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.