Ratan Tata and Christopher Benninger: Champions of Indian aesthetics

The aesthetics of Ratan Tata and Christopher Benninger made India a nicer physical place

Two great Indians, Ratan Tata and Christopher Benninger, passed away earlier this month.  Christopher Benninger qualified as an architect from Harvard and was one of India’s great professional architects. His many buildings, designed over decades, have set a standard for empathy and beauty that few can match. Ratan Tata qualified as an architect from Cornell and, apart from two years working as an architect in Los Angeles, spent his life ensuring the Tatas remained India’s preeminent industrial house, leading in scale, innovation, ethics and philanthropy. Many have lauded his nation-changing achievements. I will limit myself to how they both made India physically more beautiful, Christopher through his buildings, Ratan through his personal emphasis on aesthetics. 

I first met Ratan Tata around 30 years ago at meetings that Ashok Desai set up for the finance minister with industrialists before each budget.  On a visit to his office, the reception area was all boarded up with work underway. His assistant told me that his office (which he inherited from JRD) had been redone. As part of the renovation, a wall was painted, to his specification, in a bright red. It did not turn out as he wanted, so the painting had to be redone, to get the shade exactly right. On subsequent visits, I was always impressed by how beautifully the office worked, everything exactly right, including the shade of red.  Excellence is in the detail. 

Tata Motors’ first car, the Indica, was developed at a time when the company did not have a full-time CEO.  Ratan Tata, as chairman, would visit Pune each month and spend an entire day reviewing progress. On a typical visit, over half his time was dedicated to R&D, reviewing product design in detail. Apart from how motivating this was for the designers, it also sent a clear message to the rest of the company that design was essential to its success. 

Great current designs — the Harrier and the Nexon — reflect the emphasis on design that his vision provided 25 years ago. My most recent meetings were at his home, which I had not visited before. His house reflected his aesthetics: Simple, clean lines, with an emphasis on beauty and form. Lamps and sofas from great designers were carefully placed, not as things to look at, but to provide light and sit on. Two Nanos were part of the exterior “sculpture”. It is amongst the most beautiful homes I’ve seen, and seems to me to be quintessentially Ratan. I will not say more about Ratan Tata; many have written with great eloquence about his many fine attributes, of how he combined courage and vision with humility and values. Let me now turn to Christopher, where I have more to contribute.

I first met Christopher Benninger around 15 years ago when Forbes Marshall had bought land at Chakan to build our main manufacturing site.  We met factory architects who pitched various designs to us. They were just fine, fully functional and neat, but I would not describe any as beautiful.  In search of something different, a colleague and I visited Christopher at his office (and home), India House. Christopher had never done a factory before; the closest his firm had come was a workshop for a marine engineering college. Just visiting India House addressed any concerns we had, seeing how it had been designed, as work space flowed into home space, with features that drew your gaze in without hitting you in the face. The atmosphere was relaxed and people seemed genuinely happy working there. We asked Christopher’s firm, CCBA Design, to quote, and did not look at any other architect. 

Our factory in Chakan involved several phases of construction.  As we planned the first project, we had hours of conversation with Christopher, as he sought to understand not just the space we needed but what kind of work people would do in it and what we wanted the buildings to convey. Excellence, again, is in the detail: Jali over glass provides light and shade for the shop floor, without artificial lighting. The utility block (often ugly things with even uglier objects sticking out) near the entrance is a most beautiful building, with its mix of spiral shape and concentric steps. For our boiler manufacturing, safety reasons require that we keep a bank of welding cylinders outside the factory; instead of an unsightly rack, we have an intriguing oval outhouse connected to one of the bays. The office space runs alongside the factory, in curved glass buildings that break up what would otherwise be long flat spaces.  The final outcome, which photographs convey much better than words, is best judged by it winning the Indian Institute of Architects Award for Excellence for Architecture.

CCBA then worked with us to build a new expansion adjoining our existing Krohne Marshall factory. The way the two buildings connect and flow into each other, with a circular light well that brings daylight into the office and a ramp that welcomes you to follow it into the old building, are details that raise the spirit for all those who work there. CCBA is currently doing a further Krohne Marshall expansion, another expansion at Chakan, and a major revamp and expansion of our corporate office in Kasarwadi. The Kasarwadi offices, a mix of factory space converted to office, decades-old buildings in need of a big renovation, and a new building, have been a particular challenge. CCBA has used a white colour scheme throughout, retaining old trusses, with natural light available in abundance. An inner courtyard and garden, currently being constructed, is to provide outdoor meeting space and ensure mixing of members who do not normally interact with one another.

Christopher’s designs aren’t necessarily grand to look at. He never subscribed to what is best described as the Reichstag school of architecture. That might impress those who experience them as tourists viewing them from a distance, but they are cold and inhuman.  His designs are beautiful spaces for those who work in them, who experience them close at hand and see them every day.

The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote eloquently on beauty. Those conscious of beauty want things to look right “and looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters — not by pleasing the eye only, but by conveying meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display…. Ravishing beauties are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative … where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.”

We will greatly miss Christopher Benninger and Ratan Tata. We can pay them no greater tribute than by building a more beautiful India and world that inspires us as we go about our daily lives. Let their good manners prevail. 

ndforbes@forbesmarshall.com. The author is co-chairman, Forbes Marshall, past president, CII, chairman of Centre for Technology Innovation and Economic Research and Ananta Aspen Centre. His book, The Struggle and the Promise has been published by HarperCollins