Top Architecture Prize Goes to Low-Cost Housing Pioneer From India
Balkrishna Doshi doesn’t talk just about his buildings. This architect, urban planner and educator talks about how his buildings aim to foster a sense of community, how space can promote inner peace, how cities can contribute to the health of a society.
Considered a pioneer of low-cost housing, Mr. Doshi, 90, is thrilled to have been awarded the 2018 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, which was announced on Wednesday. He is the first laureate from India, and worked with the 20th-century masters Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.
“It is a very wonderful thing that happened,” he said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Ahmedabad, a city that was once the center of the nonviolent struggle for Indian independence. The award will be bestowed on Mr. Doshi, the 45th laureate, at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto in May.
But Mr. Doshi’s 70-year career has always been about much more than prizes — of which he nevertheless has many — or international renown, of which he had relatively little, given that he is not a household name.
Mr. Doshi has been consumed with larger issues like social good and sustainability. And he bemoans a culture and profession that he sees as overly concerned with the bottom line. “One is all the time looking at financial returns — that is not only what life is,” he said. “I think wellness is missing.”
What Mr. Doshi means by “wellness,” he said, are considerations like how we can “connect with silence”; how “life can be lived at your own pace”; and “how do we avoid the use of an automobile.”
The architect has brought this type of philosophical thinking to projects like his Aranya Low Cost Housing in Indore (1989), where more than 80,000 low- and middle-income residents now live in homes ranging from modest one-room units to spacious houses, with shared courtyards for families.
He also designed mixed-income housing for a life insurance corporation in Ahmedabad (1973), which combines income groups on three floors of a pyramidal housing block approached through a common staircase. The Vidhyadhar Nagar Master Plan and Urban Design in Jaipur (1984) features channels for both water harvesting and distribution. (The Vidhyadhar housing plan recalled Mr. Doshi’s work with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, with its wide central avenues, and a study of Jaipur’s Old City.)
“Housing as shelter is but one aspect of these projects,” the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “The entire planning of the community, the scale, the creation of public, semipublic and private spaces are a testament to his understanding of how cities work and the importance of the urban design.”
Mr. Doshi’s emphasis on communal spaces is reflected in his own work studio, Sangath (roughly translated as “moving together”), which includes a garden and outdoor amphitheater, spaces designed to foster the exchange of ideas. The mosaic tile in his studio also appears in the undulating roof of Mr. Doshi’s underground art gallery in Ahmedabad, Amdavad ni Gufa (1994), which features the artwork of Maqbool Fida Husain.