I had known of Christopher Benninger and his work in the field of architecture and city planning even before I first met him 10 years ago, at the office of the Mumbai Port Trust. He was a member of the committee appointed by the Ministry of Shipping to devise a preliminary policy to use port land that was lying unutilised. I was an urban planning consultant with an infrastructure thinktank.

We hit it off immediately. He was aware of my research paper on Mumbai Port Trust. I also told him about my Marathi translation of Cities for People, the illustrated book by the legendary urban planner Jan Gehl. Benninger presented me with his book, Letters to Young Architects, telling me that it had been translated into Gujarati and Chinese. He asked if I could translate it to Marathi.

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The book was a collection of his lectures and articles. It was a window into his thinking about architecture as a profession, how he, as a student, had been influenced by The Natural House by Frank Lloyd Wright and how architecture had become his profession and his life path.

Benninger has described his own life as a journey through four “ashrams”. I was sad when he passed away at the age of 81 and have a lingering regret that I could not translate his book.

Christopher Benninger graduated in 1966 from the University of Florida with a degree in architecture – a challenging discipline. In the first year, 250 students were admitted out of whom only 16 managed to pass. Benninger was one of them. On the advice of his teachers, he pursued higher education in architecture and urban planning from Harvard and MIT.

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In the 1960s, new experiments were taking place in the field of architecture in America. Learning from experience was the foundation of education in the discipline. The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, who inspired Benninger, were influenced by nature, fauna and the changing seasons. Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson were also prominent in the field.

Urban planner Kevin Lynch’s ideas on urbanisation were changing the ways of understanding cities and were influencing urban planning. Research in the fields of urban sociology, urban economy and the social life of cities was shaping city planning.

By contrast, architects like Le Corbusier in Europe were designing concrete buildings, working with the assumption that buildings and human culture were superior to nature. They thought of cities as machines and composed urban spaces with elements such as roads, zones for various activities, buildings and parks, in a mechanistic way. Chandigarh was being built on such ideas.

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In the 1960s, Benninger explored many European countries and cities on foot. It prompted him to think deeply about the differences in architectural and urban culture in America and Europe. During this period, he took economics lessons from John Kenneth Galbraith. He also became acquainted with anthropologist Margaret Mead and many social scientists. He refers to this as the learning period in the celibate ashram.

In 1968, while teaching at Harvard, he came to Ahmedabad on a Fulbright scholarship. Architect Balkrishna Doshi was impressed enough by Benninger to invite him to join the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad. In 1971, he started teaching in the architecture design studio.

An architecture studio is an open space for teachers and students to learn from each other. Topics for discussion could include rural-urban life, vernacular and modern architecture, folk culture, construction materials and techniques, traditions, the living conditions of people and their cultural aspirations. The objective is for the students to develop skills in designing buildings through conceptual brainstorming. Teaching in this studio helped Benninger become acquainted with Indian life and culture.

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In the 1960s, urban planning was practically absent in India. The first postgraduate course in urban and regional planning had started at the School of Planning in Delhi only in 1955. In 1973, a second postgraduate course in urban planning was started under Benninger’s leadership at the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad. As the centre’s first director, Benninger created a curriculum on urban planning tailored for Indian students.

Later, he married Anita Gokhale of Pune, who was a student of the first batch. Benninger describes this as the starting point of his “grihasthashram”.

Architecture and people’s well being

In the 1970s, there were only a handful of institutions in India offering architecture education. Outside of major cities, there was no conceptual distinction between the roles of a ​​civil engineer and an architect. It was only in 1972 that Parliament passed the Council of Architecture Act, which gave architects the status of independent licensed professionals.

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After this, educational institutions and professionals in the field of architecture began to get a little more attention. The Town Planning Acts in various states mandated that plans were to be prepared and certified by professional architects.

While in Ahmedabad, Benninger was part of an affordable housing project for poor families at Jamnagar. Later, an innovative sites and services project he designed for 2,000 poor families in Chennai was completed in collaboration with the World Bank. The project provided 100 sq mt plots with essential services such as roads, electricity, water, and sewage connections. The families were allowed to build one- to three-storeyed houses on the plot according to their needs and means. The poor also built affordable rental housing for other poor people.

These ideas may have influenced the informal layouts implemented on agricultural lands in peri-urban areas in part of Maharashtra on plots of one guntha (101.17 sq. mt), which are known as gunthewari schemes. These layouts of purportedly illegal settlements were created by agriculture landowners in urban agglomeration zones and sold to needy people. In 2001, they were regularised by The Maharashtra Gunthewari Developments (Regularisation, Upgradation and Control) Act.

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Benninger also prepared plans for the Housing And Urban Development Corporation in Hyderabad. He brought with him the social consciousness he imbibed from participating in Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement while in college in the US.

In his book, Benninger made several important observations about the profession of architecture. He considered college education in architecture only a preliminary step to entering the profession. Students are then attracted to two paths. A common, popular way is to design buildings and projects according to the prevailing fashion, as per customer demands while adhering to and treating the development plans and by-laws created by municipal authorities as sacrosanct.

There is little consideration of the impact of architecture on citizens, their health and wellbeing or the effects on the environment. High on the minds of such professionals is the desire to present functional building plans and schemes in an attractive environment. In recent times, government agencies, municipal authorities, developers and politicians have become the main clients of such professionals.

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A gurukul in Pune

Another way, as practiced by Benninger, is architecture as a mission. He worked as a sensitive professional striving to improve human society. For such professionals, an understanding of the techniques of construction, painting or other skills is not enough. Architects in this category must know about the life cycles of various groups of people and have empathy towards them.

The architect needs to be aware of the needs, expectations and limitations of the context – of people and of society – in which their constructions are built.

Communication skills, awareness and concern for the local ecosystem are essential. Such skills are not usually taught in college. They are developed through experience and the process of actual work by learning from mistakes. He believed that a guru is essential to create a dedicated professional and that it requires a different kind of gurukul.

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In 1976, Benninger and his wife moved to Pune to establish such a gurukul at the Centre for Development Studies and Activities on the outskirts of the city. This centre provided many short and long-term courses and facilitated interested professionals in gaining experience by working on projects. The main idea was that human beings should be central to all structures.

The Azim Premji campus in Bengaluru, designed by Benninger. Courtesy Sulakshana Mahajan.

The India House Ashram

The Centre for Development Studies and Activities carried out research and training missions for 20 years, after which the administration of the institute was handed over to Aneeta Benninger. Christopher Benninger returned to professional practice as an architect and urban planner to establish the India House, a sort of new workplace with 50 people in Pune.

This rishikula is housed in a large building on a single plot in Pune that includes his house, a guest house, studio, art gallery, auditorium, and entertainment spaces.

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Similar to the historical wadas, the building has a large open courtyard in the middle and buildings on the two sides. Working from this space, Benninger designed the Ceremonial Plaza in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu, the campus of Azim Premji University in Bangalore, the campus of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, the Maritime Institute in Mumbai, a hospital and research centre in Maharashtra’s Udgir, the Mahindra United World College near Pune, the Bajaj Science Center at Wardha and projects in places such as Goa and even as far as Sri Lanka.

His belief that architecture is an art that brings together human emotions, culture and society is reflected in his designs.

The circular library building on the Azim Premji campus in Bengaluru, designed by Benninger. Courtesy Sulakshana Mahajan.

Through this rishikula, he was in contact with NGOs, artists and social service organisations. He also found time to write a book of experiences as well as a guidebook to well-designed homes in several countries.

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Benninger received prestigious national and international awards, including the John Michael Kohler Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his work and firm, the Great Master Architect Award along with Geoffrey Bawa, Charles Correa, and Balkrishna Doshi, and the Suryadatta Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received the Best Architecture Book of the Year Award for his book Letters to a Young Architect in 2012.

Today, unsustainable market-oriented, developer and government-driven projects are being implemented under the guise of sustainable development. It is time for Christopher Benninger’s ideas to be brought into focus. The challenge is to dissuade students from succumbing to the lure of the commercialised profession of architecture and encourage them to design with people and their priorities in mind. Fostering ecological consciousness is another important factor in architecture.

The institutions he founded, his colleagues and his students will no doubt takeChristopher Benninger’s work forward.

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This is the Sulakshana Mahajan’s English translation of her Marathi essay, first published in Loksatta on October 21.

Sulakshana Mahajan is an architect and urban planner. Her email ID is: sulakshana.mahajan@gmail.com.