5 Featured Architects from South Asia

# Five Architects Who Define South Asian Tropical Modernism *By TropMod Editorial* South Asian modernism was never a solo performance. Unlike Brazil, where Oscar Niemeyer's sculptural idiom became nearly synonymous with the nation's architectural identity, the subcontinent produced a constellation of figures — each operating from a different city, working with different materials, responding to different climatic and cultural conditions, yet united by a shared conviction that modern architecture could speak with a South Asian accent. The five architects profiled here represent three generations, three national traditions, and a spectrum of approaches that collectively define what tropical modernism means in a region that has been building climate-responsive cities for four thousand years. --- **Balkrishna Doshi (1927–2023)** Doshi's life reads like a syllabus of twentieth-century architecture. Born in Pune, he studied at the Sir J.J. School of Architecture in Mumbai before sailing to London in 1951. He arrived at Le Corbusier's atelier at 35 rue de Sèvres speaking almost no French, carrying a letter of introduction from an Indian patron. Corbusier hired him. For four years, Doshi worked on the Chandigarh projects and the Ahmedabad buildings, absorbing the master's method: the sketch that captures an idea in a single line, the model that tests spatial relationships, the insistence that architecture begins with the human body in space. Returning to India in 1955, Doshi established his practice in Ahmedabad and began the work that would earn him the Pritzker Prize in 2018 — the first Indian architect so honoured. His early buildings, such as the Institute of Indology (1962) and the Tagore Memorial Hall (1967), demonstrate a growing independence from Corbusian precedent. But it was the School of Architecture at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT, 1966–68) that announced Doshi's maturity: a building conceived as a pedagogical instrument, its north-facing studios open to prevailing breezes, its stepped sections creating informal gathering spaces, its exposed concrete and brick expressing what Doshi called "the naked truth of construction." The Sangath studio (1981) — Doshi's own office, half-buried in the Ahmedabad earth and covered with white china mosaic tiles — is his most personal work. The vaulted roofs rise from the ground like a buried city, their thermal mass keeping interiors cool without mechanical conditioning. Rainwater cascades from the vaults into channels that feed planted terraces. It is a building that treats climate not as an adversary to be defeated by technology but as a partner to be welcomed. Doshi's Aranya Low-Cost Housing in Indore (1989) extended his architectural philosophy to its most urgent application. Rather than designing completed houses, Doshi provided a framework — plots, plinths, service cores — that residents could extend incrementally. The project housed 80,000 people across its phases. Its spatial logic — narrow shaded streets, courtyards of varying scales, the careful calibration of public, semi-public, and private space — descends directly from the traditional Indian settlement pattern that Doshi had studied as a young man. That a Pritzker laureate should devote some of his best years to low-cost housing tells you everything about Doshi's sense of architecture's purpose. --- **Charles Correa (1930–2015)** If Doshi was the poet of Indian modernism, Charles Correa was its strategist. Trained at the University of Michigan and MIT, where he absorbed the planning theories of Kevin Lynch and the urban thinking of the CIAM tradition, Correa returned to India in 1958 with a conviction that the country's architectural challenges were spatial before they were stylistic. India's climate, its density, its cultural codes — the courtyard, the threshold, the ritual use of open space — demanded an architecture that could not be found in the European canon. Correa's breakthrough came with the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya (1958–63) at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. The museum is organised as a village of modular pavilions — brick piers, tiled roofs, open courts — through which visitors move sequentially, the spaces between buildings as important as the buildings themselves. It is modernism at its most indigenous: the pavilion form comes from the Gujarati *pol* house, the spatial sequence from the ashram tradition, the material palette — brick, tile, timber, stone — from the immediate locality. The Kanchanjunga Apartments in Mumbai (1970–83) are Correa's most influential building. At 28 storeys, it is a tower typology that seems inherently hostile to tropical living. Correa's solution was to stack the units as interlocking two-storey duplexes, each with a double-height garden terrace — a vertical reinterpretation of the bungalow verandah. The corner wind scoops channel the prevailing southwesterly monsoon breezes through the apartments, while the deep-set terraces provide shading and outdoor living space high above the Arabian Sea. It is a building that proves that density and climate-responsiveness are not mutually exclusive. Correa's civic work — the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur (1986–92), the Vidhan Bhavan in Bhopal (1980–96), the British Council in Delhi (1992) — deploys the *navagraha* (the nine-planet cosmic diagram), the Mughal garden, and the Buddhist stupa as organising devices, embedding ancient spatial concepts within rigorously modern plans. Correa's architecture consistently argues that tradition is not a style to be simulated but a spatial intelligence to be understood and deployed. --- **Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003)** The broad strokes of Bawa's biography — Cambridge English literature, Inner Temple law, the late conversion to architecture at the AA, the return to Ceylon and four decades of building — have been recounted often. Less discussed is the radical nature of what Bawa achieved: an architecture that dissolved the boundary between building and landscape so completely that it is often impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Bawa's early work was unremarkable. The real breakthrough came with the Ena de Silva House in Colombo (1962), his first mature work. The house is organised as a sequence of courtyards — arrival court, living court, dining court, sleeping court — around which rooms are arranged without corridors. Circulation happens through the open air. Light and breeze are the primary materials. The roof — a terracotta-tiled pitched form that floats above the walls on slender columns, permitting air to move through the gap — is a device Bawa would refine over the next four decades. The Parliament at Kotte (1982) represented Bawa working at national scale. Set on an artificial island in a flooded former paddy field, the complex of copper-roofed pavilions rises from the water like a photograph of an ancient Sinhalese capital. The interior is organised around a series of courtyards and water courts; legislators move between chambers through open-air ambulatories. It is a government building that is at once monumental and intimate, its scale broken into comprehensible parts that defer to the landscape rather than dominating it. Bawa's Kandalama Hotel (1994) is the definitive statement of his mature philosophy. The building is cut into the flank of a jungle hillside overlooking a reservoir; from the approach, it is nearly invisible, its green roof merging with the forest canopy. The 160-metre-long corridor that connects its rooms is open on one side to the full drama of the tropical landscape — the flicker of butterflies, the shriek of monkeys, the sudden descent of monsoon rain. Kandalama was an eco-resort two decades before the category existed. It remains one of the most radical propositions in twentieth-century hotel design: a building that treats its own disappearance as an aesthetic and ethical achievement. Bawa's true innovation was not formal but methodological. He designed by walking the site, often for months, observing the light at different hours, the path of the breeze, the way water moved through the land in the monsoon. His buildings grew from the ground up, shaped by forces that were not architectural in the conventional sense. The result is an architecture that feels inevitable — as though the building had always been there, waiting to be discovered. --- **Marina Tabassum (born 1968)** Marina Tabassum represents a generational shift in South Asian architecture — one that brings climate urgency, material research, and a quiet but unshakeable ethical grounding to the discipline. Born in Dhaka and trained at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, she founded her practice in 2005 after dissolving a partnership with Kashef Chowdhury. Her work since has been a sustained argument for architecture as an instrument of care. The Bait Ur Rouf Mosque (2012) in northern Dhaka made Tabassum's international reputation, and deservedly so. Built on a modest budget on land donated by her grandmother, it is a brick cube without minaret or dome — a deliberate stripping-away of mosque typology to its spatial essentials. The prayer hall is lit by a single slit in the ceiling that rotates light around the space as the sun moves, transforming the room into a sundial. The walls are load-bearing brick, pierced at carefully judged points by *jaali* openings that admit light in shifting patterns while ventilating the interior. It is a building of such spatial and material intelligence that it has become, in barely a decade, canonical. The project that defines Tabassum's current practice is the Khudi Bari (Small House), developed for communities displaced by the annual flooding of the Bengal Delta. The houses are flat-pack structures — bamboo frames on steel connector nodes — that can be assembled in four hours by four people and disassembled and moved when the water rises. Each unit costs approximately £300. They are elevated on stilts to stay above flood levels, ventilated through perforated wall panels, and roofed with corrugated metal. The Khudi Bari is not architecture as monument; it is architecture as survival mechanism, a direct extension of Tabassum's conviction that the discipline's highest calling is to serve those most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Tabassum's broader practice encompasses private houses, institutional buildings, and ongoing research into Bengal Delta settlement patterns. Her Independence Monument of Bangladesh (2020) and the Panigram Eco-Resort in Jessore deploy the brick *jaali*, the courtyard, and the water-responsive plinth with a formal restraint that places her in the lineage of Muzharul Islam while pushing that lineage toward greater material economy and structural innovation. Her 2023 Aga Khan Award, her inclusion in the 2024 TIME100, and her appointment as a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design confirm what has been evident for some time: that Tabassum is not merely Bangladesh's most significant architect but one of the most consequential architectural thinkers working anywhere in the tropics today. --- **Palinda Kannangara (born 1975)** The choice of an emerging voice from South Asia inevitably involves a degree of editorial judgement. Among Sri Lanka's post-Bawa generation, several figures — Channa Daswatte, Thisara Thanapathy, Nela de Zoysa — have produced work of sustained quality. But Palinda Kannangara, operating predominantly from his small Colombo studio, has developed an architectural language of such tectonic clarity and site sensitivity that he deserves recognition beyond the island. Kannangara trained at the University of Moratuwa and worked briefly with Geoffrey Bawa before establishing his independent practice — a biographical echo that could have been paralysing. Instead, Kannangara has done something difficult: he has internalised Bawa's lessons about site, climate, and spatial sequence without imitating Bawa's forms. His buildings are more tectonic, more structurally expressed, more materially severe than Bawa's luxuriant tropical compositions. The Savithru Residence (2012) in Colombo is Kannangara's most fully realised work to date. The house is a composition of brick, concrete, and timber organised around a central water court — a courtyard of shallow reflecting pools that cools the air before it enters the living spaces. The roof is a floating concrete plane separated from the walls by a continuous clerestory — a gap that admits light and releases hot air, a device Bawa used but which Kannangara deploys with greater structural articulation. The house is at once utterly contemporary and resonant with the spatial traditions of the South Asian courtyard dwelling. Kannangara's Dambulla House (2018), near the Kandalama reservoir in Sri Lanka's cultural triangle, confronts the problem of building within sight of one of Bawa's masterpieces. His solution is a composition of three pavilions — sleeping, living, bathing — arranged around a mango tree, their roofs pitched and tiled in a deliberate reference to the region's vernacular granaries. The walls are rubble stone gathered from the site; the columns are slender steel sections. It is a building of monkish restraint that nonetheless achieves the quality Bawa valued above all others: the sense that the building has always been there. Kannangara's current work — a tea-country bungalow extension in Hatton and an eco-retreat on the Kalpitiya peninsula — suggests an architect entering his mature phase with confidence and clarity. He represents, along with Thanapathy and a handful of other younger Sri Lankan practitioners, the emergence of a critical regionalism that treats Bawa not as a style to be replicated but as a method to be extended. In a region where architectural legacy can easily become architectural burden, that is no small achievement. --- These five architects do not constitute a school. They share no common formal language, no unified theoretical position. What they share is a conviction that architecture in South Asia must begin with the specific conditions of the place — its climate, its materials, its spatial traditions, its social urgencies — and that modernism, properly understood, is not a style imported from elsewhere but a method for thinking clearly about building in the world as it actually exists. Between Doshi's subterranean vaults, Correa's open-to-sky towers, Bawa's dissolving landscapes, Tabassum's flood-responsive modules, and Kannangara's monkish pavilions, they have demonstrated that tropical modernism remains one of the most vital architectural traditions at work anywhere, with the capacity to address the most pressing questions of the coming century: how to build with climate, not against it, and how to make architecture that serves not the few but the many.