Luc Durand, a Canadian Architect who worked in India between 1959 and 1962 participated in an extraordinarily experimental phase of Indian Modern when 'anything was possible'. His later well-known work include the Quebec Pavilion in the 1967 Quebec Expo and the Games Village for 1976 Montreal Olympics.
First published in DOMUS India (vol 1, issue 9) in August 2012 as
"Making Architecture in Interesting Times"
by Smita Dalvi
Luc Durand (b.1929) is the Canadian architect of such landmark buildings as the Quebec pavilion (1967) and Montreal Olympic Village (1976). He is a little known figure in India- familiar only to architects now in their seventies- a memory was long buried until recently. This year, Durand chose to return to Delhi- a city in which he spent three years between 1959 and 1962 as a young man, where he was an active participant in an energetic phase of its architectural discourse. His work was celebrated recently in his home country with a retrospective exhibition of a career in architecture spanning 60 years- including his years in India. This retrospective, the exhibits, his visit to Delhi and his conversations here not only re-kindled memories of the older generation but also opened up a new perspective on a very interesting phase of our country’s architectural development.
In the post-war, post-colonial world of the fifties people and ideas travelled across the seas without much hindrance. The citizens of the Commonwealth were free to travel and live in India without needing visa or permits. That’s how Luc Durand, who apprenticed under Jack Vicajee Bertoli in Geneva, arrived in Delhi. The firm had received commissions to design and execute Air India booking offices and Durand was in charge of this project. He set up office in New Delhi with eight graduates from the Delhi University. Durand not only oversaw the booking offices, but stayed on to work on several more projects. His Delhi experience shaped his future work in Canada and his work left an intangible imprint on the evolving architectural discourse in Delhi at that time.
The fifties characterized the birth of a nation state nurtured by Nehruvian ideals of modernity. Young architects were sent to Harvard and MIT on government scholarships and returned home to practice. Le Corbusier was invited to plan the new capital for Punjab. The Chandigarh Project with its audacious designs of the capitol complex had in its construction the involvement of many young Indian architects and engineers whose own later work bore the stamp of the Chandigarh experience. Durand knew Pierre Jenneret and visited him several times to witness the construction of the buildings in Chandigarh. His photographs of those times formed an interesting document of the times when displayed in his retrospective.
Durand was born to a French Canadian father, who was an unlettered and modest construction laborer, who through hard work, set up a family construction enterprise and got his children educated. Durand joined the École des beaux-arts de Montréal to study architecture, which closed down as the students rebelled against mindlessly copying Paris buildings. In 1951, he went to the School of Architecture, University of Geneva to continue his studies under Eugène Beaudoin and received a cutting edge modernist education, besides going on field trips all over Europe.
Durand arrived in Delhi at the age of 30. The airline booking office project took a few months. Despite this, he stayed on for three years before returning to Canada. During this time he made diverse designs- private houses, apartments, cinemas, furniture, fabric, rugs, painting, and even urban planning. The most important among his works were 18 temporary pavilions on the Exhibition ground (that is today’s Pragati Maidan) for the Indian Agricultural & Industrial Fair in 1961.
These fairs were held to showcase the industrial progress and production prowess of the new nation state. The pavilions had to be innovative and reflective of the new energy of an independent nation. Durand’s response was to freely experiment with new materials like concrete and steel. The result was creating structures that were not attempted before. “Exhibitions are fun,” he says, “they are meant to be seen and for that you need to be different. What we gain from exhibitions are new ways of expression.” His pavilion for the State Trading Corporation was ‘especially daring, a four-inch thick shell dome, tapered elegantly to three points on a confined triangular site. Sinuous gray stone walls wove exterior and interior spaces together, guiding visitors along paths of precast slabs set in white stone pebbles. The outer walls flowed into the interior spaces of the pavilion.’ The other notable design was the Martin Burn Pavilion with a metallic space frame roof supported by only two boxed columns. ‘The roof seemed to levitate above the building. Illuminated at night, the pavilion dissolved into a web of glowing triangular forms, celebrating the new electrical power of Nehru’s India’.
The experiments in exhibition pavilion design hugely influenced his work in Canada after his return. Durand came of age, in a manner of speaking, when he won the competition for the Quebec Pavilion in the Quebec Expo of 1967. This was the most influential exposition ever, with landmark works like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat. Durand’s work was worthy of this exalted company. His steel and glass pavilion both harked back to the Martin Burn pavilion and drew acclaim and comparison with Mies van der Rohe.
His next important challenge was the athlete’s village for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. For this landmark building, Durand put to use ideas he had worked on for an unrealized hotel project in Agra. He incorporated ideas from social housing, a subject of lifelong concern. For Durand, the Indian approach to design and architecture complemented his formal education. The Montreal Games Village was to house 10,000 athletes. Here, he transformed the truncated pyramids of the unbuilt Agra hotel into multi-storied stacks of rooms with circulation on both sides without an inside corridor. One side functioned as a street and the other was a variation facing the garden. This allowed through ventilation and made the streets open and visible. Later, of course, the complex would be utilized as housing. Durand wanted to create a village like atmosphere. He knew how villages worked and was convinced that it was possible to recreate them in a city. According to him, a slum is a village, poor perhaps but with community areas and where all services are organized in a network. That is what he sought to evoke in the Olympic village- a secure, calm, functional and interconnected environment.
During his visit to India earlier this year, in a conversation at the Max Muller Bhavan, Delhi, Durand summarized what he learnt from India: The first learning was the use of models as a common language between the architect, contractor and labour. As plans are abstract, the model works better as a working drawing. In his office, he had a model maker who was also a cabinet maker and together they made experimental models with teak, plaster and wire. The second learning was an awareness of different work ethics- the manner of getting the building works done instead of being tied to a standard contract. The Final learning was to keep a positive attitude always towards difficult situations. For Durand, constraints brought out resourceful and artistic creations.
As a young foreigner practicing in Delhi, although he did not need permits to live or work, he still faced hard times, especially for building permissions without paying a bribe. “It is possible to build with vision, determination and association with right people.” He became a close friend of Habib Rahman who had recently returned from studying at MIT under Walter Gropius and was creating his own brand of regional modernism. Rahman commissioned him to paint a mural in the lobby of the Sheila theatre, the first cinema hall with a 70mm screen. This vibrant abstract composition in yellow, blue and red still adorns the lobby, preserved intact.
Durand also remembered those people that influenced his work. From John Bissel, founder of Fab India, with whom he shared an apartment in Delhi, he learnt about the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and value of cottage industries. He designed textiles, rugs and furniture for this chain of stores set up to popularize locally made Indian fabrics. Another influential figure was Patwant Singh, an aesthete who brought out a magazine called “Design”, one of the rare magazines ever published in the country dedicated to an informed debate on architecture and design. Durand acknowledges that Singh’s critical comments helped to improve his practice, he even designed his house in Delhi. At the time, Patwant Singh was a rallying figure for young Delhi architects and wielded influence in shaping opinions and mentoring a critical attitude in them.
Luc Durand also delved in planning- he worked out schemes for master plans of Delhi and Calcutta and for civic centers in parts of Delhi. None of which materialized but they did help shape his own theories in Urban Planning, reflected later in his many proposals for Montreal. He was even involved in making two documentary film series produced by Canadian National film Board- ‘Urbanose’ and ‘Urba 2000’, now regarded as milestones in social documentary. These films, on shaping the urban fabric of our everyday lives, focused on social housing, an important issue at the time.
As the late fifties spilled into the sixties, Delhi’s architecture grew in optimism, in a spirit of experimentation and enormous confidence. There was a shift away from making references to the past, whether Mughal or Colonial. New materials made new expressions possible- the plasticity of concrete, the strength of steel combined with the knowledge of new structural systems; these were seized upon to shape a distinct Indian Modern. Many significant buildings of Delhi built at that time are remarkable for their unabashed modernism and use of concrete, particularly J. K. Chowdhury’s IIT (1961), Shivnath Prasad’s Akbar Bhavan(1969) and Sri Ram centre (1966-72), Rajinder Kumar’s Inter State bus Terminal (1971)and P.N. Mathur’s Chanakya cinema(1969).
Here, Luc Durand’s experimental legacy is important as his pavilions for the industrial fair were pioneering and trend setting. Today, Luc Durand’s pavilions are long gone-as they were meant to be temporary. His legacy is the abiding spirit of this heady period. He was here in New Delhi at a juncture when it was a fertile ground for new ideas. Later architects like Raj Rewal were personally influenced by Durand. Rewal’s own pavilions (1972) on the grounds of Pragati Maidan are remarkable for structural innovations, and a testimony to the precedent set by Durand. Rewal himself describes the phase as heroic, imbued with a feeling that anything was possible.
First published in DOMUS India (vol 1, issue 9) in August 2012 as
"Making Architecture in Interesting Times"
by Smita Dalvi
 |
| Luc Durand on the site of 1961 Delhi Industrial fair Source: DOMUS India |
In the post-war, post-colonial world of the fifties people and ideas travelled across the seas without much hindrance. The citizens of the Commonwealth were free to travel and live in India without needing visa or permits. That’s how Luc Durand, who apprenticed under Jack Vicajee Bertoli in Geneva, arrived in Delhi. The firm had received commissions to design and execute Air India booking offices and Durand was in charge of this project. He set up office in New Delhi with eight graduates from the Delhi University. Durand not only oversaw the booking offices, but stayed on to work on several more projects. His Delhi experience shaped his future work in Canada and his work left an intangible imprint on the evolving architectural discourse in Delhi at that time.
The fifties characterized the birth of a nation state nurtured by Nehruvian ideals of modernity. Young architects were sent to Harvard and MIT on government scholarships and returned home to practice. Le Corbusier was invited to plan the new capital for Punjab. The Chandigarh Project with its audacious designs of the capitol complex had in its construction the involvement of many young Indian architects and engineers whose own later work bore the stamp of the Chandigarh experience. Durand knew Pierre Jenneret and visited him several times to witness the construction of the buildings in Chandigarh. His photographs of those times formed an interesting document of the times when displayed in his retrospective.
Durand was born to a French Canadian father, who was an unlettered and modest construction laborer, who through hard work, set up a family construction enterprise and got his children educated. Durand joined the École des beaux-arts de Montréal to study architecture, which closed down as the students rebelled against mindlessly copying Paris buildings. In 1951, he went to the School of Architecture, University of Geneva to continue his studies under Eugène Beaudoin and received a cutting edge modernist education, besides going on field trips all over Europe.
Durand arrived in Delhi at the age of 30. The airline booking office project took a few months. Despite this, he stayed on for three years before returning to Canada. During this time he made diverse designs- private houses, apartments, cinemas, furniture, fabric, rugs, painting, and even urban planning. The most important among his works were 18 temporary pavilions on the Exhibition ground (that is today’s Pragati Maidan) for the Indian Agricultural & Industrial Fair in 1961.
 |
| Air India Pavilion for Delhi Industrial Fair 1961 Source: DOMUS India |
 |
| Martin Burn Pavilion under construction Source: DOMUS India |
 |
| Quebec Pavilion Source: http://www.canadiandesignresource.ca/expo-67/quebec-pavilion/ |
His next important challenge was the athlete’s village for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. For this landmark building, Durand put to use ideas he had worked on for an unrealized hotel project in Agra. He incorporated ideas from social housing, a subject of lifelong concern. For Durand, the Indian approach to design and architecture complemented his formal education. The Montreal Games Village was to house 10,000 athletes. Here, he transformed the truncated pyramids of the unbuilt Agra hotel into multi-storied stacks of rooms with circulation on both sides without an inside corridor. One side functioned as a street and the other was a variation facing the garden. This allowed through ventilation and made the streets open and visible. Later, of course, the complex would be utilized as housing. Durand wanted to create a village like atmosphere. He knew how villages worked and was convinced that it was possible to recreate them in a city. According to him, a slum is a village, poor perhaps but with community areas and where all services are organized in a network. That is what he sought to evoke in the Olympic village- a secure, calm, functional and interconnected environment.
 |
| Games Village at Montreal Source: Wikipedia |
As a young foreigner practicing in Delhi, although he did not need permits to live or work, he still faced hard times, especially for building permissions without paying a bribe. “It is possible to build with vision, determination and association with right people.” He became a close friend of Habib Rahman who had recently returned from studying at MIT under Walter Gropius and was creating his own brand of regional modernism. Rahman commissioned him to paint a mural in the lobby of the Sheila theatre, the first cinema hall with a 70mm screen. This vibrant abstract composition in yellow, blue and red still adorns the lobby, preserved intact.
 |
| Mural in the lobby of Sheila Theatre, Delhi Source: http://sukanyarahman.com/tag/shiela-theatre/ |
Durand also remembered those people that influenced his work. From John Bissel, founder of Fab India, with whom he shared an apartment in Delhi, he learnt about the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and value of cottage industries. He designed textiles, rugs and furniture for this chain of stores set up to popularize locally made Indian fabrics. Another influential figure was Patwant Singh, an aesthete who brought out a magazine called “Design”, one of the rare magazines ever published in the country dedicated to an informed debate on architecture and design. Durand acknowledges that Singh’s critical comments helped to improve his practice, he even designed his house in Delhi. At the time, Patwant Singh was a rallying figure for young Delhi architects and wielded influence in shaping opinions and mentoring a critical attitude in them.
Luc Durand also delved in planning- he worked out schemes for master plans of Delhi and Calcutta and for civic centers in parts of Delhi. None of which materialized but they did help shape his own theories in Urban Planning, reflected later in his many proposals for Montreal. He was even involved in making two documentary film series produced by Canadian National film Board- ‘Urbanose’ and ‘Urba 2000’, now regarded as milestones in social documentary. These films, on shaping the urban fabric of our everyday lives, focused on social housing, an important issue at the time.
As the late fifties spilled into the sixties, Delhi’s architecture grew in optimism, in a spirit of experimentation and enormous confidence. There was a shift away from making references to the past, whether Mughal or Colonial. New materials made new expressions possible- the plasticity of concrete, the strength of steel combined with the knowledge of new structural systems; these were seized upon to shape a distinct Indian Modern. Many significant buildings of Delhi built at that time are remarkable for their unabashed modernism and use of concrete, particularly J. K. Chowdhury’s IIT (1961), Shivnath Prasad’s Akbar Bhavan(1969) and Sri Ram centre (1966-72), Rajinder Kumar’s Inter State bus Terminal (1971)and P.N. Mathur’s Chanakya cinema(1969).
Here, Luc Durand’s experimental legacy is important as his pavilions for the industrial fair were pioneering and trend setting. Today, Luc Durand’s pavilions are long gone-as they were meant to be temporary. His legacy is the abiding spirit of this heady period. He was here in New Delhi at a juncture when it was a fertile ground for new ideas. Later architects like Raj Rewal were personally influenced by Durand. Rewal’s own pavilions (1972) on the grounds of Pragati Maidan are remarkable for structural innovations, and a testimony to the precedent set by Durand. Rewal himself describes the phase as heroic, imbued with a feeling that anything was possible.
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