Friday, March 28, 2008

The Arrival

Doshi Arrived in India as part of the team supervising Le Corbusier's projects first in Chandigarh and subsequently in Ahmedabad. Nehru's invitation to Corbusier to design India's first truly modern city fundamentally altered the nature of patronage and architectural practice in India. Till then the architect (or chief mason) was largely uncredited and the work was seen solely as a result of the patron's vision. Corbusier's celebrity status as a visionary architect was a new paradigm and Doshi's subsequent rise as a practitioner and instigator of large scale institution building in Ahmedabad may in some part be a result of the change in the way people perceived the role of an architect.
Doshi's real contribution is not so much in the formulation of a 'theory' of building but in the orchastration of patronage to serve the community through the inception of institutions like CEPT and to some extent NID & IIM-A.