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- 2. Introduction to the architect Christopher Benninger is one of India’s most respected architects. His firm, Christopher Charles Benninger Architects has produced some of the most admired edifices in India. Benninger’s city and regional planning works range from Sri Lanka, across India to Bhutan. His narrative presents a language that lies between modernist ideals and sacred notions enshrined within Indian courtyards, generating a unique approach to architecture and place. His first book, Letters To A Young Architect, focuses on the practice of architecture in developing societies and has been widely read amongst students and professionals in the Indian subcontinent. Christopher Benninger lives and works in Pune from the India House. His second book, Architecture for Modern India, is a comprehensive account of his practice and vision. Having lived in India for over 40 years, that the country and its myriad traditions have rubbed off on him. He enjoys eating Indian food and wearing kurtas, and, on the sprawling grounds of India House, one notices that his home is inspired by the traditional Maharashtrian wada with a courtyard. In his leisure hours he bides his time well, swimming in his lap pool, listening to Indian classical music, and reading about history and occasionally immersing himself in the world of fiction. Most evenings are spent entertaining friends at home with his partner of 25 years, Ramprasad, while weekends are spent with his son, Siddharth, who visits often.
- 3. Life Lessons ● “To gain something one may have to give up something beautiful” ● “Its better to BE than to SEEM what you are not!” ● “Don’t be euphoric when people praise or depressed when people criticize” ● “Truth is the ultimate search of all artists. Even then I feel, Its better to search the good then to know the truth!” ● “There is only one form of good luck only which is having good teachers!” ● “Architecture is a curious craft.” ● “One structure may follow all of the laws of design, yet be worthless, while still another may break all the principles and be profound!” ● “A building may be bad without doing anything wrong yet another work may have to sin against architecture to reach perfection.” Thoughts on Architecture
- 4. Early Life and Education Christopher Benninger was born to a professor of economics, Laurence Benninger, who devoted his life to analytical research, writing and teaching, bringing Christopher into the milieu of an academic community at an early age. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1942, he grew up in Gainesville, Florida, surrounded by books and music and artists and the intellectual community. As a little boy, he would often skip school to feed his appetite for adventure by cycling around, playing on Florida’s beaches, venturing into jungles, riding out into springs and canoeing in lakes. His mother, heir of the French family de Guibert, a gentile family of artists, dramatists and writers introducing him to modern dance, painting, creative writing and statecraft, with an ‘uncle’, Adlai Stevenson, the Governor of Illinois, Democratic Party candidate for President twice, and United States Ambassador to the United Nations. At the Embassy in New York, Christopher met many ‘thought leaders’ of the time, like Sir Robert Jackson, Chairman of the United Nations Refugee Relief Commission, who introduced him to the Ekistics Movement, gifting him a lifetime subscription to the Ekistics Journal. The family had homes in Free Acres (an artists’ colony in the Watchung Mountains near New York City), Gainesville, Florida (where Christopher completed his first degree in architecture) and Medellin, Colombia (where his father created a college) and Christopher was introduced to abject poverty in the barrios of the city.
- 5. Early Life and Education He was an active participant, along with his sister, in the American civil rights movement in his youth and chose many friends from amongst the South Asian student community, like Meer Mobasher Ali, his roommate, who became the first Bangladeshi Dean of Architecture in BUET in Dhaka. Benninger studied his bachelors in architecture in the University of Florida, College of Architecture and Fine Arts (1961-1966) where he did his dissertation on Museum Prototypes. He continued with his masters in urban planning at Harvard (1966-1967) wherein he did his dissertation on Low Cost Housing In Latin America and where he later taught. Following that he pursued a second master’s degree on City and Regional Planning at MIT (1967-1971) and there his dissertation topic was Growth and Transformation of Ahmedabad. Winning a Fulbright Fellowship in 1968 brought Christopher on a round-the-world adventure from Cambridge to San Francisco, to Tokyo, Nara, Hong Kong, on to Phnom Penh, Bangkok and then to India, onward through Russia and the United Kingdom.
- 6. Early Life and Education At Harvard, he came in close contact with Fumihiko Maki, Jersey Soltan, Dolf Schnebli, Yona Freidman, Shadrack Woods, Louis Mumford and Barbara Ward, who considered Christopher her protégé, taking him to the Delos Symposium in Greece in 1967, and to the annual Athens Ekistics Week thereafter, where he befriended Constantinos Doxiadis, Arnold Toynbee the historian, Buckminster Fuller the technologist, Margret Mead the anthropologist and Jackie Tyrwhitt, editor of the Ekistics journal, in which Christopher’s early writings appear. Adventure was always Christopher’s true love. His travels to Medellin, for example, have given him a tremendous viewpoint that, very often, there is another life apart from one that affluent people enjoy living in the ‘first city’. Instead of flying to Athens to attend the Delos Symposium, he landed in London, crossed the English Channel by boat, buying a Peugeot bicycle in Paris, and then cycling 1,500 miles over land to Athens.
- 7. Journey into architecture His journey began with The Natural House, a book by Frank Lloyd Wright, gifted to him on Christmas day in 1956. He was finally inspired. When he turned the last page, he knew he was destined to become an architect. One Christmas morning he woke up to an unusual gift and it was FL Wright’s book, The Natural House. But unlike the others this gift turned out to be a talisman of his future. To him it was a magic book that would change his life forever. As he read the first words, sentences, paragraphs and pages of Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Natural House, he discovered who he was, and what he wanted to be. He gained his first insight into the nature of my life’s meaning and search. Reading the pages he felt like a reincarnated person discovering who he had been in previous lives, and what he would be in the future. Then he got into college and found a clear path through a young teacher called Harry Merritt who inspired him further through his wonderful designs and thoughtful questions. He advised Benninger to leave Florida and go to Harvard. From then on good fortune introduced him to a chain of true gurus. In the days that followed after he read Wright’s book he ‘saw’ things he had never comprehended before. Wherever he went detailed elements like Finely carved balustrades and Sculptured stone gargoyles caught his attention and got him excited. He noticed that one wood was different from another in its color, grain, density and use. He was drawn to ‘feel wood’ and to slide his fingers across it, appreciating its inner soul. Stained glass windows, fine brass handles, and well thought-out paving patterns were his companions.
- 8. Journey into architecture He began to argue with sloppy workmanship and clumsy details. Unnatural, synthetic and artificial finishes fired a sense of anger in him. He developed a self-righteous sense of the right and wrong uses of materials; good and bad expressions of functions, and revulsion toward exaggerated applications of expensive finishes. Monumentalism annoyed him. Motifs crafted in Plaster of Paris to look like marble carvings repulsed him. He divided the world of artifacts into those of honest expression and those of lies. There were the master architects, and there were the others whose work he considered cheap and worthless. He realized that his ‘holier-than-thou’ attitudes were verging on fundamentalism. But he loved the order, the devotion and the balance these thoughts brought him. A new passion had entered his soul and fired his spirit. After The Natural House, he read A Testament, An American Architecture and anything else by Wright that he could lay his hands on. Broadacre City, An Autobiography and The Story of a Tower were consumed in rapid succession. Wright ignited an energy within him that burns until this day. Decades later, his designs and his ideas follow him.
- 9. Journey to India Benninger came to India in a Fulbright scholarship in 1968. When BV Doshi first visited America on a Graham Foundation scholarship in 1959 he turned to Le Corbusier to introduce him to a guide in an unknown land who then wrote to Jose Lluís Sert, Dean at Harvard, who graciously accepted the task. Several years later Sert introduced Doshi to a young Charles Benninger in his mid-twenties who was coming to India on a Fulbright Fellowship. Doshi suggested that he be with him in Ahmedabad at the School of Architecture. Without any questions Benninger went to work with him as a teacher in 1968, at the age of twenty-five. In Ahmedabad where he spent a year, he began his teaching career, at what is now CEPT University. While there he came under the spell of Balkrishna Doshi, who shared his insightful stories, zest for life and deep analysis of Indian culture. He taught his first course in town planning there, and a studio that included students like Shishir Beri, Madhvi Desai, Miki Desai, Kersi Daroga and Ameeta Parikh (later Raje) Anand Raje, Piraji Sagrara and Hasmukh Patel who become his lifelong friends. While in Ahmedabad he envisioned the need for a post graduate programme in urban studies and planning, and drafted a proposal to create a school of planning. Designing slum upgradation shelters in Vadodara, as a volunteer for the social worker Sanatbhai Mehta, led to a lifetime friendship, with Sanatbhai publishing ‘Letters to a Young Architect’ in Gujarati in 2014.
- 10. Journey to India After his fellowship ended Doshi asked him to stay on with an Indian salary and to his pleasant surprise Benninger stayed. While in Ahmedabad he worked with Doshi on his idea to start a new school of planning. On returning to America, Christopher continued his urban and regional planning studies at MIT, writing his thesis on the urban structure of Ahmedabad, authoring ‘Models of Habitat Mobility in Transitional Societies’ that became a classic in the literature of human settlements. After, in Cambridge, Christopher was offered a teaching position at Harvard, first as an instructor, and later as a tenured assistant professor. At Harvard and MIT he had a wide range of inspiring teachers, learning economics from John Kenneth Galbraith, teaching in studios with Roger Montgomery Jane Drew and Gerhard Kallmann, and working in Jose Luis Sert’s studio. India was the backdrop to his life in Cambridge, with a large Pichwai painting dominating his living room, and a sign at his front door directing, ‘Remove Your Shoes Before You Enter’. Many of Christopher’s teachers were also curious about the subcontinent writing books like Barbara Ward’s ‘India and the West’, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt’s ‘Patrick Geddes in India’, Erick Erickson’s ‘Gandhi’s Truth’, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s ‘An Ambassador’s Journal’, all raising Christopher’s nostalgia for his life and friends in India.
- 11. Journey to India When he left to teach architecture at Harvard, Doshi assumed his tryst with India was over. A year later, while with Kahn in Philadelphia, Doshi got a call from Christopher to come up to Harvard and give a public lecture. Missing Ahmedabad in Cambridge, Christopher, the brahmachārī, brought India to America, inviting Charles Correa, Achyut Kanvinde and Balkrishna Doshi to give lectures at Harvard in the spring of 1970, enrolling Indian students at MIT and Harvard like Praful Patel, Nimish Patel and Trilochan Chhaya, befriending South Asian students with whom he still shares ideas. While in Cambridge they talked of utopian dreams and about the future of India. Doshi obtained his promise that if he could ever initiate a school of planning Benninger would come back to Ahmedabad and help me start it. As fate would have it that project materialized sooner than Doshi ever imagined. But hopes for Christopher’s support evaporated as this was around the time he had just been made a tenured Assistant Professor at Harvard, and no one in the right sense of mind would leave such a coveted post so easily. In any case Doshi wrote to him that he must come. But Benninger adored India and its traditions and people and the chance to found a new institute at the age of 28 was too much to ignore so he gave up everything in America and chose to come to India. After a month Doshi was surprised to receive a letter from Benninger accepting the prior’s proposal. From then on they have been on a long journey and founded the institute we know today as the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad.
- 12. “India, like America, is a land of individuals. Like America, its composite parts are diverse. India is composed of a billion initiatives of a billion people. These are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alignment. Living in India is a huge challenge demanding understanding, patience and perseverance. This vast complexity of personalities, multiple visions, values and ways of doing things is a continuous source of inspiration and motivation. The very name of the country sparks my imagination and my curiosity even after living more than half a century amongst its wonderful people. The search here is to find the common thread that weaves all of these strands into one cloth. That is the fun of it all. What is amazing is that within all of this diversity there are so many threads that tie everything together into a stable pattern; always in flux, always in transition, always changing, yet dependable and unified. Somehow I have always felt most at home in India; more so even than in America or Europe. I love the chaos, the dynamic synergy and the way things settle into their own unique order. I love the warmth of the people, expressed through smiles and laughter. I love the variety of characters and the complexity of the society. I love the smell of rain on parched earth, wafted on the breeze from the distant mountains as the monsoon approaches. I love the sounds of insects at dusk and the songs of birds at dawn, when the sun peeks over the horizon onto verdant fields.” “I’d say as an Indian architect; my career began here when my eyes were opened to objective reality, as opposed to the dreamy romanticism of the West. as a young man, in the early 70s, I matured, dealing with a wide variety of people when I founded the School of Planning at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology University (CEPT), Ahmedabad. Later, designing institutional buildings and very large human settlements, I learned a great deal, becoming a man. Fortunately, an Indian man! In fact, as an old man, I feel young architects can learn much more about architecture right here in India from the Chola temple complexes, the Mughal campuses, and from everyday domestic architecture than they can in Ivy League schools in America or in the classrooms of London or Paris.”
- 13. Life as a Brahmachari in ashrams “To know what the truth is, though we must also search it. Through my travels such questions and propositions began to haunt me. While I travel a great deal (and indeed am on a journey in Australia even as I write this piece) I have always settled into different kinds of ashrams, or retreats. Perhaps they mirror my stages of life from that of a Brahmachari to that of a Rishi?” “There have been four figurative ashrams in my life that I would like to mention, as each had presiding gharanas, or schools of thought, nurturing them. They all had gurus and clear credos. There were my years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; my years in Ahmedabad, India; two decades at the Centre for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA) in Pune; and my present life at India House in Pune. In my previous ashrams I was an object of the gharanas, and in the present one I am the subject and the verb; that is to say that I have become more formative and deterministic as I grew older. That, in fact, is the anomaly of being an architect; as one is embattled by age, one becomes stronger; as one retreats, one becomes more engaged, making a greater impact on one’s context.”
- 14. Cambridge ashram In Cambridge he studied urban planning at MIT and architecture at Harvard, where he later taught. He also worked in Jose Lluís Sert’s studio. He was his mentor and his teacher at the Graduate School of Design. At Sert’s personal studio he worked on the Harvard Science Center and on the details of his new studio coming up. This was an ashram where modern meant ‘progress’. They believed that history was a continuous path of improvement and problem solving. All diseases would be vanquished; poverty would be eradicated, borders between countries would dissolve, and the world would become one fellowship. They were ‘thinker-doers’ charged by the urge to create a better world. Being an architect he studied economics under John Kenneth Galbraith and became Barbara Ward’s protégé, traveling with her to Greece to attend the Delos Symposium on Doxiadis’ yacht. There he came to know Edmund Bacon, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee and Buckminster Fuller. Gradually, Greece became a rest stop on his way between America and India. Sparoza, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s house in Attica, was his true retreat. And there he taught studios with Gerhard Kallmann, Jane Drew and Roger Montgomery. Dolf Schnebli became a friend. Fumihiko Maki became a lifelong mentor. During his many retreats at Gloucester Place in London, where Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry lived, he was exposed to their wide circle of philosophers, authors and artists. There were lunches with Freddie Ayer and Stephen Spender, evenings at the Albert and Victoria Museum and functions at the Architectural Association of which Jane was the President. He learned of Chandigarh, heard Jane’s stories of affairs between great people and heard first-hand stories of modern architecture in the making. When he was twenty-six years old he was promoted as a tenured Assistant Professor at Harvard, and became a Member of the Faculty Senate. That’s when his mentors cautioned him to move on or he would get too comfortable and settle down for lesser things. The Cambridge ashram was the center of the modernist gharana and had, as its gurus-in-residence, Gropius, Sert, Mirko Basaldella and many others.
- 15. Ahmedabad ashram In Ahmedabad, it was Doshi who inspired and encouraged him. He had been there on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1968-69 and thereafter returned to teach in the summers. Doshi called him back to start the School of Planning at CEPT in late 1971 and encouraged him to run his own architectural studio. There he got his first design commissions: the Alliance Française in Ahmedabad, Dr. Bhanuben Parekh’s House in Bhavnagar, low cost housing for hundreds of families in Jamnagar, and the SOS Children’s Village outside Delhi and another in Kolkata. In Ahmedabad for the first time he earned his own way and lived as a householder and teacher. The Ahmedabad ashram integrated the modernist movement of the West into a search for an ‘Indian tradition.’ Balkrishna Doshi, Hasmukh Patel and Anant Raje were his gurus. Mentors like Charles Correa, Achyut Kanvinde and Laurie Baker guided him. But in Ahmedabad he had to try being a Guru too. Doshi had asked him to start a School of Planning. He just said, “Do it! Pick up on your Harvard teaching experience and run!” The Ford Foundation supported their efforts through a grant of books, visiting professors and office equipment. Suddenly he had to write a curriculum, hire professors and scout all over India to find good students. He had to plan teaching schedules, make rules and try to bring a sense of order into natural chaos. The School of Planning was an important experiment. It drew students from architecture, engineering, social work, the liberal arts and technology, upsetting the accreditation committees of civil engineers, geographers and architects from New Delhi. Students and teachers lived in villages, rural towns and slums ‘learning from the people’ with whom they made plans for the future. They all worked in multidisciplinary teams, where teachers were students and students were teachers. His life in Cambridge, Massachusetts was in the ashram of truth, empiricism and progress. In Ahmedabad it was the ashram of devotion, social change and passionate service to community. ‘From each according to his abilities and to each according to his need’ was their battle cry. In Ahmedabad the word ‘modern’ meant transformation, not progress. They wanted to create a ‘new man’ and design a ‘new culture’, a revolution.
- 16. CDSA ashram An administrator, Vasant Bawa unexpectedly entered to catalyze a new ashram. He had taken Benninger’s advice on the new legislation creating the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority (HUDA) and wanted him to design the HUDA’s very first project. It was the new township for two thousand Class IV employees of the Government of Andhra Pradesh. Twelve labor unions had formed a housing federation and within their limited means they wanted shelter. Working closely with these people, they built a township of two thousand houses and amenities at Yousufguda near Hyderabad. The fees from this project translated into his opportunity to jump out of Doshi’s nest and fly. He wanted to start his own institute and this project provided the finances for that. Thus, the Centre for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA) in Pune was born. When Benninger shifted to Pune to start CDSA in 1976 he was thirty-three years old. This was his second institution and was a place of intellectual research and social action. The design of the new campus followed the lead of the Alliance Française in Ahmedabad. At the peak of CDSA’s ascendance more than eighty young professionals worked at offices in Pune, Bhutan, Goa, Almora in (then) Uttar Pradesh, and in Jaffna and Galle in Sri Lanka. They prepared town plans, slum improvement programs, village, district and regional plans. They pioneered micro-watershed planning, micro-level social services planning, decentralized planning and participatory planning. His twenty years at CDSA were spent inventing, enabling and facilitating programs, all to assist households to climb out of poverty. The new School of Planning at CDSA was founded on didactic techniques initiated in Ahmedabad. Students lived in slums and villages learning from those they would plan for. At CDSA ‘modern’ came to mean planned amelioration and facilitated change. It involved the civil society, NGOs, governments and people. Toward the end of his time at CDSA a commission to design the Mahindra United World College of India sparked his interest in architectural design again. It was this commission from Harish Mahindra that lit a flame in him to confine myself to the ashram of a simple studio, yet re-engage with society as a maker of artifacts. Thus, his academic life came to an end and he left his life as a teacher and householder, entering a more inward and meditative stage. At CDSA the ashram was both one of retreat and one of engagement; it was the place of thinker-doers who explored more relevant ways of doing things with optimism to change the world.
- 17. India House ashram According to Benninger perhaps India House is more of a real ashram than either CDSA or CEPT were. It is even more of a retreat than Harvard Yard, or the Endless Corridor at MIT. It is a self contained residence, guesthouse, art gallery, office, studio, and public space for cultural events. One can even swim in the lap pool and thus pass weeks without ever leaving its limited compound walls. This is his self made true forest retreat. At India House about fifty creative people work on a range of design and design management activities. Major new projects have been initiated here and older ones completed: the Capital City Plan of Bhutan; the Indian Institute of Management at Kolkata; the Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies near Mumbai; the YMCA Retreat at Nilshi; the Suzlon One Earth at Pune; works at the College of Engineering, Pune and many more. It is an ashram where young people gain their confidence and work from ‘tired to tired.’ It is his retreat into his secret world of ideas, sketches, design concepts and putting things into ‘buildable’ technology. It is a centre of art and architecture; a place of self discovery and transcendence. At India House he found the solace to write his book, Letters to A Young Architect. He found the peace to focus on a series of articles on urbanism published by the Times of India group. There is a team of devoted architects contributing to a fellowship of creativity. India House is a place of incessant creative activity. The clock never stops.
- 18. Establishment of CCBA The firm started as a small proprietorship design firm in 1995 by the Company Founder Chairman and Principal Architect Prof. Christopher Benninger along with Founder Managing Director Mr. Ramprasad Akkisetti. With the changing economic liberalization, and part of the expansion plan, Benninger Technical Services came into being in 1999 that eventually morphed into Christopher Charles Benninger Architects Private Limited (shortened to be addressed as CCBA) in 2000. CCBA is an Incorporated Company registered in 1999 under the Companies act 1956. Engineer Rahul Sathe joined the company in 1996 and is a share holder and a Director of the company managing issues regarding Finances, Contracts, Projects related issues. Architect Daraius Choksi joined the company in 1999, is a share holder and a Director of the company overseeing all aspects of architectural design studio of the company. Ar. Shivaji Karekar and Deepak Kaw are Senior Associates who have been with the design studio since 2001 and have successfully completed several award winning projects of the firm leading several architects on the process of design and drawings. Small teams mentored by senior architects, such as Noel Jerald V and Bhushan Pise, Gaurav Inamdar, Sundar Bommazee, Rahul Deshmukh develop projects in the studio. CCBA Designs Pvt. Ltd incorporated in 2016 under the companies act 2013 is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCBA Pvt. Ltd, shortened its name in 2016. CCBA also operated under the name Benninger Techtonics USA registered in Florida, USA briefly to operate its projects of overseas and United Nations. CCBA LOGO is inspired from the idea of yin and yang or the merger of the indoors and the outdoors. The idea generated from the Library building of the Mahindra United World College of India in Pune. The design of the building takes the outdoor garden inside the library making it a unique idea of bringing nature into the building. This has been a very important aspect and turning point in the design philosophy of CCBA, where there has always been a deliberate attempt to bring nature into the building.
- 19. Benninger’s architecture ● CCB’s Architecture has deep thoughts, which make him design the structure which blends with modernity and the context simultaneously. ● Benninger in all his designs has pinpointed into material use, nature care and blending with the context. This is what makes his type of architecture different from others. ● Aspiration to create something vernacularly unique has compelled Benninger to get into modernity with play of shapes and spaces. ● Simple, Functional, Modern, Vernacular would be some aspects to describe the buildings of Benninger. ● Another mention in his designs would be of Symmetry – His designs do have symmetrical forms and facades. Benninger’s works ● Internationally known as “design house” - Christopher Charles Benninger Architects, create products ranging from capital and new towns, educational campuses and corporate headquarters, housing, estates and complexes, hotels resorts and hospitals, down to the design of individual chairs and art works. ● He has initiated many projects like – housing for poor families financed first time by government of India under HUDCO and innovated concept of 'Site and Services' to provide houses via developed small plots for poor people to construct homes to their needs.
- 20. Benninger’s works Allaince Francaise , Ahmadabad CDSA, Pune Mahindra UWC , Maharashtra Samundra Institute, Lonavala Suzlon One Earth, Pune
- 21. Awards ● 2000 - Top 10 Best Buildings of the World | The Business Week Architectural Record Awards of American Institute of Architects, USA for Mahindra United World College of India ● 2001 - The Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Mahindra United World College of India as the top 20 best projects of the world. ● 2002 - The World Architecture Awards, Berlin for Mahindra United World College of India as a finalist. ● 2006 - Recognition for Excellence in Design, U.K. - Lifetime achievement award. ● 2006 - Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement by A+D and Spectrum Foundation ● 2006 - IIA Award 2006 for excellence in Architecture. ● 2010 - World Architecture Community, U.K. - Citation for Nabha House, Haryana Cultural Centre, New Delhi, India. ● 2011 - Holcim Sustainability Awards, Switzerland for Lifecare Multi-specialty Hospital, Udgir - Certificate of Appreciation.