ARCHITECTURE IN INDIA AFTER

INDEPENDENCE
Story of Chandigarh
 Introduction
• Independence brought a bewildering range of problems, opportunities,
expectations and dreams.

• A number of re settlement colonies came up, almost instantly in many parts of the
country. Public Works Departments (PWDs) had to work with innumerable
constraints and supply problems in restoring a sense of confidence to millions
through provision of housing and services.

• Achieved by handful of Indian Engineers and and the handful of Architects then
employed by Govt.

• The situation was not great. Whereas Britain had 1 Architect per 4000 people, India
had less than one Architect per 10 00 000 population.
 Introduction
• Three broad stylistic expressions prevailed in the uncertain fifties.

• Foremost among the group of architects with the most to lose had the revivalists
gained an upper hand were the first batch of Indians to receive their architectural
training in America: Habib Rehman, Achyut Kanvinde and the late Durga Bajpai.

• A second grouping with respect too style is, generally speaking, ‘backward-looking’.

• The third predominant stylistic vocabulary in this period attempted to express the
spirit of free India at Chandigarh.

• While the debate on style raged throughout the decade, the fifties also saw a
significant expansion of architectural education.

• In 1947, there were 4 schools: at Baroda, Bombay, Hyderabad and Delhi. By the
end of the fifties, nine new schools had been established in recognition of the fact
that the process of planned economic development would require a manifold
increase in the number of architects.
 Introduction
• However, models of architectural education were imported wholesale, largely from
Britain, and a significant number of students continued to migrate to England to
complete the R.I.B.A examinations. Others chose American universities to escape
the colonial link.

• Graduates of the first few batches of the Delhi School found employment at
Chandigarh, where they were exposed to the fresh methodologies of Le Corbusier,
Jeanneret, Fry and Drew.

• In Ahmedabad, a new cultural and architectural awakening had been initiated by

industrialists led by the Sarabhai family, who commissioned Le Corbusier’s four well-
known works in that city.

• A few architects from Bombay migrated to South India to set up the first
independent practices in cities such as Madras and Bangalore.

• India’s first Five Year Plan had been announced in 1952, and this gave an impetus
to architecture and its allied professions
 Introduction
• Significant resources were allocated for investments in heavy industries, new
townships, industrial housing, and scientific and technical research and training. As
the process of industrialization got under way, a new independent profession of
structural design consultants was born.

• The building industry began to manufacture, locally, items such as flush wooden
doors, steel doors and windows, and a wide range of products in asbestos cement.
The technical promise of air-conditioning led to an all-round (and perhaps unwise)
reduction in floor-heights, and raising land and construction prices led to a shrinking
of floor-space in residential and commercial buildings. All these developments
began to affect the appearance and scale of architecture all over the country,
independently of prevailing styles.
Golconde
Golconde
 History
• Golconde is a dormitory for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India
designed by Architects Antonin Raymond, Czech architect Francois Sammer and
George Nakashima completed in 1945. George Nakashima (1905-1990) was
Raymond’s colleague and project architect for the building.

• Pondicherry was home to the reclusive philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950),

who was joined by Mirra Alfassa, a French artist and spiritual seeker later known as
The Mother. Together they established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926, a
commune where people came from all over the world, drawn to the teachings of the
prolific writer and spiritual guide.

• Shri Aurobindo said about Architecture ‘the spirit needs all the possible help of the
material body to interpret itself to itself through the eye, yet asks of it that it shall be
as transparent a veil as possible of its own greater significance.’
 History
• “Our eight months at the Ashram were extremely fruitful and instructive…No time,
no money were stipulated…There was no contract. Here indeed was an ideal state of
existence in which the purpose of all activity was a spiritual one… The purpose, as a
matter of fact, of the dormitory was not primarily the housing of the disciples – it
was creating an activity, the materialisation of an idea, by which the disciples might
learn, might experience, might develop, through contact with the erection of a fine
building.” Raymond recalling in 1961 his work on Golconde has said.

• In Sri Aurobindo’s words: “In Golconde Mother has worked out her own idea
through Raymond, Sammer and others. First Mother believes in beauty as a part of
spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the
Divine Conciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they
have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated... It is on this
basis that she planned Golconde.”

• In an interview to Life magazine ( June 12 1970), he says: “I have always been

interested in meditation and mysticsm… [a] seeker. But I am also Japanese enough to
want to give this spirit physical expression”
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