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Abstract
This article looks at the written stories The Revelation, The Sacred Spring and The Legend of the Living Rock that accompany three built works in India – the Husain Doshi Gufa (Ahmedabad, 1992–95), the National Institute of Fashion Technology (Delhi, 1997) and the Bharat Diamond Bourse (Mumbai, 1998) – of Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi. The stories open up the process of architectural making, calling into question standard distinctions between author and reader, between architect and user or others involved in the making process, and between description, narration and built work. Through them, Doshi’s architecture acquires an elusive property of being not theirs, not his, neither this nor that. Its spaces are alive – they evolve, grow and tell stories themselves long after the architect has left.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a paper given at the 14th Student Research Symposium of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) held in Edinburgh, UK, April 6–7, 2017. It is based in part on research undertaken during a residency in B. V. Doshi's office Sangath in Ahmedabad, India, September–December 2015, funded by the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, Canada [grant number IT05730].
Notes
1 In 1947, shortly after India gained independence from the British, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru initiated a drive for modernization throughout the country, hence the invitation to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to visit for the first time in 1951. At Chandigarh, “the sole instruction given by Nehru was to be expressive, experimental and to not let themselves be hindered by tradition;” Patrick Seguin, Le Corbusier–Pierre Jeanneret, Chandigarh, India (Paris: Editions Galerie Patrick Seguin, 2014). Available online: https://www.patrickseguin.com/en/publications/corbusier-pierre-jeanneret-chandigarh-india/ (accessed February 12, 2018).
2 Balkrishna Doshi, Paths Uncharted (Ahmedabad: Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design, 2015), 369.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 370.
5 The stories are included in James Steele and Balkrishna V. Doshi, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism for the Developing World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998). First published as pamphlets or brochures to accompany their respective projects, the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation intends to reissue them in 2019 as separate publications.
6 Rajeev Kathpalia, “The Joy of Making – Ways of Seeing, Ways of Building,” in Harnessing the Intangible, ed. Neelkanth Chhaya (New Delhi: The Academic Unit of the Council of Architecture, 2014), 91.
7 Alberto Pérez Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 4, 5.
8 Ibid., 5, 127.
9 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3.
10 Ibid.
11 Richard Sennett, Together – The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014), x–ix, 8.
12 Ibid., 23.
13 David Robey, “Introduction,” in Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), x, xi, 45.
14 The Pritzker Architecture Prize (n.d.). Available online: https://www.pritzkerprize.com/about (accessed May 7, 2018).
15 Doshi, Paths Uncharted, 19, 34.
16 H. Kumar Vyas, Design, the Indian Context: Learning the Historical Rationale of the Indian Design Idiom (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 2000), 11.
17 Balkrishna Doshi, with Muktirajsinhji Chauhan and Yatin Pandya, The Acrobat, the Yogi and the Sangathi (Ahmedabad: Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design, 2006), 5.
18 Ibid., 6.
19 Balkrishna Doshi, unpublished notes accessed by the author in Doshi’s office Sangath in Ahmedabad, September 2015.
20 Doshi et al., The Acrobat, the Yogi and the Sangathi, 22.
21 Balkrishna Doshi, interviewed by the author, October 2015, Sangath, Ahmedabad.
22 Steele and Doshi, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 170–171.
23 Doshi, Paths Uncharted, 338.
24 Derek Pearsall, “Forging Truth in Medieval England,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (London: Routledge, 2003), 11. Pearsall discusses inauthentic documents and texts of the Middle Ages which suggest a somewhat flexible attitude towards truth, fiction and falsehood. The “recognition of the impossibility of deciding or non recognition of the need to decide” should be construed “not as an intellectual defeat but as an achievement, the capacity to hold on to one’s lack of certainty.”
25 Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 126; E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961), 24. See also Peter Bondanella, Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 165.
26 Ynhui Park, “The Function of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 42, no. 3 (1982), 424. Park is quoting Paul Ricoeur on the nature of fiction; Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Christian University Press, 1976), 37.
27 Steele and Doshi, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 146–155.
28 Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, was said to have descended in the form of ten avatars, or incarnations, to restore cosmic order. Sage Durvasa had given a garland to Indra, the king of the gods, who placed the garland around his elephant, but the animal trampled on it. The insulted Durvasa cursed the gods, declaring that they would lose their immortality and divine powers. Vishnu advised the gods to drink the nectar of immortality to regain their powers. The nectar could be acquired by churning the ocean of milk, a body of water so large they needed Mount Mandara as the churning staff and the serpent Vasuki as the churning rope. Taking the form of the turtle Kurma, Vishnu bore the mountain on his back as they churned the waters.
29 Steele and Doshi, Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 151.
30 Ibid., 153, 154.
31 Ibid., 153.
32 Ibid. The story of Sheshnaag, Sheshanaga or Śeṣanāga is described in the Puranas, ancient Hindu texts in praise of the deities.
33 Michael T. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Pre-history of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16. Saler suggests that “J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954) owed much of its appeal to its logical rigor and empirical detail. Its maps, glossaries, chronologies, and other scholarly elements fostered an analytic mindset as well as a sense of wonder. Tolkien apparently insisted that ‘fantasy is a rational not an irrational activity;’ it ‘does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary: the keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.’”
34 Steele and Doshi, Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 173–174.
35 See note 28.
36 Steele and Doshi, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 182.
37 For Eco, the “empirical reader” is someone who uses the text as a “container for their own passions which may come from outside the text or which the text can arouse;” Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8.
38 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 168–169.
39 Peg Rawes, “Acts of Imagination and Reflection in Architectural Design,” in From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, eds. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey (London: Routledge, 2013), 264–268. Rawes is describing Immanuel Kant’s notion of imagination which “enables space and geometry to become embodied, rather than merely being cognitive ideas;” 267.
40 Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 140, quoted in Marc J. Neveu, “On Stories: Architecture and Identity,” Arkitektur N (March 5, 2008). Available online: http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=arch_fac (accessed July 20, 2016).
41 Balkrishna Doshi, “Social Institutions and a Sense of Place,” Marg 48, no. 3 (1997): 23–24. In this article, Doshi refers to an earlier piece he wrote with Christopher Alexander on the concept of “main” and “supporting structures” in the design process; Christopher Alexander and Balkrishna Doshi, “Main Structure Concept,” Landscape, 13, no. 2 (1964): 17–20.
42 Doshi, Paths Uncharted, 315; Balkrishna Doshi, “Give Time a Break” in Sangath: Indian Architecture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Bruno Melotto (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Maggioli, 2012), 93.
43 Doshi, Paths Uncharted, 315.
44 Ibid., 304–305.
45 Steele and Doshi, Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, 115–129.
46 Eco, Open Work, 12.
47 Ibid., 15.
48 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 6. Vesely’s call is for a “communicative architecture” in which “interpretation […] and the way of making […] come so close that they become fully reciprocal,” rather than an architecture that is either purely instrumental or obscurely personal. “What we know contributes to what we make, and what is already made contributes substantially to what it is possible to know,” he continues.
49 Saler, As If, 6, 7.
50 Ibid., 25.
51 Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911) argues that while sensations and feelings are real, human knowledge otherwise is made up of “fictions” that are justified only through pragmatism. Vaihinger draws on Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche to reach these conclusions; Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If:” A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924); Saler, As If, 104.
52 Saler, As If, 104.
53 Ibid., 28.
54 Doshi et al., The Acrobat, the Yogi and the Sangathi, 23.
55 Durganand Balsaver, “The Paradox of Doshi’s Mythical Realism,” in Chhaya, Harnessing the Intangible, 81.
56 Pérez Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, 71.
57 Doshi, “The Nature of Architecture,” in Melotto, Sangath: Indian Architecture between Tradition and Modernity, 35.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Pallavi Swaranjali
Pallavi Swaranjali is a Ph.D. candidate and contract instructor at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University. She has a B.A. in Architecture from Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, India, and an M.A. in Industrial Design from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where she also worked in architectural practice. Her research centers on the relationship between architecture and storytelling, looking at non-conventional modes of architectural representation which combine the normative and the fantastical, and the way in which they transform architectural making and experience.