"Didi was a human magnet!" writes Chennai-based architect Lakshmi Swaminathan, alluding to the force of a figure that the late architect Didi Contractor (1929-2021) was in her book, A Call to Return: A Journey with Didi Contractor.

It was the year 2017 that Swaminathan arrived in Kangra - a region in northwestern India nestled in the shadows of the majestic Dhauladhar mountains. What was intended to be a day-long visit with Didi serendipitously transpired into four years of living and assisting her on multiple projects. As an ode to her loving mentor, “who practised what she preached,” Swaminathan shaped the book by combining a reflective account of her closely witnessing Didi’s way of life, her recorded exchanges with students and transcriptions of some of her key lectures and interviews.

“...she was frugal in her consumption, consistent in her efforts, creative in her pursuits, well-intentioned in her thoughts, straightforward in her speech, mindful of her actions, grounded in her meditation and lived an elegantly simple life,” writes Swaminathan on the self-taught American architect who she says changed her life, “as she changed the life of many others in indescribable ways.”

Born as Delia Kinzinger in the United States to Edmund Daniel Kinzinger and Alice Fish Kinzinger, both Expressionist painters, the family shifted to Europe before she turned one. Thanks to her parents’ keen interest in visual arts, as they wheeled her through museums and monuments and travelled charming landscapes where they could paint nature’s majesticness onto their easels, the sensorial experiences quintessentially nurtured Didi’s interest in aesthetics and architecture. At the age of 11, a delicious yearning to discover picturesque places found her visiting the native American adobe ‘pueblos’ in Taos, New Mexico. Exploring its charming adobe homes and churches, it was where she first fell in love with the material, a medium that became the source of everything in the last few luminous decades of her life. The journey from Delia to Didi manifested when she came to India after getting married to Narayan Contractor, a Gujarati Indian she met during a gathering at her art college, the University of Colorado Boulder.

Years of adjusting to a contrarian Indian lifestyle, followed by a thriving career as an interior decorator, Didi felt a void in the modern workings of the discipline and left the city to pursue a frugal way of life in Andretta, a quaint remote village in Kangra. Exposed to a similar truthfulness of things that she experienced in her early years in Europe, she developed a practice of building an impressive body of work that celebrated adobe buildings. Her contribution to the built environment comprises 25 completed buildings which include three institutions, two resorts and a craft centre in Kangra, in addition to her illustrious role in disseminating the wisdom of vernacular architecture. In the last few months of her life, an inquisitive nature and child-like charm were still evocative even in her crumbling health, dotted by a conscious reciprocation of the care she received through her innumerable well-wishers. On July 05, 2021, at the age of 91, Didi breathed her last - leaving behind a legacy that deserves to spread far and wide.

The inner eye

In the late 1930s, foreseeing the coming World War, my father, who had experienced the horrors of the First World War and was alarmed by the increasing intellectual control extended by fascism, fled to America with his family.

I did not adapt to America easily. Before we left Europe, I had been diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening heart murmur brought on by a severe bout of rheumatic fever. I was not allowed to take part in any physical exercise and had to spend many hours in daily bed rest. During those hours of enforced rest, I would direct my mind to memories of European happiness and taught myself to recapture each memory in vivid visual detail. The resulting ability to visualise has been one of the most important enabling skills I have, especially as an architect.

On her early years in India

During my first decade in India, I lived with my traditional Gujarati joint family in Nashik and concentrated on my children and my painting. [...] I was ready to bow to the Hindu deities, wear my sari in the deshi Gujarati style, meekly braid up my unruly hair, put lipstick aside and dresses away, but resolutely refused to alter anything really basic to my identity. [...] I added decorative beds of colourful flowers to the formal front garden, planted by my father-in-law, Sethji, to grow exclusively the scented flowers that could be gathered as daily offerings for the household puja.

Narayan and his closest friend, Sudhir, who had also studied in America, used to tease me. “Only foreigners walk for pleasure! Who bothers to look at the sunset? It happens every day. In our culture, we try to rise above the senses. You foreigners are incurable romantics!” Despite their jibes, I walked.

From Mumbai to Andretta

Didi’s career as an interior decorator was flourishing but in her 40s, she left Bombay to live in Andretta; a remote village in Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh. In an interview held decades later, after she had become a pioneer in building vernacular homes for contemporary living, Didi recalled a pivotal moment that catalysed her decision to leave her thriving work in the city, “I left my work in Bombay over a very sweet woman who just wanted more marble in her bathroom because she could afford it. She said: “I am paying for it. So, I want more marble.” And I said: “But it will not look nice. I won’t do it.”

On Rituals

Rituals and symbols are not scientifically magical but psychologically magical. [...] I like to honour all of the traditional rituals I do with the building and see what meaning I can find in them. Ritual works according to meaning. [...] Look to the wisdom of the past and be a fresh branch, a fresh growth. Don’t cut it down. It won’t grow on its own. Explore your roots and see how far you can take them to your branches.

On Play

At moments when I feel stuck and overwhelmed with copious amounts of work, I revisit the following excerpt from Didi which uplifts my spirit, keeps me enthused and reminds me to play!

I think we pervert the instinct to play. We mix it up with the instinct to win. And somewhere we have taken the joy out of play. Because the athlete who loses should enjoy the game as much as the one who wins because the point is to play. The point isn’t aggression. There is an animal play which is often a precursor to aggression., a play of lion cubs is a precursor to hunting.

On when to act on inspiration and when to let it go

I look at fish soup. Lech Walesa was once asked if he was going to change the economy of Poland. To that, he responded by saying, “Well, you have a bowl of fish. You can make fish soup once and then you don’t have the possibility of making it again, do you?” When I am cutting down a tree, fish soup - no more of that tree. But when I plant another tree, I’m getting some fresh gold out of it. [...] I use this very often when choosing a method - whether it is fish soup or whether it leaves possibilities open.

On style

In metaphysics, the big question is ‘who am I’, knowing yourself. It’s the most difficult thing. I don’t try to hide and the buildings are an honest external statement: they can’t hide. I don’t try to imitate. I try to do what seems honest to aesthetic function and practical function. [...] Maybe my ‘style’ comes out of caring, how I care for what I care about. But then still somehow my signature is there. It is unavoidable. I’m not in any way trying to put my mark on my buildings…

On practice

On another occasion, when I shared with Didi my moments of feeling uninspired about coming up with creative solutions for a project, she sat me down and calmly explained how practice influences inspiration. Do not look within for the answer but feed the within that is going to give the answer. [...] You should look at how a tree has grown, how it has branched, or the patterns that the light makes through the leaves then, you are much more likely to come upon a solution for the roof. [...]

If you are not looking for a thing within a building you will not find it. It will pass you on every side. There is mathematics floating in the air around you. There is physics. Apples have been falling for millennia but when it fell on Newton’s head, he noticed that it was because of gravity. Suddenly he asked the question. The question came from the outside but he had the mathematics in place to receive it.

The eternal return

I have had an amazing mind. I have used the gift of consciousness to the best I could and I am now ready to return it. [..] Death is also a part of life; of the adventure of life. All that I believed in, I was able to be a little bit conscious about it, not fully.” Didi shared with content the day we knew that her death was not far off. We were sitting in her bedroom she had designed to die in; a space that offers both the comfort of an earthly embrace and the wonder of upliftment. I was amazed by her graciousness in accepting death.