Last updated on September 9th, 2024 at 05:31 pm
Giving birth to a new creative form requires starting from scratch. Moreover, in the Europe of the 1920s, German educator, architect, and visionary Walter Gropius did so with the pedagogical approach he pioneered at the Staatliches Bauhaus, a new school of design established in 1919. The highly decorative Art Nouveau wrought-iron fences, smiling cherubs on the ceilings, and exquisite stairways of the wealthy were rendered uncool and un-aspirational for the general public due to its efforts. The modern style favoured bright and airy concrete flat-roofed homes decorated in cool greys and whites. Bauhaus also emphasised the interconnectedness of several artistic practices, including but not limited to painting, industrial design, typography, and architecture.
Neither engineering nor construction. Gropius once said, “Where engineering ends, architecture begins,” and he was right. In a nutshell, Gropius’s attempt to unify all forms of artistic expression under the banner of the Bauhaus is known by that term.
The Bauhaus professors believed that the fate of a home was predetermined by its occupants and their activities. Masters of the European expressionist movement, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, taught at the influential Bauhaus school. Workers and public housing were also significant concerns. Indian architects who had studied in the United States and been exposed to International Modernism and the teachings of Bauhaus masters like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were a major source of Bauhaus’s impact in India. Works by Harvard’s Achyut Kanvinde (whom Walter Gropius taught) and MIT’s Habib Rahman (whom Gropius mentored) are particularly illustrative of the Bauhaus concepts.
Based on the Bauhaus ideals, Kanvinde designed and constructed at least a thousand structures, including the Nehru Science Centre in Mumbai and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Delhi. Lakhs of Rahman’s Bauhaus-inspired homes have been built across India, and he has completed another 150 buildings, including the Rabindra Bhawan, home of the three National Academies, the Calcutta Secretariat, and the University Grants Commission of India in Delhi.
The Mehsana Dairy, Ahmedabad
Kanvinde and Rahman are responsible for introducing the Bauhaus style of design to India. In addition, “architectural modernism” was introduced to India’s mainstream and public institutions by them “before Corbusier,” as the late architect’s son, Sanjay Kanvinde, put it. Gandhi Ghat was constructed by Rahman in 1949; Kanvinde constructed his first Bauhaus structure the following year; and the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association was established in 1950. The majority of Corbusier’s master plan for Chandigarh was built in the 1960s.
After completing over eighty projects in Bengal, including an engineering college, police housing, and India’s first steel-framed skyscraper, the secretariat, Rahaman moved to Delhi in 1953.
While in the United States on a government scholarship, Rahman shifted his focus from mechanical engineering to architecture. He was the official government architect and his work can be seen all throughout India, including the General Post Office in Delhi and the Auditor General’s offices in Madras and Bombay.
In his time at Harvard’s School of Design, where he studied under Gropius, architect Achyut Kanvinde assimilated the Bauhaus method of approaching design and found no need to deviate from it. While Rahman included a thin jaali (stone or latticed screen) into his otherwise modernist edifice in Delhi for the mausoleum of Maulana Azad, India’s first education minister, Kanvinde was always reticent to incorporate any ‘Indian aspects’ into his own constructions.
However, Kanvinde periodically ran with a powerful lobby opposing the simple adoption of the International Style, as Bauhaus was known in the nations that accepted it when working on government commissions. Even though it went against his better judgement, he had to incorporate domes, chhatris and jaalis into the design of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) building in Delhi.
After 100 years of the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta, it could be seen that Bauhaus in the Indian architectural landscape did not achieve that popularity other than in government infrastructures. However, that is a known fate for many international art movements in this country.
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