Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Bijoy Ramachandran writes a personal essay on the architectureas completely embraced by naturein one of BV Doshi's most evolved works.

- Bijoy Ramachandran

“There are various ways you can greet a person: you may shake hands, you may say namaskar, or you may embrace. In his [BV Doshi’s] buildings you find all these three phenomena. See the Indology building—it has landscape and it just stands out there. I say it does namaskar. See IIM here, it shakes hands. See the landscape and the building—they meet each other and again go back. It [the landscape] doesn’t enter but if you see Sangath and particularly the Gufa, I think these buildings are completely rooted, rooted into the ground and it is like a tree, it is drawing its nourishment from inside. That is like embracing. That building shows a tremendous intimacy, it is a virtual marriage between the land and the building. It doesn’t mean one is better than the others, these are just three ways of meeting friends.” —Navnath Kanade, Doshi (2009), dir. Premjit Ramachandran

My classmate Thomas Samuel and I were now beyond the drive-in, beyond civilization, speeding on his silver RX 100, to discover what Nagaraj Vastarey, a senior, told us would answer all our questions. Grappling with the then rather innocuous question of Indian-ness as part of the DY Patil critical analysis trophy for NASA ’91 (National Association of Students of Architecture) we were desperately seeking the holy grail—a true syncretic expression— meld ing familiar modernist tropes with an “Indian” architecture of labyrinthine passageways, episodic spatial forms, deep shadows, and resonant metaphors.