A film on architect Balkrishna Doshi makes the legend come alive
Walking into a grove on the Centre of Environment Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad, an institute he designed and helped set up in 1962, architect Balkrishna V. Doshi looks into the camera and says, “This was a stretch of barren land and we planted a forest here.” Then he adds, as if he struck anew on this grassy verge by a revelation: “Architecture is a matter of transformation, of all odd situations into favourable conditions.”

It’s one of the many conversations that make up Doshi, a 74-minute film on one of the greatest contemporary architects of modern India. Premjit Ramachandran, a 34-year-old film-maker and graphic designer based in Bangalore, who directed, shot and edited it, does not tell a straight biographical story. Instead, through a series of interviews with Doshi, it allows us into the presence of a serious, subtle thinker as he makes connections with the practice of architecture and the philosophical rhythms of Indian life. “I realised that the only way to do justice to what we had shot is to base it around his philosophies on life, not architecture,” he says.

The film was conceived by Premjit’s brother Bijoy Ramachandran, 39, an architect in Bangalore, who wanted to “try and understand how Doshi achieved so much”. “Film is the perfect medium in which to capture architecture. It is also the best way to engage a person like Doshi. Having a conversation with him is to immediately understand his appeal,” says Bijoy.
There couldn’t have been a better subject for a film that teases out connections between architecture and social life, modernity and tradition. Doshi has been part of several defining moments of Indian architecture. In 1951, he was a young architect in his twenties when he walked into the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) to find it buzzing with one word: Chandigarh. He went on to join Le Corbusier’s team as it built a symbol of modernity for newly-independent India.

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