As the first Pritzker Prize laureate from the south Asian subcontinent, with a seven-decade career, Balkrishna Doshi is easily viewed as a Modernist standard-bearer for Indian architecture. And Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People, now at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 (its only stop in North America), plays up Doshi’s fusion of Indian vernacular traditions and Modernism, learned at the feet of Le Corbusier (he spent four years working in Corbusier’s Paris studio) and Louis Kahn (he worked on Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad). But there aren’t any Taj Mahal domes or Keralan bamboo houseboats. Instead, the exhibition’s photos, sketches, and wood models express India’s cultural specificity and challenge Western architectural ideals. In exploring how the public realm and private spaces are inextricably intertwined in Indian cities, Architecture for the People attempts to communicate something visceral and direct about daily life in that country, and it is largely successful.
The exhibition (organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the Wustenrot Foundation, and the Vastushilpa Foundation) is curated by Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, Doshi’s granddaughter and longtime collaborator. It features projects from 1956 to 2014, and is organized by program and scale. Within Wrightwood 659 (designed by another Pritzker-winner, Tadao Ando), education projects are showcased in the second-floor gallery, cultural and urban-scale work on the third floor, and housing projects on the top floor. The exhibition begins strikingly, with one of Doshi’s paintings—of his 1980 Sangath architecture studio—hanging in Wrightwood 659’s grand atrium.
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