Foreign Architects in India

The profession and practise of architecture in India has undergone a complete transformation in this decade. The last eight years have been a boom time, not seen since the heady days of Post Indipendance India.

The booming economy and the burgeoning middle class has prompted developers to bring in foreign architects with foreign fees to design everything from airports to residential and office towers and bungalows and resorts.

Foreign architects bring in the tried and tested processes and function precision to bring about a complete turnaround in the way projects are designed and built. They pair up with Indian firms who have the expertise on the ground to get things done and built.

Foreign architects for the most part are bringing in foreign solutions and design principles which may not all work in India, but the public does not think a second before lapping it all up. We are literally bringing New York, Chicago, Tokyo or Shanghai to Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and countless other towns and cities.

Only time will tell if this is successful in the long term. India is not the only place in the world where this is happening. China is way ahead of us in transplanting urban fabric from the West into their cities.

The TOI has an interesting article about the whole phenomenon of foreign architects coming to India.

" Time was when there was only the occasional eruption of concrete. Today, India’s skyline is a work in progress. But while the towering new skyscrapers, sprawling IT parks, glitzy airports and swanky townships reflect desi aspirations, the blueprint, more often than not, is foreign.

Be it a slum redevelopment project in congested Mumbai or Kolkata’s new museum of modern art, the global imprint on the country’s fast-changing urban landscape is evident. Made in India but designed by a clutch of foreign architects looking to cash in on the country’s real estate boom. For Edinburgh-based RMJM, the company behind the distinctive Scottish Parliament, a foray into India four years ago has translated into business of £1 billion. That, the company says, is unprecedented for a UK architecture firm doing business in India. “There’s a cue here for UK business — we need to be in India in a very big way,” says RMJM CEO Peter Morrison. RMJM, which currently has 38 projects under way in India, is now looking to establish a permanent base in Mumbai.

Many others have taken the cue. Celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster, who shaped London’s skyline with buildings such as the Gherkin and designed the Reichstag in Berlin, has entered India in a tie-up with a Mumbai real estate firm, the Neptune group. Other big UK names in India are Laing O’Rourke, Davis Langdon and Mott MacDonald. Not just UK, firms from Canada (Arcop) to Australia (Omiros One) have designs on India.

But does India really need foreign architects or is it just about getting a brand on the brochure? Most builders agree it’s as much about star power as it is about international quality. After all, well-heeled buyers respond to designers with international reputations as much as they respond to a luxury label like Gucci or Prada. “When people purchase an expensive apartment, a famous architect is extra validation they’re making a good choice,” says Kunal Banerji of Ansal API which signed up US firm Chelsea West to design Manhattan-style condos at its Aquapolis project in Ghaziabad.

The Mahindra group’s real estate arm Mahindra Lifespaces, which has roped in US-based architect and design firm HOK (of Dubai marina fame), says their reasons go much beyond the brand. “The selection of an international architect or planner is driven by the unique needs of the project. For instance, the 325-acre Mahindra World City project is one of the largest such developments under implementation and to that extent the width and depth of on-ground implementation experience is currently available only with international firms who have conceived and implemented such projects in different parts of the world,” says Anita Arjundas, COO of Mahindra Lifespaces.

Size does matter and with Indian developers going beyond stand-alone commercial blocks and residences to converting huge swathes of land into townships and IT parks, a ‘foreign hand’ does come in handy. “Foreign firms can visualise and handle massive scale. Also, their designs are very innovative. They create landmarks and not just buildings,” says Shantanu Malik, DGM-Architect, Unitech Ltd.

It’s a win-win for Indian architects as well. “Working with foreign firms gives us exposure to international standards. There is a lot to learn from their use of detailing and modern materials,” adds Malik.

Unitech often hires multiple design firms for a single project. For instance, it has 10 global architecture and design consultants for the $3 billion Unitech Grande, a super-luxury residential complex spread over 347 acres along the Noida expressway. This project draws on the expertise of US-based mall designer Callison, landscape artists SWA and EDAW, Britain’s RMJM for architecture and interiors and HOK for floor plans, besides a course designed by Australian golfer Greg Norman.

With so much demand, it isn’t surprising that Mark Igou, director in the US architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Llp (SOM), has been shuttling between New York and India over the last three years. “I spend more than three months a year in India, familiarising myself with the ground situation.” And ground reality is what SOM — the firm which has designed the Burj Dubai, which will be the world’s tallest skyscraper when it is finished in 2009 — is faced with in Mumbai where it is designing homes for slum dwellers in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz as part of a masterplan for Unitech. “It’s a unique design challenge — recreating the same sense of community that exists in their current housing so that people don’t want to return to the slums they left,” says Igou. SOM is also using the services of sociologists and cultural anthropologists to get a sense of the social and cultural aspects of the lives of those being rehabilitated.

Whether it’s slum housing or a swanky township, India is essential to the design inputs. “Education and social interaction are both important to Indians so our designs will reflect these needs. So residential units would have schools nearby and public spaces for people to interact,” he says. Besides projects like the Jet Airways headquarters in Mumbai, SOM is also working in Tier-II cities like Ahmedabad and Nagpur.

Be it the Indian ethos or the vagaries of its climate, Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott keeps it in mind when he is on the drawing board. Ott, who has designed a technopark for Tata Consultancy Services at Siruseri, Chennai, in association with countryman Carlos Ponce de Leon, says, “I am constantly studying the history and traditions of India, hoping to integrate some of its characteristics in my buildings. And though my work is definitely contemporary, the clues from the past are integrated in a modern vocabulary.”

Ott is building on the work that earlier foreign architects have done in India. Apart from Lutyens and Le Corbusier, several other international architects have showcased their designs in India. Ahmedabad’s Indian Institute of Management reflects Louis Kahn’s trademark style of veering towards monolithic masses resembling ancient ruins. Christopher Charles Benninger designed the Mahindra United World College of India, near Pune. British-born Laurie Baker planned the Fishermen’s Village in Poonthura in Kerala, while American Joseph Stein gave shape to Delhi’s India International Centre.

Now, a new generation of foreign architects has designs on India. And their glittering computer-generated images look set to redefine the country’s skyline. "

Le Corbusier : "Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris"

1887: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known to the world as Le Corbusier, is born in the Swiss city of La Chaux-de-Fonds. He will change his name and take French citizenship in his 30s. More importantly, he will help pioneer the International Style of architecture and is one of the most influential proponents of the machine aesthetic.

Jeanneret-Gris’ interest in design and architecture came early in life. He attended the local art school, where he studied under architect Rene Chapallaz, who became a major influence. After moving to Paris in 1907, he toiled for Auguste Perret, an architect renowned for his work in reinforced concrete construction. A few years later he continued on to Berlin, where he became fluent in German and schooled under Peter Behrens, another architect with bohemian predilections esteemed for his industrial designs.

By the time he returned to Switzerland, where he spent the World War I years, Jeanneret-Gris’ guiding aesthetic was well formed.


Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France. Built 1950-1954.
Le Corbusier’s later work, while still in machine-age reinforced concrete, assumed more sculptural forms, as in this hilltop chapel.


Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France. Built 1928.

In adopting the single-name pseudonym Le Corbusier, when he returned to Paris shortly after the war, Jeanneret was following a popular bohemian practice of the time. He took the name, in fact, during a brief period where he abandoned architecture for painting and sculpture. Like his artistic brethren, Le Corbusier was making a symbolic statement that anyone was capable of reinventing himself.

But his estrangement from the drafting table didn’t last long. By 1922, he was back at it, picking up where he had left off, this time in partnership with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret.

That meant continuing the theoretical development of the style that would come to define not only his own work but an entire school of architecture. If his early years were spent as a provincial architect, his aesthetic was anything but. His formative work, which included a number of private homes and villas, reflected his reverence for the machine aesthetic.

Le Corbusier admired the design of well-built automobiles and the great trans-Atlantic steamships of interbellum Europe. His attitude can be summed up by his most famous quote: “A house is a machine for living in.” (The man was born and raised in a town known for its watchmaking. How Swiss is that?)


Heidi Weber Museum (Centre Le Corbusier), Zurich, Switzerland. Built 1967.
This colorful, even playful, building is Le Corbusier’s last, completed two years after he died.


Sainte Marie de La Tourette, near Lyon, France. Built 1957.
The concrete monastery is appropriately severe, though still redolent of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye three decades earlier. This design was a precursor to concrete work by others around the world in a style dubbed the New Brutalism.

His signature buildings, for example the Villa Savoye outside of Paris (built in the late ’20s), embody this architectural style, which he referred to generally as Purism, after the art form that was itself a rejection of Cubism. The lines are clean and sharp (in contrast to the full and curvaceous lines of Streamline Moderne, then very popular), and the interior functions are precise and laid out in a modular way. Villa Savoye is also built on reinforced concrete stilts, another Le Corbusier trademark and one of his “five points of architecture.”

But Le Corbusier didn’t limit himself to the design of single structures. He’s also remembered for his theories on urban planning and renewal, which, again, reflected his rejection of traditional models. Never one to make modest proposals, Le Corbusier tried to interest Parisian officials in bulldozing the Marais and replacing the district with a forest of egalitarian skyscrapers surrounded by tracts of open space. For Le Corbusier, this radical plan represented a complete break with the past, something he continually advocated as necessary for society to advance.

Fortunately for Paris, if not the betterment of society, his idea was rejected.

Frustrated in his dream of becoming the latter-day Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier looked elsewhere for opportunities to implement his Radiant City urban plan. Eventually, a number of these unités were built around Europe, the first (and most famous) of these in Marseilles. If they bear more than a passing resemblance to Soviet-style architecture, it’s worth noting that Le Corbusier was influenced by his study of an earlier communal project, the Narkomfin Building in Moscow.


Secretariat Building, Chandigarh, India. Built 1953.
This state-government building combines the formalism of Le Corbusier’s earlier Purist designs with a generous hint of the muscular, sculptural forms that appeared later.


Church of Saint-Pierre


Church of Saint-Pierre, interior

Like a lot of so-called visionaries, Le Corbusier was an active self-promoter. He authored numerous books on architecture and design and openly courted protégés. Like modern-day Apple devotees slobbering at the feet of Steve Jobs, Le Corbusier’s acolytes worshiped him with blind, near-religious fervor.

His critics, however, were less sanguine. The harshest of them argued that his urban designs, especially, were cold and sterile, and worse, the product of technical incompetence.

Nevertheless, by the time he died in 1965, Le Corbusier’s enormous influence on 20th-century architectural sensibilities was indisputable. He ranks in a select pantheon alongside such worthies as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Seating designs by Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was born in 1887 in the Swiss town of La-Chaux-de-Fonds, located within a few kilometers of the French border.

He attended school in his home town where he studied the visual arts and architecture. In 1910, he landed a job working in Germany in the office of Peter Behrens where he may have met Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Unlike his problematic theories for urban planning, Le Corbusier's designer furniture is still very much admired by collectors of modern and Bauhaus seating.

Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture

Easily regarded as one of the most adroit architects of 20th century, Le Corbusier was a relentless designer, urban planner and writer dedicated to industrializing almost every city he came across.

This spring The Barbican - London’s colossal multi-arts venue - is hosting an all-encompassing showcase of Le Corbusier’s work, a survey which will include an abundance of original models, interior settings, drawings, furniture, photographs, films, tapestries, paintings, sculpture and books designed and written by the architect himself. More of a celebration than an exhibition, the festivities include concerts, films, guest speakers and a photo competition all in his honor.

Architectural Quotes

“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.” - Philip Johnson



"Architecture is the reaching out for the truth." - Louis Kahn



"To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be." - Le Corbusier



"Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." - Frank Lloyd Wright



"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness." - Frank Gehry



"We should work for simple, good, undecorated things... ...but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street." - Alvar Aalto



"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light." - Le Corbusier

Review: Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in Liverpool

Ellis Woodman on Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in The Crypt, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

There is a moment early on in Liverpool’s new Le Corbusier retrospective which perfectly encapsulates its subject’s public persona.

It is a short film, from 1925, showing the man known to his mother as Charles Édouard-Jeanneret peering out from behind those fearsome thick-rimmed, circular spectacles that he invariably wore.

He is explaining his proposal for the construction of the Plan Voisin, a modest scheme to bulldoze much of central Paris and replace it with a series of 60-storey cruciform towers laid out on a grid.

As he turns to the map behind him, draws a large rectangle around the proposed site and calmly proceeds to black out the medieval street pattern, you can’t help thinking what a magnificent Bond villain he would have made.

Such moments of provocation proved wildly effective in promoting Le Corbusier to international fame. They also, however, served to caricature him as a deranged technocrat, an image that the work of his lesser post-war followers did much to reinforce.

And yet the exhibition powerfully conveys that this is only a fraction of the story. Yes, the urban plans still look absolutely barmy – thankfully, very few of his large-scale projects were realised – but Le Corbusier was also a painter, sculptor, furniture designer and, of course, an architect of some of the greatest buildings of the 20th century.

At Liverpool, all these aspects of his output are brought together, giving an indication of how developments in art – notably Cubism and Surrealism – played as large a role in shaping his architectural imagination as did developments in reinforced concrete technology and the growth of motor car use.

The show also describes a figure who was Picasso-like in his quest for reinvention. His early work draws on both classical architecture and the vernacular buildings of his native Switzerland.

It is only when he arrives in Paris in the 1920s that he adopts his pseudonym — which can be translated as “the crow-like one” — and begins to produce the series of highly abstract, spatially complex houses that bring him to the world’s attention.

The post-war work is as different again: muscularly sculptural, where the earlier work had been composed of thin planes; and in rough, exposed concrete and brick where it had previously been painted a pristine white.

One wall of the exhibition is devoted to Le Corbusier’s very substantial influence on the British architecture of the Fifties and Sixties. However, he never built here, and visiting much of his greatest work — the church at Ronchamp, the La Tourette monastery, the string of major buildings that he realised in India in the 1950s — demands a considerable trek.

The Liverpool show represents the next best thing, offering an Aladdin’s Cave of original models and drawings. As a bonus, it offers a rare opportunity to see inside the crypt of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, the only part of Lutyens’s original design for the building to be built.

However, quite what Lutyens would have made of the show being staged here, I dread to think. On admission to his office, new staff members were notified that ownership of Le Corbusier’s books was considered a sacking offence.

A canvas in concrete: Architecture as Art?

His bare apartment blocks and austere interiors transformed 20th-century architecture. But could Le Corbusier's forms be called art?

Le Corbusier was, arguably, the most influential architect of the 20th century. Every time you walk past the Barbican, you're in Corbusier territory; the same applies if you explore the ruins of the extraordinary seminary at Cardross designed by Gillespie Kidd & Coia, or if you happened to be strolling through the Sussex University campus designed by Sir Basil Spence. Should you travel on a Virgin Pendolino to Liverpool, where the first major British exhibition on Corbusier's work for 20 years is underway, you will pass through a tranche of post-Corbusian urban planning known as Runcorn.

More than three decades after drowning while swimming off the coast of the Côte d'Azur, Corbusier's importance makes him almost impossible to discuss, or view, without lurching into prejudice. He saw the future and designed it decades before anybody else. Correction: he tainted the future with the allure of concrete, and surfaces stripped of texture or decoration. His designs proposed a sensually socialist world. No, he was an utter solipsist who wanted very little to do with people who weren't as over-dressed, bourgeois, creative and mother-fixated as he.

Le Corbusier, The Art of Architecture is embedded in the crypt of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. And there's a nice conceit to this: the launch-pad architecture of the so-called Paddy's Wigwam was designed in the Sixties by a Corbusian, Sir Frederick Gibberd, but rose from a crypt designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1931 as the foundation of a cathedral that would have been as big as St Peter's in Rome. Under those beautifully bricked vaults, in a show sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Vitra Design Museum, should we bury architecture's Caesar – along with those heavy, circular spectacle frames that said: I see things you don't – or praise him?


The futuristic form of Saint-Pierre de Firminy church, built in 1960

The first thing to say about the exhibition, created by Graeme Russell, is that it has been arranged with considerable virtuosity. Russell, working with Dieter Theil, has deferred with some grace to Lutyens' marvellous spaces, yet managed to create thoroughly modernist sets: the tableaux and linked perspectives are precisely set out, and we are drawn through the show by subtle glimpses ahead at key points.

Perspectives relating to the fountainheads, and riddles, of Corbusier's art and architecture are less certainly portrayed. The genius of the Swiss architect is certainly apparent, but not in an obviously progressive narrative; we don't quite get to the root of his obsessions. Nor is there any subtext of humanity, or of humane architectural commodity. Corbusier's conflations of art and architecture are mostly presented as a kind of orderly collage or scenography in which time, or the critical moment, seems absent. The material in the three sections of the exhibition – Context, Privacy and Publicity, Built Art – often seem interchangeable. In this, the show reminds us just how brilliantly seductive, and ultimately ungraspable, Corbusier could be. "I am an acrobat of form, creator of form, player with form," he declared in 1951. "Form means to express all plastic emotion. Form, expression and style of mind." Architecture, he said, was "a pure creation of the mind".

Today, in an age of styled minds, and sanctified immateriality, the very idea of purity or formal playthings seems as museum-worthy as a Bakelite telephone. Corbusier still matters – not so much as an architect, but as an engrossing case-study of a designer who began by referring to houses as machines for living in (Huxley saw through that clinical nonsense in his 1932 satire on modernism, Brave New World), and ended in the thrall of primitive abstract art, not to mention breasts (drawn, on collected postcards, carved, concretised).

Most architects, even arch-modernists, think of themselves as artistic. They are not, but they want to be; a drawing board, computer screen or the now -virtually unused Rotring pen are ultimately Nanny Whips, rather than naked models. Corbusier was the first of the post-Bauhaus massive to bring arbitrary abstraction, and the body's sensuality, into major architectural works, and tens of thousands of ordinary architects have since tucked into that vaguely sexy design slipstream with no intention of pursuing the profound creative conflicts and risks that generate the best architecture.

The risk is that we should think of Corbusier's art and architecture as interchangeable. Fortunately, the exhibition demonstrates only juxtapositions between his art and architecture, rather than fusions. Architecture, however artful, is almost always extruded through a conflicting mesh of imagination, rationality, cost and functional imperatives. If you are Zaha Hadid, you will have clients who can pay for a vast sculpture in the Emirates that might also happen to be a concert hall; if you are Jacques Herzog or Rem Koolhaas, you can deploy outlandish amounts of steel to create a stadium or a state television headquarters in Beijing whose forms are perceived as being in some way artistic. But the art-response is mendacious and activates a pernicious trip-wire: architecture plus art equals entertainment; entertainment is fleeting, therefore architecture is fleeting and we needn't trouble ourselves to think too deeply about it.

Corbusier thought deeply about architecture – even the Edwardian Lutyens, who disliked his architecture, recognised this – and he designed and built for posterity. Even his models were built to last. The massive wooden model showing the artfully symbolised topography and buildings of the government site in Chandigarh, India, is utterly engrossing; its undulations and objects form a richly surreal tableau, a dreamscape rather than an architectural setting. In the mind of Corbusier, reality always follows dream.

Or almost always. The illustration of Corbusier's Plan Obus, a 1931 scheme that would have demolished two-thirds of Algiers' kasbah to make way for a continuous serpentine apartment block hundreds of feet high, several miles long, with a motorway on top of it, could be described as a "plasticised" primitive relief. In this case, art threatened architecture: a wonderfully revealing perspective drawing shows a single man standing on a narrow central walkway between the two lines of traffic, with the Gulf of Algiers far below. In one image, we see the brilliance and potential vacuity of Corbusier as the artist of a floating, ferroconcrete world that mostly wanted very little to do with the ground (messy) or people (ditto), and vastly more to do with cars and aeroplanes and houses such as the seminal Villa Savoye (which hardly touched the ground). The exhibition succeeds admirably in showing facets of this eternally debatable aspect of his architecture.

Obus means bombshell in French. Graeme Russell's exhibition has given us the shell fragments of Corbusier's architectural impacts, but not the tensions that underlay them. We encounter much that is of interest: films, models, carving, letters, magazines, fly-through visuals; and all of it set out to suggest fairly distinct connections between his art and architecture. Yet what really matters (and the exhibition avoids this important provocation) are the dynamics of their estrangements. The show proves, unintentionally, that Le Corbusier was – and in no small way – a great architect because he was a minor artist.

Le Corbusier design show opens in Liverpool

Exhibition will celebrate architect's multidisciplinary approach to design



An exhibition of le Corbusier's work will open on Tuesday in Liverpool as part of the city's European Capital of Culture events.



The show includes models of the architect's most influential buildings, from the arts-and-crafts houses in his native Switzerland to the Ronchamp chapel and his designs for Chandigarh in India.

It will also explore Le Corbusier's multidisciplinary approach to design, combining art and film with urban planning and architecture.



The exhibition will be the first ever staged in the crypt of Liverpool's Roman Catholic cathedral. It will remain there until 18 January, then move to another UK location – the Barbican Arts Centre in London, where it will be on view from 19 February to 24 May.

6th Le Corbusier Research Center to be Built in India

The world is soon to have a new Le Corbusier research center/museum. It's been announced that the sixth such building will be constructed in Chandigarh, India, a city for which Corbusier laid out the master plan for in the 1950s. It's the second building in India, and it will feature a museum, like in all the other locations, but also plans to be a destination for architects and designers to work in their respective fields (though much more like a research library and most of it will have to do with the famous designer/architect himself). What's more, it will also be built to resemble and function in the way Le Corbusier would have likely wanted it designed, the planers hoping that it will resemble how things operated when the man was there working lo those many years ago.

Here's a bit:

The centre will be divided into six sections portraying the archival records, original plans, elevations, sketches and studies, maps and models, documents, photographs and furniture. Three rooms will serve as reception, reference and digital library with internet facility.

"We will establish a 'Chandigarh heritage conservation cell' for monitoring the conservation activity within the city. The materials that will be displayed in the centre will be collected on a permanent loan basis from various public, private and international institutions," he said.

The open courtyard would be used for the temporary exhibitions to promote ancient, medieval and Contemporary art and architecture in the region.

Le Corbusier Center to open in Chandigarh

The Sector 19 office of Le Corbusier, the place where the architect sat and drew plans for the City Beautiful, will be converted into the Le Corbusier Centre this October. The centre will preserve, interpret, research and display Corbusier’s works and maintain his legacy.

The centre will have six sections displayed in the six rooms of the building, while three rooms will serve as reception and information centres, reference and digital library with Internet facilities. The open verandah will be used for temporary exhibitions to promote the ancient, medieval and contemporary art and architecture around the region.

Besides various government institutions, the Administration is also getting support from various international organisations, including the Foundation Le Corbusier, Paris, Centre Le Corbusier, Zurich, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Museum of Architecture and Design, Chicago.

According to the Administration’s plans, all sections will recreate the ambience of the original office of Le Corbusier. For the purpose, it will also seek help from those who had worked with him.

From decade-old maps and models, including that of the Secretariat, the open-hand monument, the High Court, the Governor’s Palace, to plans, sections, elevations, sketches and studies of Corbusier’s works, everything will be available at the centre.

V N Singh, consultant, Museum and Art Gallery, STEPS, said: “The centre is going to be the first museum and research centre of a well-known architect, planner and designer in the country. There will be display boards, showcases, digital boards, reference as well as digital library. These will also be available online. I have also visited local architects, artists and senior citizens of the city, asking them to provide us with anything they can that is related to the architect and can be displayed.”