April 9, 2019
Balkrishna Doshi’s Expansive Architectural Oeuvre Goes on View at the Vitra Design Museum
Among the last of the Moderns (he is going on 92), Doshi reflects the best of Modernism’s social mission, presiding over a rich body of work (notably addressing low-cost housing and town planning).
Few have been as deserving of a Pritzker Prize as Balkrishna Doshi; indeed, his selection in 2018 partially redeemed that dubious ritual of kingmaking (there has been only one solo female recipient in the architecture award’s history, Zaha Hadid). Now another late-career honor has been conferred on the great Indian architect, this time by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany: a major monographic exhibition, inexplicably the first outside his home country. Among the last of the Moderns (he is going on 92), Doshi reflects the best of Modernism’s social mission, presiding over a rich body of work (notably addressing low-cost housing and town planning) in which he paid “utmost attention to local mores and to the topography and climate of the site,” writes architectural historian Kenneth Frampton in the accompanying catalog (DAP, May 2019). The pop art historian Nicholas Fox Weber goes a step further, calling Doshi “one of modern civilization’s great humanitarians.”
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