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oCCASIonAl PublICAtIon 18 IIC An Innocent Abroad: Joseph Stein in India the views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and not of the India International Centre. the occasional Publication series is published for the India International Centre by Cmde. (Retd.) R. Datta. Designed and produced by FACEt Design. tel.: 91-11-24616720, 24624336. An Innocent Abroad: Joseph Stein in India t is an honour to speak about Joseph Allen Stein while standing Stein was both Iin this sublime example of his work. this talk is a collection of an interesting thoughts from a work in progress, and I should point out that there man and a are many people in Delhi, and even in this room, who worked with complicated one Joe and knew Joe much better than I ever did, having only met him briefly in the united States. their memories, shared with me over the past year-and- a-half, make up a large part of today’s presentation. 1 I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Clarence Stein Institute at Cornell university, 2 which has funded my research in India. An enjoyable part of this project over the past couple of years has been meeting people and talking about Joe, what his architecture means to them and what his legacy means to India. the question today is: who was Joseph Stein – after whom was named the street just to our right as we sit here in the India International Centre (IIC) , and the architect of both the IIC and the India Habitat Centre, which outlook magazine ranked number one and number two on the list of the best buildings in Delhi three years ago. Stein was both an interesting man and a complicated one and, as those of you who 1 Among those who graciously consented to be interviewed for my research are: J.R. bhalla, Sudeshna Chatterjee, Prem Chaudhary, Anurag Chowfla, Madhavi Desai, Miki Desai, Minakshi Devi, Sumit Ghosh, Pankaj Gupta, P.C. Jain, Ravi Kaimal, bharat and Gabo Kapur, Ashok b. lall, Kanai lal, R.M.S. liberhan, Meena Mani, unkar Matu, A.G.K. Menon, Snehanshu Mukerjee, Ram Rahman, Mansingh Rana, K.t. Ravindran, Jagan Shah, Pritpal Singh, nalini thakur, Ravindra J. Vasavada, and Sudhir Vohra. I am especially grateful to Joseph Stein’s sons, Ethan and David, for their generosity in sharing both memories and documents, as well as suggestions and comments, and in sum, making this project possible. Still, any errors are mine alone. 2the Institute funds research into the planning and architectureofClarence Stein, and into the work of others whose ideas were influenced by his writings and practice. are familiar with Stephen White’s remarkable tome on Stein, building in the Garden (oxford) know, it is hard to do justice to the architect even in 300-400 pages.3 Joseph Stein was born in 1912, in omaha, nebraska, and spent some of his early years on a farm that was equidistant from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, really in the middle of the American agricultural heartland. He grew up in an orthodox Jewish family and escaped that life when he was 16 years old. He went on to the university of Illinois to study architecture and then proceeded to have a series of fascinating architectural experiences in the 1920s and ’30s. He undertook his masters in architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, an important institution focused on modern design where, among others, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and sculptor Carl Milles taught. Stein then attended a brief programme at the Ecole des beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau after which he moved to new York City to work for Ely Jacques Kahn, another Jewish architect who was just beginning to build his own important practice around that time. In 1939, Joe left new York and moved to California to work for Richard neutra, and that started his career as a modern architect. His heroes at that point were louis Sullivan and Frank lloyd Wright, who was Sullivan’s student and apprentice. In los Angeles, Joe had an opportunity to experience personally contemporary works of Wright and other major architects, such as Rudolph Schindler, and these influences In 1939, Joe show up in Joe’s works. left New York After a few years, Stein established a small practice in los Angeles and moved to with Gregory Ain, another former employee of Richard neutra’s who California to would become an important figure in modern architecture in his own work for Richard right. later Joe would recall that he and Ain didn’t actually do a lot of architecture – they mostly talked about politics. Gregory Ain was Neutra, and that quite left wing, Joe leant that way too, and the times being what they started his career were, at the end of the Depression and with war developing in Europe, as a modern there was considerable political ferment. Still, there were a number of architect interesting houses that came out of their partnership. 3 Much of the background informationused in this talk comes from building in the Garden, by Stephen White,oxford university Press, 1993; still the definitive work on Joseph Stein. When the u.S. became embroiled in the Second World War, Joe The high point moved to northern California, to the San Francisco bay Area, of Joe’s career in where he did some work on his own but also teamed up with the Bay Area was another architect named John Funk. It was then that Joe began to being selected establish his own architectural language, which was a version of bay Area regional modernism. Even though bay Area architects in along with the early ’40s were focused primarily on projects such as housing John Funk to associated with the war, they were also developing a regional design a project modernism that was particular to the character of place, and called Ladera, concerned with understanding and protecting the environment. a suburban Joe belonged to a group called ‘telesis’, an early environmental planning organization modelled on the Regional Plan Association development of America, formed some years earlier on the east coast of the based on united States, and his work explored the interaction between progressive landscape and building that was a strong tradition in the bay planning models Area dating back to the 1920s and pioneering regionalists such as William Wurster. the houses that Joe designed for his own family (which included his wife, Margaret, and sons David and Ethan) and for the landscape architect, Robert Royston, both of which were landscaped by Royston, were emblematic of his work at that time: modest in scale, open to and partaking of their surroundings, simple in form, embellished by the use of natural materials. they are located in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. the high point of Joe’s career in the bay Area was being selected along with John Funk to design a project called ladera, a suburban development based on progressive planning models. this was at the end of the 1940s, after the war, at a time of substantial population growth in the region, in large part from returning soldiers who had moved to the benign climate, beautiful setting and rich educational and employment opportunities of the bay Area. ladera was modelled on the work of Clarence Stein (no relation), an important planner of the first part of the twentieth century, whose designs for communities such as Radburn, new Jersey, not only informed Joe and his colleagues, but also the 1950s planners of Delhi, especially Albert Mayer. 4 the architects were joined on the project by Garett Eckbo and Robert Royston, of the firm Eckbo, Dean, Royston and Williams, which was destined to became one of the most important landscape architecture firms in the united States. they later worked with Joe on the redesign of the lodi Gardens in Delhi, among other projects. the team designed the community, but construction stalled because banks could not get federal financing, as was customary and necessary for that scale of project. the reason was that ladera was racially integrated, and the united States government would not loan money to such projects. the project essentially ground to a halt, except for some privately financed homes. the bitterness of that experience, combined with Then, in 1952, anguish about the concurrent resurgence of the McCarthy hearings Joe received and the blacklist against communists and other left-wing figures that a call from swept up people as diverse as Gregory Ain and Frank Sinatra, made the situation so ethically and economically intolerable for the Steins Vijayalakshmi that in 1950 Joe and Margaret decided to leave the united States with Nehru Pandit, their two young boys. Prime Minister there are various versions of this story. one is very dramatic: it Nehru’s sister, describes a hasty night-time departure, complete with a dog left who was just behind in the house. that is probably apocryphal, but it does seem true stepping down that Margaret was the primary force behind the departure, basically from her post as refusing to raise their children in such a regressive political and social ambassador to environment. the family went first to Mexico, believing it to be more progressive and that Joe would have the opportunity to do housing the United States and other socially conscious architectural projects. It didn’t happen, and Mexico, although they did establish a friendship there with Frida Kahlo and while continuing Diego Rivera. the Steins then moved to Europe, spending time in both to head the Switzerland and Italy.

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