Top Architecture Prize Goes to Low-Cost Housing Pioneer From India

Congratzz Mr Doshi for this award...the below saying is an example that he deserve the award... “One is all the time looking at financial returns — that is not only what life is,” he said. “I think wellness is missing.” What Mr. Doshi means by “wellness,” he said, are considerations like how we can “connect with silence”; how “life can be lived at your own pace”; and “how do we avoid the use of an automobile.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Doshi's work is fairly mediocre, and nothing more than derivative of the works of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, with whom he worked as their local architect. His own Sangath studios, shown as one of the images in the article, are a knockoff of Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth by Kahn, and much of the rest, Corbusier knockoffs. By no means does anyone in India think of Mr. Doshi as a "low cost housing pioneer" -- that is simply absurd! There have been some truly amazing work class architects out of the South Asian sub-continent that have been missed by Pritzker Prize jury over the years -- Geoffrey Bawa of Sri Lanka, and Charles Correa from Indian. Their work is truly great design, original, and innovative. If you are looking for a "low cost pioneer", there was no one better than Laurie Baker. All of these architects built scores of buildings.

This award should have been given to him over 20 years ago, the same to Denise Scott Brown.

When a great creative mind seeks solutions the results are often astonishing. The ability to create low cost housing does not just benefit those with limited funds. What sense does it make to create housing that takes so much income that dwelling owners have less discretionary income? In New York, tax abatement programs fund housing for the rich while programs for everyone else makes fares less well. Better housing creates stability and community. The only reason there is no real progress is the politicians are compromised by a system of contributions that amounts to nothing more than legalized bribery. Remove all special interest money form the political process and watch as solutions outpace excuses.

Thank you for bringing Balkrishna Doshi's stunning work to the attention of New York Times readers like me. The way he combines beauty with function, community consciousness, and designing for extensibility should be the inspiration for all architects in the 21st century. Given the length of Doshi's career, it's high time the Pritzker Prize and the New York Times are honoring him. Doshi's belated and well-deserved recognition is another example that proves that honoring diversity really means throwing off our blinders. It's wonderful to see that the field of architecture is much, much more than Western white men designing "statement" buildings that take your breath away to look at but barely function for the people who use them. Since I live near Boston, I'm thinking of Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT. The building is so riddled with cracks and leaks that the university sued Gehry in 2007. I'm sure there are many more examples. Congratulations to Balkrishna Doshi, and thank you to Robin Pogrebin and NYTimes for this excellent article.

Reading the comments It seems many people are only focused on the gallery project and I think thats very sad. I wish there had been more photos of his other work. Congratulations to Mr. Doshi!

There is a shift in the attribution of the Pritzker Price. It seems to shift from starchitects to socially aware architects. This is progress.

Congrats to Mr Doshi whom I had never heard of even though I spend my winters in India. Local newspapers have not carried any stories on this award. Just to show that today in India - what is needed is not award winning architectures housing - but just he housing. I have been to Chandigarh - and it is indeed a city unique in India with broad streets and checkered pattern streets that remind you of a planned American city in the West or the South. Unfortunately, it has the same disease - prevalent in India - no maintenance and dirty. To me the problem with architecture here in India is architects are involved only in design. However, I wish these architects could educate Indians on how to maintain these properties after they have been built - including surrounding areas. That photo (the last one) about that center - first, it appears half finished and nearby appears typical scene of India - slums and poor streets. The other thing India needs is architects who know how to build a housing in place of a 100 plus year old building in crowded cities like Mumbai. This city - the richest in India - has such a low availability of quality housing that even Indians living in America refuse to come back here. Of course, cost is one matter but typically not for these Indians in America. So, while I applaud this gentleman - his half a dozen projects in India are more a museum style pieces than a design copied around in this country.

This idea that buildings are 'living' is just the architects need to give themselves cover for their impact on the natural world. We, humanity, have covered enough of the world in egotistic buildings. We need to focus on restoring the world for the rest of life on earth.

Louis Kahn's brutalistic concrete designs could never have happened without poured-in-place concrete. People give themselves way too much credit sometimes.

As commenter Me said, the photo reminds me of Gaudi's work.

"The mosaic tile in his studio also appears in the undulating roof of Mr. Doshi’s underground art gallery in Ahmedabad, Amdavad ni Gufa (1994), which features the artwork of Maqbool Fida Husain." Anyone else see the influences of/resemblance to the work of Antoni Gaudi and Parc Guell in Barcelona?? (See images of the Colonnaded pathway areas under the Roadway projections and also the Main Terrace and ...) Great stuff.

No mention of Kiesler? As if this were new? "Frederick Kiesler worked across mediums. He believed that “sculpture, painting, architecture should not be used as wedges to split our experience of art and life; they are here to link, to correlate, to bind dream and reality.” - wikipedia

Awards ceremonies are the nadir of human activity - class based, exclusive, unfair, and as stupid as a Donald Trump beauty pageant. I am an architect,a painter and a singer songwriter. I am, I suppose, mostly an artist. And I know so many in these varied fields that will never see the light of day because of some twist of fate or some whim of someone in power, or by simply being born in Syria or Yemen or Iraq or Gaza at the wrong time in history. These award ceremonies are sad, unfortunate and delusional. Everything on this earth will dissipate into space soon enough. We should be working hard on creating opportunity for all, increasing architectural commission opportunities for more folks, distributing wealth more equitably and eventually containing and suppressing the massive separation of haves and have nots. I get that our friend here has made a name in low cost architectures. Good for him. We need a revision of how we celebrate people in the so called free world. We are becoming far too much like the protected neo-fascist enclaves of The Hunger Games.

Congratulations, Mr. Doshi! You make all people with any positive association with India very proud. (No ifs, ands or buts...). Pritzker committee: It's so wonderful that you honored Mr. Doshi.

Building stuff is neat.

Architecture is a living organism? The architect is closer that he thinks to the original truth about architecture. A 6.000 years old Neolithic temple, Mnajdra (Malta), was 8-shape, like the Goddess of the time. The first and second “door” are a gynecological representation of this fertility goddess. The same features remained much later, when the Goddess was substituted by God, in Egyptian temples and Christian churches. The oldest monument in the world, 12.000 years old Göbekli Tepe temple (Turkey) is again a rather explicit gynecological representation, an so is the original Labyrinth. You will have to admit it if you are not too Victorian to read simple symbols. Fact checking is possible thanks to a light yet very serious essay: “Our Lady Goddess & The Femicide of the Heroes” is available for free on a San Francisco academic site https://independent.academia.edu/JeanSantilli

The concept is nice and warm and fluffy and smells like a Bounce fabric sheet; however, it screams of housing projects that work for a few years and then turn into slums. India has major problems and making a nice space will not correct their fundamental failure: population. America should not import something because of good intentions or we will suffer their fate.

Pygmalion, as an example!

Gosh, the future, I can hardly wait. We get to live in (fancy) caves, eat insects and use no water (because there will be very, very little) except to sip carefully. What fun!

I am from India, I am thrilled an architect from India won the prize. However, the concrete structures do not reflect the peace an adobe house with hay thatched roofs that were common in India, even 50 years ago. All the materials were sourced within a distance of 1KM. Probably the cost of materials was less than $200. No nails. They provide good insulation from the blazing heat. The village planning was organic, spaces for everyone. I hope an architect revisits these structures and brings back them in vogue.

The "undulating underground art gallery" is more likely the place where Yoda hides out. The force is weak in this architect.

The Pritzker Prize jury really missed an opportunity in not awarding Charles Correa, another Indian architect who passed away three years ago, whose work far far surpasses that of Doshi.

Your long ago dance critic, Edwin Denby, in his reviews and his classic Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets wonderfully captured the flow and respect or disrespects of us as we move past other peoples. This article tells us but not yet writes with the same sharing of attention and shape, flow and interaction. I hope she will pick up his work and mimic and come to share what she sees rather than tell us the architect does. I hope that she gains confidence and the daring to fail in order to share her interest. On the positive side, I will now search for more to learn the architect’s visions and styles. I have started collecting from Pics the shapes and flows, colours and contrasts of various African homes and neighborhoods, food storage bins and gateways.

The picture of the underground art gallery shows a very Gaudi-esque influence, a structure that reminds one of nature. I'm surprised there was no mention of Gaudi, the famous and unique Catalan architect, whose structures in/around Barcelona are always identifiable as his.