Christopher Charles Benninger: A reflective obituary

Architect, urbanist and academic, Christopher Charles Benninger passed away at 82 on October 2, 2024, in Pune, India. Born in Ohio, USA, Christopher spent most of his life in India where he built, taught, grew, loved and now rests. In 1970, when independent India was all of 23, Christopher moved to the subcontinent and jumped right into India’s nation-building exercise; a democratic socialist experiment developing policies, infrastructures, economic diversification, law, agriculture, education, media, health and so much more. For Christopher, architecture was always a social tool, one that created transformations in society, or even a means to “create a new man”!

Having left behind a tenure position at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Christopher founded the School of Planning at what is now CEPT University in Ahmedabad (1971) along with Indian architect B.V Doshi. His friends and mentors included Charles Correa, Laurie Baker, Achyut Kanvinde, Hasmukh Patel and Vikram Sarabhai to name a (very) few. Christopher breathed education. Throughout his life he built many important educational institutes and campuses; he also designed programmes, courses and curricula; taught, wrote essays and papers, gave seminars and talks, all in formal and informal capacities. ‘Teach and you will learn,’ he’d keep throwing me into new classrooms ignoring my trepidations of 'not knowing enough to teach yet' until they continue to be spaces where I learn, grow and thrive the most. His studio at India House, Pune, is a site of knowledge in the arts, culture and architectural practices, a mini institute of its own standing, now headed by Ramprasad Akkisetti (Ram), his loving life partner.

In a young India, Christopher designed vast low-income shelter projects for urban development authorities and state governments (1972-86); set up the Centre for Development Studies and Activities in Pune (1976); prepared development plans for cities in Sri Lanka (1979-83), India (1971-96), Bhutan (1979-86), and researched development processes, income distribution, ability to pay and designed programmes for poverty alleviation. Some of his most notable projects in India include the Mahindra United World College, Nanegaon; Alliance Française, Gujarat; Centre for Development Studies and Activities, Pune; Baja Science Center; Kochi Refinery Headquarters; Azim Premji University; SOS Children’s Village, Bhawana, Delhi. He also built the United Nations House in Bhutan; the Thimpu Capital Plan and National Ceremonial Plaza.

Christopher spoke of cities, buildings and people in interchangeable ways. Cities breathed, grew, died, awakened; buildings expressed, remembered, interrupted, broke into lyrical poetry; and people built. Their hopes, histories, aspirations, futures, celebrations and conditions travelling time. Christopher kept people at the centre, anchoring his personhood and his architecture. He designed systems of participatory planning, working with community groups and local authorities, opening up public dialogue on informal settlements, civic and hygiene infrastructure and resource distribution, in his quest for a just, equitable society.

Christopher’s life was like a long letter to a young architect. His designing and building philosophies are also his loving and living philosophies. His insistence on ‘honest expression’ was as much his way of speaking as it was the way his buildings spoke. Fluent in local material, resources, culture and labour (theoretically developed as ‘critical regionalism’), the spaces he built were poetic, albeit, in their local dialect. Community, sustainability and culturally resonant designs were non-negotiables, not exceptional qualities of what he considered (good) architecture. When Christopher taught, which was typically any conversation with him, it was through questions of the subjective kind, divorced from any form of knowledge-testing or value judgment. He was interested in the ways people found meaning, the more elemental questions of life and creative force. How do we look at ideas? What differentiates the profound from the banal to whom and why? Before drawing pragmatic solutions to real-world problems, in plans and sections, Christopher would strive to find the emotive truth that tied it together. His signature was ‘be, not seem’ and encouraged us all to do the same, no matter the discipline. He very much believed in the idea of mentors and gurus, his life was certainly rife with many but found worship in any form to be a disparagement. He had worked with and learned from Jose Luis Sert, Walter Gropius, Jerry Soltan, Fumihiko Maki, Kevin Lynch, Herbert Gans, Edmund Bacon, Margaret Mead and Buckminster Fuller. He taught studios with Jane Drew and Roger Montgomery, studied economics under John Kenneth Galbraith and became Barbara Ward’s protégé. Here was a man who refused to accept adulation, deference, or anything that was awe-adjacent, instead indulging in debate, discussion and introspection.

Christopher and I exchanged short but frequent emails when I was a graduate student at Columbia University, New York. An ambition that was posed to me as a question by him in a matter-of-fact, “Why aren’t you applying to Harvard and Columbia? Are you just going to keep working here with me? Go. Fly.” While in New York, my emails to him would be about the courses I was taking, readings, assignments, my excitement to be bouncing in the bubble of academia, his emails were about the many cheeses and wines I absolutely must try.

Sitting across from Christopher meant an endless conversation about people, ideas and India. Or as he liked to say, the many ‘Indias’ that exist within and as the country. His wry wit and humour sprinkled generously on his stories across history, philosophy, art, film, politics and gossip. Ram, Christopher’s partner of 30 years, in life and beyond, matched his sass. In the last few years, Ram oscillated between being the mischievous one of the duo and the responsible one who’d monitor Christopher’s nutrition and call bedtime when it looked like another bottle of red was about to be uncorked. The love, humour and warmth in their relationship are always an endearing sight to witness.

Christopher moved through life with purpose and in search of it. His existentialism asked lofty questions of the human condition, refused despair and insisted on hope with an almost militant air. His spirit, fueled by critical thought and creative solutions, left no room for defeat or naivete. He had witnessed and catalysed many a change around the world in his time, replacing cynicism with debate and action, a quality that was highly infectious. Proficient in the discipline of tackling the ‘why?’s of the world with ‘how?’s, one grand plan at a time, he pulled many along in this quest, compulsorily dragging us in an endless celebration of life. The party must and will go on. Let us ‘be, not seem’.