Search for your world in architecture: BV Doshi

Sarika Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 25

“Buildings are not dead boxes,” he begins. “They are as important as us,” he adds. As BV Doshi, celebrated architect and planner, takes you through his presentation on the Art of Architecture in Chandigarh on Tuesday, you begin to see what he really means. You see how, like art, architecture too ceases to be just architecture for architecture’s sake. It becomes you, your world.

At the heart of it lies one little lesson he learnt from his guru, the master architect, Le Corbusier. “Corbusier was always analysing animals, plants and their form. What I learnt from him is that when you begin to analyse what gives them their form, you stop seeing the structures as a system,” says Doshi, who is here to give a series of lectures on architecture and Corbusier, organised by the Chandigah Lalit Kala Akademi and the Chandigarh Tourism.

Doshi takes us through his works across the country. His low-cost housing plans, the schools and universities he helped evolve as places of learning, the much-famed “Husain-Doshi gufa”. In each of the works, the building evolves with its surroundings — the trees, animals and the climate of the area. At a school he designed, they turned brick kilns a part of the landscape. As grass grew over it, they became an organic whole. The Institute of Indology, another important building designed by him in Ahmedabad, is shaped like a boat and has wooden detailing. “I wanted the Jain munis to feel they have come to a haveli,” he says.

For Doshi, the structures have to be climate oriented. Whether it is public spaces or his house or his famous office Sangath, which was among the 125 best designs of the world in the last 125 years in a leading US magazine last month, all minimise use of artificial lighting and modes of cooling. In all his works, he says, vocabulary is the same and the location is the most important.

Stressing on students studying traditional buildings, he says they must analyse why they are cherished. “Not for their cultural or historic value but understand why their style and structure has existed for so long,” says Doshi.

He also wants students to learn how to use things frugally so that they become affordable. That, for him, is very important for a country like India where one-half is lesser than the other. And he tells them that good architecture need not be complex. It must be simple. “Just follow the sun,” he says but points that most architects will forget a simple thing: “Where will kids play?” That is why, he says, it is important for an architect to study behavioural science too. He says the answer to that will follow when people begin to look at space as an unmeasurable thing, not a measurable thing.

Slide after slide showcases subtle designs of his architecture, which he, interestingly, calls a game of drama, a game of theatre. Slide after slide, he also insists you create something for yourself and asks: “Where does architecture begin? Where does it end? Where does life begin? Where does it meet architecture?” Buildings, after all, are not dead boxes.