Mustansir Dalvi was the longest serving professor of architecture in the University of Mumbai. In this long read – which was first published in the National Herald – he reminisces about his employer, the late Chandrakant Patel, the architect behind Mumbai’s most familiar landmark, the BSE building. Mr Dalvi writes:
“At the cusp of the 1990s, on every working day, I took an elevator to the 26th floor of the second most-photographed building in India. This was the Bombay Stock Exchange building, and I was privileged to work for its architect, Chandrakant Patel.
His design studio, the Architectural Research Unit, offered views and inspiration, as ribbon windows swept over the panorama of the harbour across the bay to the hills on the mainland. Patel passed away late in April. I take this moment to ruminate on his times through the building he is most known for…
Chandrakant Patel graduated from Sir JJ College of Architecture, a contemporary of Bombay architects Kamu Iyer and Rusi Khambatta. In 1958, he attended the International Congress of Architects in Moscow as the only Indian representative, and went on to work for Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish architect and designer.
Patel imbibed Aalto’s vision of architecture as a complete work of art, with functionalism and materiality as its rationale. I recall Patel’s resistance to the right angle, his insistence on the right material for the right place and using geometry as an unerring guide to create original-looking designs. All these principles could be seen in his conception of the iconic Stock Exchange building.
In fact, the building became an icon even before it was built. The project was the brainchild of Phiroze Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy, chairman of the Bombay Stock Exchange for more than three decades…
In 1969, his vision to create a modern edifice for the financial centre of the country – replacing a half-century-old building by Claude Batley in congested Dalal Street with a soaring skyscraper and trading hall – coincided with the design prowess of a young architect, freshly returned from Finland.
Patel had earlier worked on the design of the Usha Kiran building in Tardeo, which was then the tallest building in Mumbai until surpassed by Jeejeebhoy Tower, which is the proper name of the Bombay Stock Exchange building. In storybook fashion, the old stalwart put his faith in the young architect based on a model he presented to the governing board, which unanimously approved his design….”
Mr Dalvi goes on to explain that the BSE building we see today contained several structural innovations and was build in two phases over 15 years:
“The 29-storey building that you see now was the result of several architectural and structural innovations. These were needed to realise his floor plan, hitherto unseen in any tall building in Bombay. The two swinging wings, designed for variable floor space, were envisioned through non-concentric arcs and pinned together by a structural core housing the array of elevators, services and toilets.
The wings were held up by thin steel mullions, “matchstick columns”, as Patel called them, that ran along their entire perimeter. These allowed the façade of each floor to be free of structural restraints and resulted in the continuous ribbon windows.
The core was built in Reinforced Cement Concrete and raised to its full height of around 300 feet using a technique called slip-form construction, where the formwork in which concrete is poured is winched into place, rising from floor to floor. That this winching was the result of very well-coordinated manual labour is an atma-nirbhar story quite ahead of its time…
The tower was finally completed in the 1970s. The tower wings were edged by a very early example of glass curtain walls attached to the outside of the building, while its basements were created using diaphragm walls.
Patel worked in collaboration with the noted structural designer Kamal Hadkar to achieve his vision. Their innovations and risk-taking were validated 20 years later when the building survived relatively unscathed after a car bomb exploded in its basement in March 1993…
In the late 1980s, the second phase of the building resumed, to create a vast trading hall. This single domed space was for brokers…
Patel and Hadkar joined hands once again to create a structural system that allowed fresh basements to be excavated even as the superstructure rose, a combination of straight and Y-shaped columns, tilted steel mullion and Reinforced Cement Concrete slabs…”
And then after a decade and a half of frenzied activity, the great halls of the BSE building fell silent: “Inevitably, the business of stockbroking and exchange had its own paradigm shift. In an irony only architects face with their creations, trading in the Bombay Stock Exchange went online on March 14, 1995, rendering the newly completed trading hall silent in one fell swoop.”
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