Lot 175: BALKRISHNA DOSHI

DESK FROM THE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL, LE CORBUSIER'S MILL OWNERS' ASSOCIATION BUILDING, AHMEDABAD

measurements note
28 5/8 x 98 x 44 1/2 in. (72.7 x 248.9 x 113 cm)

ca. 1955

with remnants of stencil

teak veneer

NOTE

In 1951, Bakrishna Doshi, a 24 year old aspiring Indian architect studying in England, attended the International Congress of Modern Architecture in Hoddeson in search of cutting edge modernism. As the only Indian there, he was besieged with questions about Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, conceived from scratch by Nehru after the Partition of India had ceded the former Punjabi capital city of Lahore to Pakistan. In an attempt to show the world that India was a "modern" nation, Nehru had hired Le Corbusier (among others) for the utopian project. At Hoddeson, Doshi met Le Corbusier, asked for, and was offered a job at the atelier on rue de Sèvres. Speaking no French, and receiving no pay for the first eight months, Doshi survived on a diet of bread and olives. For the next four years, he would work principally on several of the most important of Le Corbusier's Indian projects of the 1950s: the High Court, the (unbuilt) Governor's Palace in Chandigarh, the Shodhan and Sarabhai Villas and the Mill Owners' Association Building in Ahmedabad. Doshi was quickly designated by Le Corbusier to be the principal interlocutor between Paris and India. In 1955 Doshi returned to India to oversee the completion of Le Corbusier's projects there, and started his own firm. Around that time, he designed the desk offered here, closing the book on one of Le Corbusier's stormiest commissions -- and most poetic built works. Doshi went on to become one of the most important Indian architects of the postwar period. Along the way he was Lou Kahn's principal assistant in Ahmedabad for Kahn's magisterial Institute of Management.

The desk offered here clearly draws on the the work of Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret, scaled to match the palatial ambiance of the Mill Owners' Association. In 1955, Doshi was not yet at the stage in his career where he would build on the lessons of Western modernism and pursue a more overtly Indian vein. He needed to please the Mill Owners' Association, who wanted the Le Corbusier brand, as well as meet Le Corbursier's exacting standards for what he described as a "little palace... an architecture for modern times adjusted to the climate of India...a true message toward an Indian architecture." The result: magnificent modernist furniture of a piece with one of LeCorbusier's greatest built works, yet which would not be out of place in the St. Germain showrooms of Steph Simon.