This article investigates the universalist problematic in Modern Movement town planning predominantly through the Indian phase of the career of Otto Koenigsberger (1909–99). Educated in Germany during the Weimar Republic but subjected to Nazi persecution, Koenigsberger migrated via Egypt to Bangalore and employment by the Tata Dynasty in 1939. Upon independence, he was appointed to Director of Housing in charge of New Town Development across India, including the organization of the Chandigarh commission. Koenigsberger’s architecture and town planning, in particular for Jamshedpur, mobilized current transatlantic modernist practice. It was predicated on the potential of abstract aesthetic and functionalist form to embody radical socio‐political change that surmounted both pre‐colonial and imperial conventions. While accommodating some features of Indian architectural tradition, Koenigsberger espoused non‐sectarian and standard solution, especially for housing. This thinking was most evident in his partially realized scheme for pan‐regional prefabricated dwelling units. The failure of this enterprise and ensuing political controversy caused him to resign and move to London. It is argued here that Koenigsberger’s experience in India informed his inauguration in 1957 of the School of Tropical Architectures at the Architectural Association and the department of Development Planning at University College London in 1972; these teaching posts coincided with successive reconsideration of his concept of urban design that culminated in the locally conditioned concept of Action Planning. The analytic is discursive, reading shifts in design thought out of Koenigsberger’s photographic and textual archive as well as his architectural and urban design work in India.
Figure 10. Otto Koenigsberger, plan for the new capital of Orissa at Bhubaneswar, 1948 (with permission of Renate Koenigsberger).
Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. He was educated at the Courtauld Institute of the University of London. His teaching and research have focused mainly on transatlantic art, architectural and cultural history in Europe, Britain and North America from c. 1600 to the present. He is the author of several books, including William Wilkins 1778–1839 (Cambridge University Press, 1980); (with A. Barrett) Francis Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age (University of British Columbia Press, 1983); Altogether American: Robert Mills Architect and Engineer (Oxford University Press, 1994) and The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver 1938–1963 (Canadian Center for Architecture, with Douglas and McIntyre, and the MIT Press, 1997).
The research for this article was supported by grants for research on intersections between Modern Movement design and later British imperial policy from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Fellowship from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, and enabled by Renate Koenigsberger who, most generously, allowed the author to examine Otto Koenigsberger’s remaining papers and discussed his career in India and Britain during interviews in 2000 and 2002. The author also gratefully acknowledges the astute and helpful comments kindly provided by the editor and anonymous reviewers of this journal.