The Architecture of Hasmukh C. Patel: Selected Projects 1963-2003. This item is unavailable.The Architecture of Hasmukh C. Patel: Selected Projects 1963-2003

Hasmukh Patel was at the forefront of modern architecture in India. His completed projects include over 300 buildings of many types. Each of his projects is a built manifesto, a testing of his ideas at full scale through construction. These explorations demonstrate a profoundly pragmatic approach to design. He focused on practical problem solving, building to address the issues of a modernising Indian population. He invented a contextually relevant, modern architectural idiom suitable for India, and combined this with an intuitive ability to make beautiful spaces. Hasmukh Patels practice bridged rapid changes in social and economic policy. These directly affected the types of buildings being constructed and their procurement and financing. As his practice grew, the state sponsored nation-building of the Nehru years gave way to the rise of speculative buildings financed by private developers and in turn to the sweeping changes unleashed by liberalisation. Hasmukh Patels work helped define modern architecture in India. This book documents and discusses sixty of his buildings, many for the first time.

Catherine Desai is an architect and graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has had a long association with India, first visiting to study the country's modern buildings in the early 1990s and returning regularly to continue her research. 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 design.