Indian modernism and the culture of beauty’s complicated relationship is a dance between noticeability and

un-noticeability, where beauty was both a dangerous word and one entirely inapplicable to a universal
modernist sensibility

Dudhsagar Dairy, Mehsana, Architect: design to elicit a favourable Achyut Kanvinde. Photograph
by: Peter Serenyi. © MIT Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections

National Dairy Development Board Office Building, Gujarat. Architect: Achyut Kanvinde.
Photograph by Peter Serenyi. © MIT Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections
 .

Salvacao Church, Mumbai, Architect: Charles Correa & Associates. Photograph by: Peter
Serenyi. © MIT Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections
In 1976 while a student of architecture at the university, I returned one afternoon to the studio to find an
elaborate note taped to my drafting table. The note explained in some detail that its writer was an Indian
architect based in Delhi and was attending a convention in Philadelphia celebrating the Bicentennial. And,
indeed, that if I were interested in meeting him, I would be welcome to attend his talk in the auditorium.
Having lived and grown up in the United States, I was completely unaware of professional practice in India
and its multitude of independent personalities. I didn’t know that the man who wrote the long elaborate note
was not only one of the country’s best-known architects but also a man of extraordinary thought and
sensibility, and at his core, a humanitarian. I tore up the note and left for the collage bar.

Only later did I learn that he had taken great pains to enquire from the college admissions office if there was
an Indian student registered in the architecture programme, and in which of the many studios his desk might
be located. Not meeting AP Kanvinde at the time is something I have regretted all my life. His deeply
contemplative and humble persona was unusual to a profession that subjects all work to personal
glorification; and even more so at a time when the construction of independent India was a gigantic task
given to a select few. Kanvinde was one of the earliest practitioners of Indian modernism.

Balkrishna Harivallabhdas House,

Ahmedabad, Architect: Achyut Kanvinde
 Dudhsagar Dairy, Mehsana, Architect:
Achyut Kanvinde. Photograph by: Peter Serenyi. © MIT Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections

Indian Institute of Technology, New

Delhi, Architect: Achyut Kanvinde
Throughout the history of pre-independent India, artistic concern for beauty manifested in architecture in
ways that were self-conscious and inhibiting. In its most fastidious falsification, architecture invariably
offered itself as disguise, a wilful representation of itself as another; the enveloping skin showed one thing,
the inside another. An outside of grand aspirations and select brand of beauty, the innards of leaking
biological frailties.
 The growth of a structure in the city or the countryside,
by its very bigness of scale and size, brought the architect under the shadow of noticeability. Buildings
couldn’t hide in a gallery nor could they be set aside in a drawer. Architecture then was always afflicted with
the scourge of beauty, and so always in competition with itself. Whenever and whoever built it – Mughal
Emperor or Colonial ruler – there was always an urge to rub in a point. Exaggeration and extravagance were
in fact legitimate ways to make that point. In order to be heard you had to shout louder than the rest. Indian
architecture could only establish its position in the city through overdesign and the intentional complication
of the simplest matters. It was important to employ a vast retinue of craftsmen to make visible to the public
that the building before them was a carefully constructed work of art. And they better notice, or else…

The emergence of modernism – or rather the forcing of its ideology on a nation’s traditional values – and
the functional austerity of its simplified forms – was an impossible struggle in the visual sensibility of a
people used to a messy and contrived realism. Beauty was both a dangerous word and one entirely
inapplicable to a universal modernist sensibility.

Kanvinde, Correa and Doshi, the most prominent practitioners of the time, urged by the new order, relieved
their structures of the burden of applied expression – and went headlong into the new quest. In a recent book
on his career, Kanvinde explains that architecture had begun to be ‘defined as a creation of the mind
manifested by means of sensation and perception’. The rationale for such a reading lay in opposition to the
traditional ideal of beauty, and became, instead, a consequence of sensations imbibed in space, form, texture
and light. The construction of factories and vast dairy complexes – which fell earlier as engineering
endeavours – could now be classified as architecture, and could be judged on the basis of the new aesthetic.
The real experimental ground was obvious in buildings that had a common purpose – mundane office
structures, housing, factories and dairies that sprung up to support growing city populations. The expression
of beauty was less an attribute of function than the capacity of the design to elicit a favourable disposition
of its many users, what Kanvinde called ‘the deeper values and meanings associated with physical and
psychological needs that contribute to form’. The architect worked with the austere medium at his disposal
to tame a new way of seeing: the greyness of the concrete, the glow of light on a plane brick wall, and
skylights so deep that the source of light was a mystery. The physical world was being tested as much by
construction as by its absence. Un-noticeability was modernism’s greatest asset.

Architecture’s formal concerns ultimately directed the enquiry of beauty outside of the visible – to space
contained and time elapsed – the two mediums that came together through the experience of a building. The
aesthetics of that spatial dimension were then seen as transcendental – a place existing somewhere between
the built world and emptiness. The innate principles that governed constructed life and human needs –
privacy, meeting, community, isolation, exuberance, silence, contemplation, work and play – were enacted
in frames that diminished or enlarged the scope of experience. Beauty then became an active metaphor for
something larger – an abstract ideal like happiness – an unformed dimension that only conveyed the seeming
rightness of things. A purpose hard to describe, never achievable, but always there to strive for.