Balkrishna Doshi Was Named the First Indian Winner of the Pritzker Prize on 7 March 2018, After More Than 100 Buildings from the Sangath Studio to Aranya Housing in Indore

On 7 March 2018 the Pritzker Architecture Prize named Balkrishna Doshi of Ahmedabad as its 45th laureate and its first from India. He was 90, and the jury’s citation pointed to more than a hundred completed buildings, his work as a teacher and his service to the communities he built for. “I owe this prestigious prize to my guru, Le Corbusier,” Doshi said in the announcement, according to Dezeen’s report.

The prize, set up in 1979 and often compared to the Nobel, goes to a living architect. Doshi’s body of work runs from low-cost housing in Ahmedabad in the 1950s to a township planned in 1983 for tens of thousands of residents, and it includes the studio he designed for himself and the school he founded.

From the J. J. School to Le Corbusier’s Paris office

Doshi was born in Pune in 1927 into an extended family that had worked in the furniture trade for two generations, according to the Pritzker Prize’s biography. He began studying architecture in 1947, the year of Independence, at the Sir J. J. School of Architecture in Bombay (now Mumbai). The same biography says he sailed to London hoping to join the Royal Institute of British Architects, then moved to Paris to work under Le Corbusier although he spoke no French.

The Architects’ Journal gives his years in Le Corbusier’s office as 1951 to 1954. He returned to India in 1954 to oversee Le Corbusier’s projects in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, among them the Mill Owners’ Association Building (1954) and Shodhan House (1956), both in Ahmedabad, the Pritzker biography says. The Architect’s Newspaper adds, in its obituary, that Doshi was the only Indian architect working on the Chandigarh Capitol Complex while in Paris. That is one outlet’s statement, so treat it as attributed. The city and the complex themselves are covered in our article on Chandigarh and its UNESCO-listed Capitol Complex; Doshi oversaw Le Corbusier’s projects there, and the Capitol Complex remains Le Corbusier’s design.

Vastushilpa in 1956 and a campus with Louis Kahn

In 1956 Doshi hired two architects and founded his own practice, Vastushilpa, according to the Pritzker biography. It has since completed more than 100 projects. Architectural Record reports that he married Kamala Parikh in 1955, took a Graham Foundation fellowship in 1958 and travelled to the United States, where he met the American architect Louis Kahn in Philadelphia.

The two worked together on what became one of India’s best-known campuses. The IIM Ahmedabad archive records that on 3 August 1962 Kasturbhai Lalbhai, who headed the building committee, told the board that the National Institute of Design would take on the design work, with Kahn as “foreign consultant and principal architect” and Doshi as “Indian consulting architect”. Anant Raje assisted and finished many of the planned buildings after Kahn’s death in 1974. Kahn first visited in November 1962, and the archive gives 9 September 1964 as the date campus construction began. The archive says Vikram Sarabhai and Kasturbhai Lalbhai wanted a campus on the level of Le Corbusier’s Ahmedabad buildings; Sarabhai’s wider story is in our piece on the founding of Indian space research. The Pritzker biography says Doshi and Kahn went on collaborating for over a decade.

Doshi then designed campuses of his own for the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (1977 to 1992, in phases). The Pritzker jury cited the Bangalore campus for its patios, courtyards and covered walkways that shade visitors from the sun and catch breezes.

The school that became CEPT University

The Ahmedabad Education Society says it established the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology in 1962 with the School of Architecture, funded by a grant-in-aid from the Government of Gujarat. The School of Planning followed in 1972, and the building and interior design schools in 1982 and 1991. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s heritage portal describes the campus as one that Doshi and his colleagues planned as a campus without walls, with studios, workshops and open areas in between.

Two dates need care. The Pritzker biography lists Doshi as founder, director and later chairman of the School of Architecture and Planning from 1966 to 2012, and gives 2002 as the year it was renamed CEPT University. Architectural Record also says he founded the School of Architecture in 1962 and served as its first director. The Pritzker jury dates the School of Architecture building to 1966. The sources therefore support 1962 for the founding of the school and 1966 for its building and for the start of the span the Pritzker biography gives for his leadership. In 1978 Doshi also founded the Vastushilpa Foundation, which the Pritzker biography says was set up to develop design and planning standards suited to India’s social and climate conditions.

Sangath, a studio built partly underground

The studio Doshi designed for himself, Sangath, is dated 1980 by the Pritzker Prize and the Architects’ Journal. The jury citation says the Sanskrit word means to accompany or to move together. It describes structures that are semi-underground and fitted to the site, with terraces, reflecting ponds, mounds and curved concrete vaults, and notes that the interior spaces differ in light, shape and use while concrete holds them together. Architectural Record adds a garden and an open-air amphitheatre, and says the vaults, sunken spaces and planting ease the heat. Doshi’s office operated from Sangath, Dezeen noted in 2021.

Aranya, a township planned for 60,000 people

Aranya in Indore is the project the jury linked most closely to a promise Doshi made in 1954. The citation quotes him: “to provide the lowest class with the proper dwelling.” The Pritzker jury says he made his first low-income housing project in the 1950s, and Architectural Record dates his low-cost housing for the textile research association ATIRA in Ahmedabad to 1958.

The Aga Khan Development Network’s entry gives the plan. Aranya lies 6 kilometres from Indore, and its master plan, prepared by Vastu-Shilpa Foundation in 1983, is built on a central spine of businesses with six sectors of 7,000 to 12,000 people on either side, crossed by linear parks. The Indore Development Authority was the client. Ten houses, each with a back courtyard, form a cluster that opens onto a street. The poorest families live in the middle of each sector and better-off households on the edges, so that income groups mix. Doshi designed 80 demonstration houses, from one-room shelters to larger homes. Most buyers bought only a plot; the poorest also received a concrete plinth, a service core and a room. Owners could build with any material they chose.

The Aga Khan jury called Aranya “an innovative sites-and-services project” (a scheme where residents get a plot and basic utilities, then build for themselves) and gave it an Award for Architecture in the 1993 to 1995 cycle. The AKDN lists 1989 as the completion year.

The population figure differs between sources. The AKDN says Aranya “will eventually house” a total of 60,000 people in 6,500 dwellings on a net planning area of 85 hectares. The Pritzker announcement, repeated by ArchDaily and Dezeen, says the development provides housing for more than 80,000 people. This article uses the AKDN’s planned figure and flags the other. The Architect’s Newspaper says Doshi encouraged residents to improvise on and extend the architect’s formal design.

A gallery in the ground, and other buildings

For the painter M. F. Husain, Doshi designed Amdavad ni Gufa, an art gallery set mostly underground and roofed with interconnected domes. The Pritzker site gives 1994 as its date, ArchEyes gives 1992 to 1995, and Dezeen’s reports use 1994 and 1995 in different pieces, so the building dates to the first half of the 1990s. ArchEyes describes the domes as clad in a light mosaic made from broken ceramic, and the semi-underground placement as a way of keeping interior temperatures steady.

Architectural Record lists other Ahmedabad buildings: the Institute of Indology (1962), Kamala House (1963), Tagore Memorial Hall (1967), the Life Insurance Corporation housing known as Bima Nagar (1973) and Premabhai Hall (1976). The jury cited the Madhya Pradesh Electricity Board offices in Jabalpur (1979) as another example of sun-shading courtyards. The Architect’s Newspaper wrote that Doshi’s most profound contributions came through his work as an educator and institution builder.

Honours and his last years

The Pritzker biography lists the Padma Shri in 1976, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Aranya, the Gold Medal of the Indian Institute of Architects in 1988, the Gold Medal of the Academy of Architecture of France the same year, the Prime Minister’s National Award for Excellence in Urban Planning and Design in 2000, a global lifetime achievement award for sustainable architecture from the Institut Francais d’Architecture in 2007 and the French Order of Arts and Letters (Officer) in 2011. It also says he served on the Pritzker jury from 2005 to 2007.

Doshi received the Padma Bhushan in 2020; IIM Bangalore announced it on its website and Swarajya’s list of the 2020 awardees includes him under architecture. The Royal Institute of British Architects named him its 2022 Royal Gold Medallist in December 2021 and presented the medal to him on 15 June 2022. The institute’s president, Simon Allford, said Doshi had “influenced generations of architects through his delightfully purposeful architecture.”

Doshi died at his home in Ahmedabad on 24 January 2023, aged 95, according to The Architect’s Newspaper. The next day, 25 January, the Press Information Bureau announced the Padma Awards for 2023, with Doshi among six Padma Vibhushan recipients, honoured posthumously. The same list included the tabla player Zakir Hussain, whose career is in our profile of him. The Pritzker Prize’s statement on his death, quoted by CNN, said Doshi “touched humanity in every socio-economic class of his native country.”