Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi has been named the winner of the Pritzker Prize 2018, architecture’s most illustrious award, making him the first Indian architect to receive the prize.
Balkrishna Doshi, who turned 90 last summer, is best known for his designs in his native India. Many of them, such as the Aranya low-cost housing community in Indore, were built for social reasons. Designed in 1989, Aranya currently provides residence for some 80,000 people through a system of houses, courtyards and a labyrinth of walkways.
Community Aranya, Indore, India
Doshi is known for incorporating Indian heritage into his buildings: another of his designs, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, was inspired by labyrinthine temples and traditional Indian cities, its design evident in the interlocking buildings and courtyards.
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India
Over six decades, he has made a name for himself in India as an educator who transformed practices in his field, in part by as an educator who transformed practices in his field, in part by establishing several schools of architecture and design.
He has built over one hundred buildings that reflect his investment in local materials, social change and the environment. As a student and young architect, Doshi worked with two of the great modernists of the 20th century: Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.
Doshi was a vital, if little-known, partner in creating the meccas of modern architecture in India. He translated the plans of Le Corbusier and Khan into Indian building standards and found ways to interweave prefabricated materials with handmade elements.
Doshi has also been a teacher for most of his career and helped establish design schools in Ahmedabad. He was the founding director of the city’s School of Architecture and School of Planning and played a vital role in the development of the famous Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design.
Balkrishna Doshi believes that, like life itself, architecture should be experienced with exuberance and wonder, and with an abiding sense of its infinite possibilities.
Doshi will collect his $100,000 prize from the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the Pritzker, at a ceremony in Toronto, Canada later this month. Following Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena ‘s 2016 recipient, and the Catalan trio of RCR Architects last year, the selection of Doshi points to the growing appreciation of the Pritzer by relatively unknown architects working on social change projects in their regions. We are very happy about this.
