The Architecture of Hasmukh C. Patel by Catherine Desai and Bimal Patel

Catherine Desai and Bimal Patel

Mapin Publishers (Buy)

19th November 2016

India House Art Gallery (Map)

7:30 pm

Introduction

Hasmukh Patel’s architectural practice spanned the transformative latter decades of the 20th century, navigating the political and economic changes of his time and bringing his talents to bear equally on institutional, private and speculative development projects. He recognised that with every commission came opportunities to further architecture’s formal, civic and social agendas.
Each of his projects is a built manifesto, an exploration of how architecture might enrich the lives of India’s modernising citizens. His buildings belong to a deep
tradition of 20th-century modernist thinking, where the legibility of the architectural diagram is a primary concern. Included here are 51 of his buildings, many documented for the first time. This book is both a tribute to Hasmukh Patel and a gathering of a canon of works to inspire and inform the next generation.
With contributions by Catherine Desai, Bimal Patel, Christopher Benninger, Ismet Khambatta, Bobby Desai, Arindam Dutta and Rahul Mehrotra.
Catherine Desai is an architect and graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Her knowledge of modern Indian buildings encompasses both well known and obscure work and she is an advocate for the preservation of India’s modern architectural heritage.
Bimal Patel is an architect, urban planner and academic, with numerous award-winning projects to his credit. He is President of CEPT University, and heads HCP Design, Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd.

Hasmukh Patel is an Indian architect and urban planner, known among prominent Indian architects in the post-independence era along with Charles Correa, B.V. Doshi and others. He is also the founder of the Ahmedabad based architecture firm HCPDM that is now headed by his son and the president of CEPT, Bimal Patel. Patel was also a key figure in reviving interest and mobilizing support for the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in 1970s and for constituting RFDG (Riverfront Development Group) that consisted of local private architecture businesses.Hasmukh C. Patel was at the forefront of Indian architecture, having designed iconic buildings of many types: private bungalows, theaters, speculative office buildings, banks, schools, religious buildings, factories and many others. He invented a contextually relevant, modern architectural idiom suitable for India, and combined this with an intuitive ability to make beautiful spaces. His work has helped define modern architecture in India, and here, for the first time, are reproduced lavish visual aids and extensive original research to understand his work.

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