Letters To A Young Architect

by Christopher Benninger

  As I read other books by Wright I learned that there are gurus whose wisdom helps to navigate the ocean of facts and knowledge, and they could guide me on a meaningful path in life’s journey. This inspired me both figuratively and literally to be an adventurer of the spirit and a traveler of the mind. It catalyzed me to search out wise men and women who could pass on to me their understanding of the meaning of life. To find these people I had to wander and explore, stumbling serendipitously across wonderful people. As I traveled, I learned that there are ‘schools of thought’ that live on over decades and even centuries, with their spirit passing from teachers to their students, who then become teachers. Like a flame from one candle lighting another in a row, one guru passes away, but the flame of his spirit – his vision – passes on. In Indian music these schools are called gharanas and through gurus like Balkrishna Doshi I came to know that such traditions exist in architecture also.

  Travels and Discoveries

  My physical travels took me on a bicycle from Boston to Montreal through undulating green mountains; from Berkeley to Los Angeles down the San Joaquin Valley, through the Santa Lucia Range, past San Simeon through Cambria to the Mojave Desert on to Los Angeles; from Paris to Athens through the Vosges Mountains and two thousand kilometers across Europe through Tito’s Yugoslavia. By boat I traveled around the Aegean Sea, the Baltic and the shores of Florida. As a youth I went to South America, crisscrossed North America and explored Europe. As a young man I visited Russia, Japan, Southeast Asia and in 1971 made an epic overland journey from London to Mumbai.

  With no plan, program, or knowledge of the means of travel, I set off from Victoria Station by train, crossing the English Channel by boat. I rested at Dolf Schnebli’s house in Switzerland and at Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s in Greece. In Turkey I entered a new society, a new religion, a new culture and an ancient civilization. The cuisine, the dress and the people were all new to me. As I traveled east, vast arid lands and immense mountains greeted me. A harsher territory dared me to enter. The rail line came to an end at Erzurum, and one could only thumb a ride on a mini-bus to the Iranian border. Along the way I met people who shared happy and sad stories, echoing their love of life. In Turkey I met a young engineering student, Prem Chand Jain, headed from Germany to Delhi, carrying a television set as his luggage. We became traveling companions on to Delhi. We met hippies and back-packers, unshaven and dirty.

  In Tehran we found an oasis of modernity, urbanity and bustling streets; then on to Mashhad, where boys at the city mosque threw pebbles at Western girls in shorts. “Serves you right!” I said to them. I travelled by mini-bus across the border, into the mud city of Herat, where I slept in a walled serai garden on a platform under a vast sky. A simple meal and a good massage under the shining stars put me to sleep. Several days by buses, like desert schooners floating over the arid sands, got me to Kandahar and Kabul. The bazaar was exotic and complex. The people were affectionate, full of laughter and bound by brotherhood. That is now an antique land that lives only in my memories. Harsh new realities and wars have destroyed its past. Coming down the Khyber Pass I discovered the Indian subcontinent. The people, the greenery, the increasing humidity, and the smell of rotis roasted on coal fires were all sub-continental!

  All along my journey I made friends. Our physical destinations were common, but our life’s searches were not. One could tag along with a local traveler, from whom one learnt the ropes of each segment of the journey and the segments overlapped. The flame passed from one candle to the next. One never knew with whom one would be on the next day, or where one would be going.

  I think life is like that, based in people sharing joys and sorrows, seeking the meaning of where we are and where we are going. The photographer Cartier-Bresson, a great traveler, once said, “To be a great photographer one only needs one eye, one finger and two legs!” While he chronicled the meaning of life through his lens, I knew I would have to capture the essence of life in brick and mortar. But before I started putting lines to paper, I wanted to see what the masters had done across the world and through the ages, creating my present, in order that I could contemplate the future. For that I would need to move; I would have to travel on two legs, meeting people along the way, enriching one another’s lives listening, telling stories and sharing the small belongings we carried with us on life’s journey.

  As a boy traveling in America, I would pick up the phone in New Canaan and call Philip Johnson, and he’d say, “Come over tomorrow!” In Los Angeles Charles and Ray Eames said, “Come see our house and then we’ll go to see a new film we’ve made.” In Phoenix Paolo Soleri said, “Come see my bells.” In Miami Buckminster Fuller said, “Come have coffee at my hotel,” and lectured me till three in the morning. And all along the way I was meeting people and listening to them: Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo; Otto Koenigsberger, Barbara Ward, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry in London; Shadrach Woods and Yona Friedman in Paris; Dolf Schnebli in Switzerland, and Jackie Tyrwhitt, Panayis Psomopolous and Constantinos Doxiadis in Greece.

  I particularly remember a Sunday afternoon with Louis Kahn and Anant Raje in Philadelphia. It was springtime in 1970. We listened and Kahn lectured the two of us for several hours. At one point he crushed a sheet of plain typing paper into a tight ball, tossed it on the table, and asked me to sketch it. As I struggled, he laughed. Then he drew four lines making the original simple flat sheet. We all laughed. Behind every conundrum lies the joke of life.

  In India I met Achyut Kanvinde, Habib Rahman, Balkrishna Doshi, Charles Correa, Kamal Mangaldas, Hasmukh Patel, Mrinaliniben and Vikram Sarabhai, Anuradhaben and Sanat Mehta all within the first month of my arrival in 1968. Those were heady days full of discovery, hope, dreams and sharing.

  Just as I marveled at the character of mountainous landscapes and great rivers, I tried to grasp people’s unique characters, their great spirits and their world views. I never bothered much about what they said of facts and figures. That I could learn on my own. I was interested in comprehending how they looked at ideas and what they felt about life. I wanted to understand their subtle mental organization of things and their nuanced reactions to the world. How did they extract poetry from the banal? How did they filter the profound from the mundane? How did these subjective traits temper their designs for the future? Deep down, each of them was asking, “What is the meaning of the universe? Why am I here? Are my actions directed towards a mission or a purpose?” All of these people emitted positive energy and were humanists. Many of them are no more. And there were hundreds of unnamed wise people I met along the way who shared their lives with me, and from whom I imbibed the nourishment of life’s truths. I had to absorb their wisdom; I had to inculcate their spirit and to digest all the subtle knowledge that I could absorb. This was my search and the catalyst of my life’s journey. This was the stimulant of my imagination.

  Wisdom and Enlightenment

  In retrospect I see that it is only through emotions, through subjective twists in things, through the poetry of life and through the love of people that profundity emerges. We can formulate ideas and concepts and nurture attitudes and ‘constructs’, but without a welling up of emotions these are merely dull academia. Truth dwells in the emotions of the heart. That is where poetry originates.

  Behind every conundrum lies the joke of life.

  Yes, we have to draw, measure and make buildings and create a civilization, but with what elemental material do we do this? It is from the emotive energy of the people we meet – their positive energy – that we gain the wisdom and the power to do things. Methods and techniques can be sub-contracted, but without passion and care there can never be anything really new. I think this is how I came to love the arts. This is how I came to love poetry and architecture. This love and passion is my legacy. It is our legacy.

  So I realized that I did not travel to document or to photograph; nor did I read to learn facts and figures. I did all
of these things to discover a larger emotive aura around myself and within me; to gather into myself sharper feelings about the nature of the universe, to seek fundamental answers to life: Who am I? Why am I here? Why do I build? For whom do I create? What is the meaning of the universe? Can one ever have a lien on eternity?

  The Good Life

  In the end there is something called ‘the good life,’ which underpins everything. I do not mean wealth, fame or conspicuous consumption. I do not mean that one has to drink the best Scotch, eat the best cuts, or know the names of the most famous wines. Yes, one should freely enjoy things to know what life is all about! But there has to be a balance.

  One should eat well, but not become obese; one should drink good wine, but not become a drunkard; one should discuss ideas, but not argue incessantly; and one should be a good lover, but not let it envelop one’s entire being. There is a kind of art in life and a measure in how one does things. Maybe one should be open to experiment just to know them, but then retreat to a middle path between boredom and hyper-excitement? That is where the good life lies, in the in-between zone. It is just a step outside of materiality and it is the essence of our work to find that realm and to recreate it for others. The Greeks called this optimality the Golden Mean, manifested by balance, proportion, harmony and scale.

  Truth dwells in the emotions of the heart. That is where poetry originates.

  While Wright gave me a legacy of Truth, my travels in Asia taught me about the search for ‘the Good.’ I have often said it is better to know the Good than to search for Truth. The Good is lived; it is walked on under the clouds; it is smelled in gardens; it is there in bed at night and in our arms in the morning. The Good is known through smiles and laughter. The Truth can be sought in books, on the internet and gleaned from journals. It lies waiting in our study bookshelves; it is debated over by politicians, clerics and academics. They are all wondering and seeming; they are often pretending, while we are experiencing and being.

  ‘Be, not SEEM’, could be a simple way of expressing our legacy, because we will never really 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.

  The Ashram of the Student: The Life of a Brahmachari

  As I have already mentioned, my interest in architecture was ignited by Wright. Through Wright the windows opened onto Mies van der Rohe, and from there to the entire European school. Great buildings were emerging all around me: Lever House; Dulles International Airport; the TWA terminal; La Tourette, Ronchamp and the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles; Baker House at MIT; the Carpenter Center at Harvard; the United Nations Building; the Ford Foundation Building; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Yale School of Architecture; Marin County Civic Center and many others.

  Le Corbusier was building Chandigarh, Paolo Soleri was building Arcosanti, and Wright’s Taliesin West was my Mecca. Houses by Wright, Oscar Niemeyer, Charles and Ray Eames, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty, Harry C. Merritt and Paul Rudolph all amazed me. In those days it was actual constructed art that inspired us. Now it is what people say and write about architecture that intrigues us. Today, without a theory to explain them, the queer shapes have no meaning. After reading and re-reading, and visiting construction sites, I got a chance to study real architecture. My father was a professor at the University of Florida where there was a large school of architecture. There were two hundred and thirty students in the first lecture series by Professor Blaire Reeves and only sixteen students graduated from that batch. Survival was a struggle. The campus was a vast spread of lawns, trees and ivy-clad brick structures dating from the mid-nineteenth century. We studied architecture in Grove Hall, a temporary wooden barrack put up in the Second World War for officers’ training. There was a pond next to it where alligators lived. Nature and new ideas surrounded us.

  The amazing thing was that we had a core group of great teachers. Blair Reeves, Robert Tucker, Turpin C. Bannister, Norman Jensen and Harry Merritt grabbed our attention. They challenged us with ideas and puzzles. They opened windows on ideas, concepts and issues, creating competition between us youngsters while we studied. Tucker started an evening discussion group of motivated students from all the classes. Hiram Williams, the painter, Jerry Uelsmann the famous photographer and many others hosted us for dinner symposia. We worked, slept and ate in Grove Hall. Blair Reeves and his gracious wife were caring guides, opening our eyes to all aspects of modern art and design, walking the talk in their garden home; Robert Tucker was the Socrates. He was our philosopher and the teacher always posing questions. Norman Jensen, the painter, changed my perspective, asking me if I were a bird and admonishing me to sketch from eye level only. Harry Merritt was the embodiment of a ‘great man.’ He was a builder-teacher of great talent and confidence, and we learned through his beautiful works of construction, his studios and his discussions. It was Professor Merritt who guided me to leave the small university town of Gainesville and to attend Harvard. He pushed me off the edge of a cliff, seeing if I could free-fall, open my wings and fly. He pushed and I flew!

  In Cambridge I studied urban planning at MIT and architecture at Harvard, where I later taught. I also worked in Jose Lluís Sert’s studio. He was my mentor and my teacher at the Graduate School of Design. That was a time when we had only twelve students left in the Master’s Class, after the four or five poor performers were asked to leave in the first month of studies. Times were hard. Sert was a ‘no-funny-business’, down-to-earth rationalist who loved life, and the people around him. But he wasted no love on laggards; out they would go. He found humor in our immaturity and exposed the ‘joke of life’ in letting us know our follies. From his chuckles we learned to think. I lived in Perkins Hall for a year and then shifted to Irving Street, into a large wooden house built by William James. They say he was the inventor of behavioral sciences. Julia Child lived two doors down the street across from E. E. Cummings and Elliot Norton.

  The campus motto VERITAS, or ‘Truth’, was the object of our search then. Harvard and MIT were steeped in the empiricist school of thought, where “what is true is only that which can be seen to be true.” Cambridge was also a bastion of the European way of thinking and doing things. While Wright employed natural materials, integrating buildings into the landscape, Le Corbusier and Gropius poised their buildings off the ground on crystalline white pillars. Civilization for them seemed to float above nature. Europe worshipped sky gods, abstractions and ideas. Americans loved nature, wildlife and the turn of seasons. Gropius, though retired, would visit our studios and pose questions. Jerzy Soltan, who developed Le Modulor for Le Corbusier, pushed us to ‘be better than the best’. Joseph Zalewski, who survived the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, and worked at 35 Rue de Sèvres, would often just stare at a drawing and mutter, rien (‘nothing’ in French). Albert Szabo, a deep thinking Hungarian, treated us like his own sons.

  At MIT, Kevin
Lynch awakened our understanding of cities and urban experiences, while with Herbert Gans we explored the social ecology of cities and how people used them.

  At Sert’s personal studio on Church Street, I worked on the Harvard Science Center and on the details of his new studio coming up on Brattle Street. These were very much ‘to the point,’ rationalist buildings that inspire me even today. The word Brahmachari hardly describes the personal lives of young scholars living along the Charles River! But it surely reflects an innocence, a persistent quest for the truth, and working from ‘tired to tired’ to reach perfection. This was an ashram where modern meant ‘progress’. We sincerely 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. We were ‘thinker-doers’ charged by the urge to create a better world.

  Even though I was an architect I 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 a few of us lucky youngsters came to know Edmund Bacon, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee and Buckminster Fuller. Later, over the years, Greece became a rest stop on my way between America and India. Sparoza, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s house in Attica, was my true retreat. Panayis Psomopoulos became a life-long ‘elder brother’ sharing stories, good wine and long nights in the cafes of Kolonaki Square. After summers in Europe I would return to Cambridge, where the green leaves were turning bright red, yellow and orange. And at my true ashram I taught studios with Gerhard Kallmann, Jane Drew and Roger Montgomery. Dolf Schnebli became a friend. Fumihiko Maki became a lifelong mentor. During my many retreats at Gloucester Place in London, where Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry lived, I 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. I learned of Chandigarh, heard Jane’s stories of love affairs between great people and heard first-hand stories of modern architecture in the making.