90-year-old Balkrishna Doshi becomes 1st Indian to win prestigious architecture award

NewsBharati 08-Mar-2018

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Madrid, March 8: Balkrishna Doshi has become the first Indian ever to win the coveted architecture award Pritzker Prize for being able to interpret architecture and transform it into buildings that respect Eastern culture. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has congratulated Doshi on winning the prize.

Considered as a pioneer with a 70-year long career on his back, Doshi is famously known for designing Ahmedabad's Tagore Memorial Hall and the Aranya Low Cost Housing development, a collection of more than 6,500 residences in Indore.

Doshi began studying architecture in 1947, the year India gained Independence, at Mumbai's famous Sir JJ School of Architecture. Working under Le Corbusier, he returned to India in 1954 and worked on the Modernist guru's projects in the cities of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad.

Doshi also collaborated with Louis Kahn, another of the 20th century's Modernist giants.

The Pritzker Prize is regarded as architecture's equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The Prize is awarded annually to honor a living architect or architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

Pritzker Prize Balkrishna Doshi architecture award PM Modi Architecture