CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/14/2020

'Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People' is on view at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago

These 2018 Iwan Baan photographs of Amdavad Ni Gufa exhibition space, built for renowned Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain in 1994 in Ahmedabad, are reproduced from Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People, the most comprehensive monograph ever published on Doshi, winner of the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize. It accompanies the newly opened exhibition of Doshi's work at the Chicago architecture exhibition space, Wrightwood 659. Exquisitely designed, this 400-page clothbound hardcover from Vitra Design Museum features 450 color and black-and-white images printed on two different uncoated papers. Newly commissioned photo essays are mixed in with copious, well-edited archival materials, while an assortment of scholarly essays and an interview of the architect by Hans Ulrich Obrist are framed by an illustrated biography and writings by Doshi himself. In a text about Amdavad Ni Gufa, Doshi describes an event that took place when the building was consecrated. "The tribals who had worked to construct it were so deeply affected by the technique of construction, the forms of the building, and the way changes could be made naturally, that they felt they were living their own ancient ritual of Pithora Bava (a form of ritual painting). So what they did was to perform a dance following a puja (prayer ritual) and the sprinkling of sacred colors. These nocturnal rituals lasted for nine days. But on the first day, after hearing the chant of Sheshanaga (the thousand-headed cobra that is Lord Vishnu's resting place), Husain suddenly stood up and, holding a long brush, climbed up on the domes, where he feverishly painted a cobra connecting the two large rotundas. He then asked me to get this cobra glazed in black mosaic. On the ninth day, the tribals declared that prana, the breath of life from Pithora Bava, had now entered the Gufa. The Gufa has now become a place celebrating the first ever collaborative acts of painting and architecture."