Engineering Modern India

Mahendra Raj (*1924 in Lahore, India) is India’s eminent structural engineer. His professional career reads like an architectural history of post-colonial India. After receiving his degree in Lahore he worked as a junior engineer for the Punjab Public Works Department, realizing two of Le Corbusier’s central buildings in Chandigarh, the Secretariat and the High Court. These demanding projects raised his interest in complex concrete structures – and in absence of possibilities to proceed with his education in this field in India, he decided to move to the U.S. where he completed his Master of Engineering in Minnesota. Subsequently he worked in the office of the Swiss bridge expert Othmar Ammann (Ammann & Whitney) in New York, where cutting-edge structures like Eero Saarinen’s TWA Building were calculated at the time.

In 1960 Mahendra Raj decided to move back to India and start his own practice, which would leave a strong imprint in India’s architecture of the decades to follow. In collaboration with some of the finest architects active in India at the time – Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi, Raj Rewal, Achyut Kanvinde, Joseph Allen Stein and Louis Kahn to name a few – he was able to realise an impressive oeuvre of spectacular structures, which helped define the architectural language of Nehru’s Modern India.

Mahendra Raj translated highly progressive and experimental structural systems into the Indian reality – in absence of the modern techniques and machinery available in the West at the time. His impressive oeuvre were calculated for a good part without the help of computers, and realised with simplest technical means and impressive manual skills.

One of Mahendra Raj’s best known buildings – the Hall of Nations, built 1972 in collaboration with Architect Raj Rewal for the International Trade Fair in Delhi – is a 80 x 80m column-free exhibition space in shape of a truncated pyramid. The enclosing space frame structure was originally conceived in steel, but soon it became obvious that the amount of steel required for the structure would not be available in the tight timeframe and it would blow the budget. The structure was re-calculated, this time in pre-cast concrete. In the process of tendering the structure it became clear that none of the builders is ready to build such a complex structure in pre-cast elements, which lead to the decision to pour all concrete elements in situ. This required to calculate the entire structure a third time and to develop a joint able to accommodate the steel bars from 11 members. The hall was finally built this way, in a time frame of 18 months from competition to the opening of the exhibition.

The Hall of Nations is currently under threat of being demolished in a sweep of commercialisation of New Delhi’s fairground, to which all “non-air-conditioned” buildings are in danger to fall prey. In absence of a mechanism to protect modern buildings a good part of India’s Modern Architectural heritage is in a precarious situation today.

At the age of 91, Mahendra Raj is still active today, heading his practice Mahendra Raj Consultants in New Delhi. While many of Mahendra Raj’s structures have been published widely and form a substantial part of modern India’s architectural history, the buildings were in most cases accredited to their architects and the name Mahendra Raj remained surprisingly unknown.

Tuesday 4.10.2016, 18h00 / Zürich  ETHZ DARCH

Introduction: Prof. Annette Spiro. Introduction to the oeuvre of Mahendra Raj: Rohit Raj Mehndiratta and Vandini Mehta

Panel Discussion: Mahendra Raj, Joseph Schwartz, Johannes Käferstein, Ariel Huber

Followed by book launch

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Thursday 6.10.2016, 18h30 / Lausanne EPFL Archizoom

Introduction: Cyril Veillon. Introduction to the oeuvre of Mahendra Raj: Rohit Raj Mehndiratta and Vandini Mehta

Panel Discussion: Mahendra Raj, Aurélio Muttoni, Eric Lapierre, Ariel Huber

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Tuesday 11.10.2016, 19h00 / Berlin Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin

Joint book launch of “The Structure – Works of Mahendra Raj”  + “Chandigarh nach Le Corbusier: Ethnografie einer postkolonialen Planstadt in Indien“

Introduction to the oeuvre of Mahendra Raj: Rohit Raj Mehndiratta and Vandini Mehta

Panel Discussion: Mahendra Raj, Bärbel Högner, Ariel Huber

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Thursday 13.10.2016, 19h00 / Berlin  Technische Universität Berlin

Introduction: Prof. Regine Leibinger

Lecture by Mahendra Raj

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Friday 14.10.2016, 19h30 / Paris  Société Française des Architectes + Librairie Volume, 47

Book Vernissage + Apéro