Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi
b. Poona, India, 1927.

Cosmopolitan, without ever losing sight of his Hindu origins and Indianness “Doshi” (as he is known) is, along with Correa, among the most influential architects practising in India today. Educated at J. J. School of Art, Bombay (1946-50), he became senior designer for Le Corbusier in Paris for projects in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. He was in private practice in Vastu-Shilpa, Ahmedabad (1956-77) and as Stein, Doshi & Bhalla since 1977. Responsible for the sensitive adaptation and refinement of modern architecture to the Indian context, Doshi supervised buildings by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad. Emancipation from this vocabulary has allowed Doshi to evolve his own command of the modern-vernacular approach; an architecture beyond stylistic considerations. As thinker and teacher he remains unique in India, his environmental concerns and his urbanism always relevant. He set up the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Environmental Design in 1962 and founded the School of Architecture and Planning in Ahmedabad, also designing their premises. The architectonic scale and massing (vaulting), the clear sense of space (courts), mystery and community (water), an attraction to material and the role of incompletion in visual terms for an India ever constructing and decaying, remain thematically strong throughout his work. Doshi’s more recent Gandhi Institute of Labour achieves complexity and scale by an exquisite treatment of community and space in a very difficult unenlivened environment. Doshi’s thorough professionalism and modest architecture will distinguish him in the future and provide one of the most important models of response for new Indian architecture.

List of major buildings / works
Doshi House, Ahmedabad, India, 1961.
Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad, 1962.
Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (with Kahn), 1962-74.
Tagore Theatre, Ahmedabad, 1967.
Srinagar Master Plan (with Stein), 1970.
Computer Centre, Hyderabad, 1976.
Sangath, 1981.
Institute of Management, Bangalore, 1985.
Gandhi Institute of Labour, Ahmedabad, 1986.

Bibliography
W. J. R. Curtis, Balkrishna Dosh:: An Architecture for India, Ahmedabad, I988.