Christopher Charles Benninger

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Christopher Charles Benninger is an Indian architect and planner born in America 1942. He studied urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he later taught (1969-72).

Benninger studied under Josep Lluis Sert and worked in his studio. He was a protege of the economist Barbara Ward and a member of the Delos Symposium group, contributing many articles to the journal Ekistics. He was influenced by the group's leader, Constantinos Doxiadis who was founder of the Ekistics movement. This brought him into close association with Buckminister Fuller, Arnold Toynbee, Margaret Mead and Jaquline Tyrwhitt.

Upon the invitation of B. V. Doshi in 1971 he resigned from his tenured post at Harvard and shifted to Ahmedabad, India as a Ford Foundation Advisor to the Ahmedabad Educational Society, where he founded the School of Planning. In 1976 he shifted to Pune, India, where he founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities. In 1983 Benninger wrote the Theme Paper around which the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements was held in 1984. In 1986 he was engaged by the Asian Development Bank to author their Position Paper to the board, arguing successfully the case for extending loans in the urban development sector. Benninger has been on the Board of Editors of CITIES journal (U.K.) and on the Board of the United States Educational Foundation (Fulbright Foundation) in India. He is a distinguished professor at the Centre for Environmental and Planning Technology, Ahmedabad, and on the board of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.

While in Ahmedabad he innovated the concept of Site and Services, an approach to housing providing access to shelter via developed small plots, allowing poor families to construct their own homes, according to their means. For the World Bank and the Madras Urban Development Authority 1973 he designed over 20,000 such units in four locations, the largest being at Arambakum in Chennai. With the advent of institutional housing finance in India 1972 he created a unique neighborhood of small ground level houses for about five hundred households in Jamnagar, Gujarat. This was the first shelter program funded by the Government of India for the economically weaker section of society. In 1976-79, using funding from the Housing and Urban Developemnt Authority, he built a township for low income households at Yusafguda, in Hyderabad with over two thousand houses, public amenities and shopping centres. This was the first project of the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority and provided owners with road acess, storm drains, electricity and sanitary cores. Around these core facilities low income families could construct their own houses. For the World Bank and the Calcutta Urban Development Authority, Benninger was part of a team that devised the (slum) Busti Improvement Program. This approach brought sanitation, potable water,electricity, storm drains, paved lanes with street lighting and community services to millions of low income citizens of Kolkata.

Benninger's best known architectural works are a cluster of academic and educational campuses in the mountainous region between Mumbai and Pune in India. These include the Center for Development Studies and Activities, the Mahindra United World College of India, the Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies, the YMCA International Camp, Nilshi, India, and the International School, Aamby. The Centre for Neurological Research at Pune is a radical departure from his earlier work. Other important works are the Kochi Refineries Corporate Headquarters in Kerala, the Alliance Francaise in Ahmedabad and SOS Children's Villages in Kolkata and Bawana outside of Delhi.

The Mahindra United World College of India won international recognition as the recipient of the Business Week/Architectural Record Award for Excellence in the year 2000. This Award was sponsored jointly with the American Institute of Architects. Business Week called it one of the ten super structures of the world in the year 2000. The project also won the Designer of the Year Award in 1999. The Kochi Refineries Headquarters Building won the award for one of India's two best office buildings in the 2005 Indian Architect and Builder awards for working spaces. The YMCA International Camp, Nilshi, India won the Archies Award and the Indian Institute of Architect's Award for the Best Public Building 2006.

Benninger's planning work includes the development plans for six regional capitals in Sri Lanka, three new towns in Bhutan, the Development Plans of Kalyan and Thane in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, the plans for twenty-eight urban centres in Madhya Pradesh and the Capital City of Bhutan, Thimphu. For Nepal he designed their decentralized planning methodology 1989 and for Indonesia their Shelter Sector for the Indonesian National Rural Development Program 1979-81. Benninger guided the planners of the Katenga Regional Development Authority in their design of the new economic region in Terengganu, an emerging regionin the North-eastern region of Malaysia. Benninger's work in urban design, city management and town planning resulted in his Principles of Intelligent Urbanism, which guided his planning of the new capital of Bhutan.

Architectual works in progress include the new campus for the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; the Indoor Air Conditioned Stadium at Ahmedabad; The Governance Center at Hyderabad; and in Pune the World Headquarters of the Suzlon Wind Energy Company, the new studios for Christopber Charles Benninger Architects, and a new Taj Hotel, amongst others.

The studio in Bhutan has started construction on the Tsechu Ground, a major ceremonial plazza and pavillion for the annual National Buddhist festival and the Coronation site for the Fifth King; the Supreme Court of Bhutan; and the first two, of the ten, Secretariat Ministries that will form the National Secretariat Complex.The Bhutan Studio is also designing the new UNDP HOUSE in Bhutan.

In recognition of his contributions to the architectural and planning professions in India Christopher Charles Benninger has been honored as the first recipient of the (RED) Recognition of Excellence in Design Award (2006). This was conferred by the Royal Society of Designers and Architecture Plus Design journal in India on an Industrial Designer, an Interior Designer and an Architect. Christopher Benninger is currently the sixth winner in India of the Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement (2006) to be conferred in May 2007 by the A+D and Spectrum Foundation.

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