Opinion Work, play, build
B V Doshi’s designs are informed by a sense of optimism about what society can be.
In calendar year 2018, the rupee has depreciated by almost 13 per cent, which is seen by the government as too fast-paced a slide. 
For Balkrishna V Doshi, landscape and the built form can never be in isolation.
Balkrishna V Doshi, the first Indian to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, has been architect, teacher, urban planner and design thinker for nearly seven decades. While he studied at the JJ School of Art, Mumbai, Pune-born Doshi was groomed in Le Corbusier’s Paris office.
The Swiss-French architect who designed Chandigarh gave Doshi the necessary tools for life. He would learn how to sculpt spaces with generous light as one sees in his own studio, Sangath, in Ahmedabad, and win his clients’ approval through clever story-telling, as he did at National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Delhi.
But where Doshi has liberated social structures is in his designs for housing. Be it the Aga Khan Award-winning Aranya Community Housing, Indore (1989) or the LIC Township in Ahmedabad (1973), Doshi consciously worked at integrating different income-groups, through design.
Taking on the challenges of high density, he managed to provide courtyards and community spaces for all groups at Aranya, while in LIC his reverse stacking ensured that the unit with a room and kitchen got a lavish terrace. Not only did such a design make for a democratic equitable distribution of space, it also gave scope for incremental growth.
For Doshi, landscape and the built form can never be in isolation. He rues that design education these days fails to note that architecture exists in a context. When he collaborated with Israel-born Canadian urbanist and architect Moshe Safdie and Harvard professor Josep Lluis Sert for the Habitat Bill of Rights, which was presented at the UN Habitat Conference in 1976, the emphasis was on the quality of life for all.
How much space do they have, indoors and outdoors? Do residents have privacy? How good is a resident’s mobility to work? It is this sense of optimism of what society can be and in his awareness of human relationships that the merit of his work lies. Architecture has never been removed from the work, play, live quotient of life for Doshi and the award is a recognition of that.
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