Christopher Benninger: Architecture for Modern India

Majority Thinking

If we re-imagine the world the way it is today, then no culture or civilization has a monopoly on thought, whether in art or science. Asia alone accounts for something like 60% of the world's population, with China and India making up more than half of that figure again. And as the second most populous continent, Africa represents about 15% of humankind, while Europe's 700+ million people make up only 12%, Latin America and the Caribbean claim around 9%, North America 5% and Oceania 0.5%. The notion that Western ideas determine and dominate meaning on this planet is both inaccurate and certainly out-of-date. And while several decades ago most of the globe's largest urban agglomerations were found in the more developed regions, today’s big cities are concentrated in the global South, with the fastest-growing cities located in Asia and Africa. ('World Population Prospects', United Nations Database 2014).

It stands to reason that thinking in terms of the "majority" defines community in terms of what it truly is, rather than what it lacks or what it should be, and re-balances an appreciation for the cultural and social wealth of diverse groups. Since architecture is the most public and universal art form, involving anyone using it or merely passing by, Benninger's social consciousness, motivated by "public interest design", alongside his experiences and sensitivities to ancient wisdom are valuable assets in an often individualistic and self-referencing profession focused on design for its own sake. In his work volumes and external spaces are incorporated into what is metaphorically more like an architectural organism in dialogue with the external world and therefore the communities it is servicing. This is in keeping with his deep and original interest in how the built environment can achieve social outcomes. That same dialogue between the inner and outer, is reflected above and below in his layering of spaces which involve natural elements such as water, vegetation and climate. We could even say Benninger is a “community architect”, a kind of hybrid title that perhaps best describes what he does every day: talk to communities, understand their needs, and translate those ideas into the language of architecture, based on the premise that beauty and order can be equally distributed to those seeking it.
As a teacher he loves to connect new and old ideas for critical evaluation, and aims to make learning accessible and shared. In keeping with architectural elements, he provides a bridge across generations and cultures. Obviously, bridges span obstacles and provide safe passage across and beyond terrain that is by definition challenging or in some way impervious. A bridge is anchored and determinant. Benninger's conversations often carry or more precisely transport other's thinking. Such discussions are about social cohesion achieved through shared value systems, and his architecture is also about an education for peace through a commitment to facilitate well being for all; it is about the humanising effects of the arts, in all their manifestations; and about cultivating a voice for social change. Like the best storytellers Benninger's message and example needs to be reiterated so that we can avoid being ignorantly hijacked by individual or conglomerate interests representing the vested interests of a very few with strongholds on markets, instead of aiming for the kind of "transcendent architecture" that will imagine a better future.

Despite his privileged Western upbringing and education, Benninger was lured to India by veteran architect Balkrishna Doshi, who became his guru, making it his home and ultimate universitas magistrorum et scholarium ('community of teachers and students'). The challenges and satisfactions of living and working in one of the oldest civilisations in the world, which has metamorphosed into the newest and largest democracy, has provided a true frontier and life's mission for this architect. One of his most fundamental premises is that nature provides the principles of sustainability and that we can achieve balance through wisdom, traditional techniques, local materials and practitioners, not from ever more sophisticated or imported technologies. And that teams of different thinkers working interdependently must create new scenarios of development grounded on the common ideals of equality and inclusiveness.

Benninger's work deals with indoor and outdoor relationships, what he calls "fabrics of construction" and their interpretations into complex clusters. He employs positive-negative units of built-up masses and open courtyards, and structural systems that connect or continue between buildings. These recurrent elements can be seen in his first community projects in the 1970s with projects such as the SOS Children’s Villages in Delhi and Kolkata; the first was the second such orphanage built in the entire Subcontinent, founded by the social workers Tara Ali Baig and J. N. Kaul, and consisting of twenty family homes for about 270 people. From the start of his career Benninger has been a passionate advocate for citizen participation, as the premise for quality and relevance, and his ethical impulses have overlapped his roles as architect, writer, designer, technician, and even sociologist. He welcomes intelligent debate and is not one to shy from philosophical differences on the responsibilities of architecture to serve existing communities. As a very young man in Ahmedabad, he helped plan access to shelter on small plots, allowing impoverished families to build their own homes according to their means, designing over 20,000 such units in four locations, with the largest in Chennai. In 1972 he created a unique neighbourhood of small ground level houses for 500 households in Jamnagar, Gujarat, which represented the first government funded shelter program for the economically disadvantaged in the country. In 1976–79 he built a township for low income households in Hyderabad with over 2000 houses, public amenities and shopping centres. This was the first development authority project to provide owners with potable water, road access, paved lanes with street lighting, storm drains, electricity and sanitation facilities.

Benninger's environmental stand calls for a contraction of consumption, and the application of intelligent design principles to sustain homeostatic micro climates. There is spatial grandeur and openness in his works, which create a public domain where people can come together, keeping the faith in relationships and exchange. He pictures places where residents and workers can speculate and contemplate; and his buildings 'breathe', as if they were organisms in their own right. Local knowledge and economics are vital to the infrastructures he envisages and aims to find the "middle path" of balance - utilizing rather than exploiting resources, replenishing energy, re-elaborating traditions, authenticating culture rather than cloning customs, respecting climatic conditions, and supporting conviviality. And he even argues about "slums of hope" rather than despair.

I visited the Suzlon 'One Earth' Global Corporate Headquarters in Pune earlier this year. A truly impressive "campus ensemble", it marries branding purpose with social infrastructure to meet the needs of workers and visitors alike. Convincingly "powering a greener tomorrow", the complex is sited across a huge industrial section of the Pune-Mumbai corridor. A leader in wind energy, the Suzlon project called for more than just a symbolic adaptation of its mission. The whole complex actually demonstrates the values of ordered, cost-effective simplicity, and energy consciousness. While it is very large it still feels domestic and familiar. Its welcoming logic and aesthetics are echoed everywhere, from ceilings to floors to columns and louvers. Uplifting "sky courts" and cylinders maximise ventilation, with uninterrupted views of plants and water bodies that buffer and adorn the working areas. Branded as 'One Earth', each of the spaces comes alive, simultaneously activating the senses - Aqua (water), Tree (wind and wood), Sky (ether), Sea and Sun (fire) - and providing emotional relief with interludes of channelled sunlight. A coherent conservation credo is evident throughout the entire complex, and there is a sense of open fluidity that translates to your movements as you walk through the premises. An unmistakably Hindu structure, the Deep Jyoti Stambh ('oil lamp or light tower', traditionally found in temples and illuminated on special occasions), stands majestically in the middle of the main entrance alongside the basement-level pool. And the high tech solutions, such as solar photo-voltaic panels and reflective pools, create a micro environment with extensive openings promoting ventilation and a clear connection of interiors with the exterior. This relaxed, poetically "unifying" ambiance provides a contextual and culturally stimulating fit, as opposed to those alienating "office-scapes" we see in less sensitive and sensitizing architecture. He intends an "honesty of expression" of vernacular motifs wherein materials are expressed in their natural form, often using brick and stone bearing walls, sloped tile roofs, exposed concrete work and glass panels.

I have also been lucky enough to stay at India House. Arriving from Delhi after a busy time at the India Art Fair, I was exhausted with work and travel. The moment I set foot in Pune I felt a welcomed change and I took the warmth of the late January sun on the back of my neck as a good omen. I have been travelling throughout the Indian subcontinent for the last decade, on rickshaws, ferries, trains, buses, and in perilous cars, but my sense of relief was immediate as I arrived at India House. Its tranquility was palpable. Essentially inspired by the traditional haveli houses in Rajasthan and Gujarat, or wada mansions in Pune, it enjoys a central courtyard - Bhramasthan (based on Vedic architecture and planning) - that opens to the sky as if to embrace its daily wisdom. My body wanted to keep sleeping, having sensed a real opportunity for retreat, and my time there reminded me of the power of good architecture to truly enhance the quality of our lives.

Over one hundred and twenty years ago, Camillo Sitte (1843-1903) argued that architecture was a process of culturization, and he feared that urbanism would become a dryly technical task devoid of spirit and artistic commitment. He called for a reconciliation of the picturesque and the pragmatic, and summoned "artistic generating thought" in an aesthetically conscious manner to achieve the "creative quality of urban space". Intuitively, he also echoed an ancient Eastern wisdom - also reverberating from the ancient Vastu Sastras principles of Hindu design - about the whole amounting to and creating far more than the sum of its parts. Thankfully, and perhaps even serendipitously, Benninger's particular kind of genius has never been "strangled to death" nor has his joi de vivre been "stifled by the system", as Sitte had warned. Not by chance, more than forty years ago, Christopher left for an India that was in the middle of unprecedented changes; the same India that is now bursting at the seams of progress towards "the good life". He is still energetically contributing, knee deep, in a new transformation, and his tireless efforts are reflected in a previously celebrated affirmation of such a brave enterprise: "The forever edifying impress of artistic perfection cannot be dispensed with in our busy everyday life. One must keep in mind that city planning in particular must allow full and complete participation to art, because it is this type of artistic endeavour, above all, that affects formatively every day and every hour the great mass of the population..."

And when someone is that committed to their mission there will always be countless projects and people waiting for their love. (1)

Rosa Maria Falvo
Milan, August 2015

(1). Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), Translated by George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (Phaidon Press, London, 1965), 91-104;105-112.