‘global family’ that without any questions Christopher Benninger came to work with me as a teacher in 1968, at the age of twenty-five.

  After his fellowship ended I asked him to stay on with an Indian salary. He stayed! While in Ahmedabad he worked with me on my idea to start a new school of planning. When he left to teach architecture at Harvard, I assumed his tryst with India was over. A year later, while with Kahn in Philadelphia, I got a call from Christopher to come up to Harvard and give a public lecture. While in Cambridge we talked of utopian dreams and about the future of India. I obtained his promise that if I could ever initiate a school of planning he would come back to Ahmedabad and help me start it.

  As fate would have it that project materialized sooner than I ever imagined. But hopes for Christopher’s support evaporated as he had just been made a tenured Assistant Professor at Harvard, and I knew he would not leave that coveted post easily. In any case I wrote to him that he must come. I was surprised after a month to receive a letter that he would join me. From then on we have been on a long journey. Like the gharanas of music, we share a common school of thought and a lineage of great teachers. From Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Jose Lluís Sert, the gharana baton was taken over by people like Oscar Niemeyer, Fumihiko Maki, Dolf Schnebli and me. It is our good fortune that we could pass on part of our burden and inherited obligation to the next generation and that they are doing the same. I am heartened to have a person like Christopher call himself my protégé and my shishya.

  The ‘letters’ that follow are in fact a collection of interviews with the media, public lectures and articles in journals from 1967 onward. They cover a wide range of topics but are integrated through a number of concerns, ideas and concepts. Some of these are elemental to the ideas that energized Le Corbusier and concepts around which I built institutions in India. These are the ‘connectors’ that have linked generations of architects. They are not ‘styles’ or visual attributes, but concerns for the human condition. These are a way of looking at the world. These letters are Christopher’s very personal revelations about his life, which should catalyze young architects to think out their own careers. There are ‘letters’ about modernism and his concerns that architecture has become isolated from its social, historical and contextual base. There is a concern that architecture has turned into eclectic academic postmodern styles employed for greed and mercantile purposes. Some of the letters focus on Christopher’s interest in social and economic change, appropriate technologies and their impact on urbanization, poverty, equality and the environment. Often he brings these concerns together through his discussions on urbanism and city planning. Some letters are tributes to people he knew well who he feels should be the role models for young architects.

  Our journey has been one of friendship, learning, sharing and love. Our decades of work together never seemed like work. It was always an exploration, accentuated with discoveries and full of fun. We each brought out the child in the other and catalyzed each other’s creative instincts. I could say that our friendship has been a celebration of life. This collection of talks and articles, now presented as letters, is familiar to me. It embodies our shared values, life’s work and hopes for the future.

  Balkrishna V. Doshi

  Ahmedabad, India, April 2011

  Prologue

  A wise sage I once met in his cave retreat, somewhere on the rocky slopes of Mount Abu, offered to read my fate from my palm. As a young student of empirical method, I recoiled from his outrageous suggestion. What would my teachers think of a protégé who curried the favors of godmen to know his fate? But he charmed me with his charisma, and questioned my logical abilities to reject his conclusions, should I find them so whimsical. I suppose his piercing eyes and the lyrical landscape, perched high above the Rajasthan desert, swayed me like some magic potion.

  He told me that I was a person of little wealth, but of great fortune. He declared that luck was my life’s companion.

  Tempted further, I coaxed him, ‘But what do you mean by good luck?’

  With an incredulous sneer on his face, he informed me that there is only one kind of good luck, and that is to have great teachers.

  I felt a chill run down my spine and across my skin, momentarily l
eaving goose pimples all over. He had unraveled a truth within me that he never could have made out from my appearance, or from his imagination. It was true that I had been blessed with wonderful teachers.

  From then on, what had been a youth’s good fortune became my life’s endless search. To meet wise people became my passion.

  That passion, and my fated trajectory of good luck, brought me decades ago to India. My good fortune led me to the likes of Balkrishna Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde, Anant Raje, Kurula Varkey, Vikram Sarabhai, Piraji Sagara, Yoginder Alagh, Hasmukh Patel, Dasho Lam Penjor, Lyonchen Jigme Thinley, and to many youngsters who are now practicing architects and teachers. There have always been values, ideals and principles that have bound us together and made us one. I often imagine all of my gurus as ‘one being’ and ‘one soul’ who have embodied many avatars, worn many masks and appeared in many manifestations. But the path we walked on has been bound on either side by values. The destination has been our shared ideals and utopian ambitions. Through the medium of the ‘letters’ which follow I am trying to share this legacy with future generations.