Last month Associate Professor Jeffrey Chusid led a colloquium lecture, exhibition, and reception on renowned architect Joseph Allen Stein. The exhibition presented some 100 items from the more than 5,000 drawings and other materials from Stein’s personal archives that were given to the Cornell University Library.
The gift is an important addition to the library’s collections on modernist architecture and planning on South Asia. The documents will provide rich fodder for scholars of “the architecture of independence” period, from which the physical infrastructure for the modern Indian state was built.
“Creating the exhibition has not only allowed me to immerse myself in the wonderful materials being given to Cornell, but it also impelled me to explore important themes in Stein’s life and work,” said Chusid. These themes include Stein’s work in affordable housing and lightweight long-span structures, his role as an expatriate in a post-colonial state, and the relationship between architecture, institution building, and the politics of the Cold War.
Chusid, who is working on a book on the architect, feels inspired by Stein’s life story. In Stein’s 40+ years in India, he managed to convert from an outsider into something more respected and central to the conversation about architecture and planning. Several of his works, including the India International and India Habitat Centres have become monuments in New Delhi.
The exhibition captured different aspects of Stein’s life and work, including Chusid’s three favorite pieces: an architecture student journal from his time at the Bengal Engineering College in 1952 in which Stein introduces himself to his future homeland, a freehand perspective sketch of the India International Centre, c.1959, on which Stein wrote a brief essay about the meaning of architecture, and a series of beautiful and rigorous hand-drawn light studies for the façade of the India Habitat Centre from 1988.
“He was a deeply ethical individual—passionate about architecture and its ability to improve lives, while eschewing formalism or high style—who aspired to be good and modest as a person, and as an architect.”
Click here to view more images from the exhibition.