Joseph Allen Stein 555u6

Joseph Allen Stein

Joseph Allen Stein began his career in India, at age 40, as the first Head of the Department of Architecture at Bengal Engineering College, Howrah with a sense of purpose. He undertook research with students in developing prototypes for urban and rural housing demonstrated at the International Exhibition of Low-Cost Housing in New Delhi in 1954. His township development in association with architect Benjamin Polk and engineer Benoy Chatterjee for government housing in West Bengal and Orissa and for TISCO in Bihar, were an attempt to balance Nehru’s ideal of an industrialized, modern India by providing workers with dignified housing.

Stein created an oasis in Delhi where he shifted in 1955 to start practice, emphasizing the importance of tangible harmony of buildings in nature. He brought grace in modern architecture by the settings of nature in which he created them. The series of major works for cultural, humanitarian, and environmental institutions Stein designed in New Delhi maintain his continual striving towards a humble, refined form in a garden setting, enriched materially by the adaptation of the traditional north Indian jali and the inclusion of local building stone. Stein was one of the first architects working in India after independence to use traditional elements in a modern building. His development of the jali and several other shading devices dramatically filter light and create a quality of repose in the spaces they shade from the fierce north Indian sun. Each of his projects in and around Delhi were conceived of in order to offer relief from the intense climate and created a new urban grammar of form making. He integrated buildings with the idea of vertical gardens - a prototype for bringing living beauty to crowded urban settings.

Stein along with structural engineer Vishnu Joshi explored a variety of shell forms, significant for their purity of form and inventive conservation of materials, as modestly scaled structures integrated with the landscape.

Stein’s partnership with Doshi and long time associate Jai Ratan Bhalla began in 1977, their designs maintaining several points in common- a modest, harmonious sense of proportion; an ongoing interest in the vault as a structural and architectural form; and an integration of man-made constructions with their surroundings. Stein personally focused on two environments for design he felt to be vital to the earth itself and our human future- the regional environment of Central Asia’s Himalaya mountain range threatened by deforestation and cultural disintegration, and a more conceptual landscape he called ‘metapolis’... “The entire earth, or at least its fertile portions, could be a garden of paradise, with intensive agriculture in the irrigated lowlands, protected wilderness in the highlands and wellengineered, pleasant new towns sheltering both industrial and agricultural workers on the less fertile lower slopes. In case of India, much of the country has an ideal geomorphological structure for realizing such a pattern of total landscape, in

which there would be room for all, including the creatures of the wilderness...”

PROJECTS:

Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling, 1953 Urban and Rural Prototypes, New Delhi, 1954 Institute of Child Health, Calcutta, 1955 Durgapur Steel Township, West Bengal, 1955-59 Rourkela Steel Township, Orissa, 1955-59 Tata Iron and Steel Township, Jamshedpur, 1955-59 The Australian High Commission, New Delhi, 1958 Triveni Kala Sangam Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, 1957, 1977 Gandhi Bhavan, Delhi, 1958 YWCA Guest House, New Delhi, 1959 Industrial Buildings for Escorts Ltd., Faridabad, 1960 American International School, New Delhi, 1962 India International Centre, New Delhi, 1962 Kennedy General Education Centre, AMU, Aligarh, 1966 Home Science College, Ludhiana, 1966 Headquarters for Ford Foundation, New Delhi, 1968 Master Plan for Lodi Park, New Delhi, 1968 Indian Express Tower, Bombay, 1968 Ethiopian Embassy, New Delhi, 1970 Memorial Plaza, New Delhi, 1970

Master Plan for Dal Lake Area, Kashmir Valley, 1970 Conservatory/Greenhouse, New Delhi, 1971 Master Plan for the Gulmarg-Tanmarg Area, Kashmir Valley, 1972 Child Development Centre, New Delhi, 1976 Environmental and Development Planning for Bhutan, 1970-80 Royal Guest House, Thimpu, Bhutan, 1977 Headquarters for UNICEF, New Delhi, 1981 Factory for Gujarat Steel Tubes, Ahmedabad, 1982 Kashmir Conference Centre, Jammu & Kashmir, 1977-84 Bankers Institute for Rural Development, Lucknow, 1985 Confederation of Engineering Industry, New Delhi, 1987 National Trade Centre and Exhibition Building, New Delhi, 1988 India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 1988 Headquarters of World Wild Life Fund for Nature-India, New Delhi, 1990 Academy of Rural Banking, Lucknow, 1990

“Architecture has long been known to be more than technique, and that more is usually the effort to express the imponderable... As the population of the world doubles, and doubles again, and man squeezes other life almost off the planet, one of the things we architects can do, within these limits, is to create some sort of oasis by trying to work without spoiling the earth...” – Joseph Allen Stein s