For many people who work with or study India's built environment, the city of Chandigarh dating from the mid-1950s is often considered to be the starting point for the use of reinforced concrete in India. By that stage, Europe and North America had been building with reinforced concrete for over fifty years and so this paper investigates the use of this material in India during the first half of the twentieth century. questions explored include where and how was reinforced concrete used, who were the designers and what was done to address Indian contexts such as climate, materials and the skills of the workforce.

Apart from the buildings designed by Lutyens and Baker for New Delhi, there has been little interest in India's built environment from the first half of the twentieth century. There are a number of possible reasons for this. The buildings of this period began to take on a more international appearance, replacing the exoticism of the Indo-Saracenic style from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that was, and remains, s appealing to many writers on Indian architectural history. The majority of buildings, where a designer is acknowledged, were by architects who are almost unknown inside and outside India and consequently have not attracted the attention of western architectural historians. What has been written on the built environment has generally concentrated on the architect and stylistic issues. For works on Indian buildings from the first half of the twentieth century the writer will mention the architect if he - there are no references to female architects - was sufficiently important and will focus on whether a particular building fits into a particular category such as Art Deco or Modern Movement. Apart from journals and publications written at the time there is no mention of the engineers and contractors, or details of the structure of the buildings.

The study finishes in 1947 with the end of British rule in India, a period of transition for India and close to the "pause" in the building industry caused by World War II. Although Anglo-Indian architects continued to practice after the war they were eclipsed initially by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn - high-profile names brought in to help promote a modern India - and then by Indian architects such as Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi and Raj Rewal.

There are two personal notes. The first is that I have used the British names for towns and cities, Bombay instead of Mumbai or Madras not Chennai, simply to be consistent with the contemporary references. Similarly, as all the structures referred to here were designed and built using the imperial system of measurement, the imperial measurements are given for "round numbers" like ¼ inch or 3ft. (with their numeric equivalent) since these bring us closer to the way the original designers and builders thought.