Last century's global

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW

For the record, Dr Christopher Vernon is the lean, lanky professor who is a bit of a cliche in fiction. In real life, he's slightly otherworldly as those who lecture on architecture tend to be. Particularly when they begin to specialise on the works of only a few architects. And it is his special interest in one of them that has brought him to India.

Le Corbusier, you might think, but Vernon debunks your theory early in the evening as a guest of the Australian embassy, when he sets up a (malfunctioning) slide projector to tell you of the triumvirate of capital builders at the turn of the last century.

The Empire was never going to end (though, in hindsight, it was in its sunset years) and the British colonies needed new cities "" Pretoria in South Africa, New Delhi in India and Canberra in Australia.

Vernon is Australian, and has spent a good deal of his time studying the architecture of Canberra. But the interesting question he posed was: did the three cities in three separate parts of the world have anything in common? Did the architects? Did they exchange or share notes?

Canberra was designed by Walter Burley Griffin, Pretoria by Herbert Baker, and New Delhi by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Griffin, along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, was part of America's most important architects who created some of America's original architectural style.

Based in Chicago, he worked on 130 design commissions in Chicago before he and his wife Marion Mahony won the Canberra commission in 1912 in a worldwide competition.

Because Vernon was from Chicago where natural landforms had been completely destroyed by buildings, Vernon says Griffin "let landforms venerate his setting for Canberra through the use of landscape geometry".

Australia was the 20th century's newest nation, yet with no collective national history so "Griffin used nature as culture". Using Washington as an example and with influences from all over the world, he designed the Australian capital overlooking landscape forms. Which is why Canberra has no dominant architectural form "" as, say, the Opera House in Sydney.

When Lutyens was awarded the New Delhi commission, it upset Edward Lanchester who insisted there should have been a competition for the award (he went on, later, to design Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur). Lutyens, along with Herbert Baker, laid the grand plans for the capital, initially rejecting all local idioms but eventually incorporating all or most of them in his buildings that aimed at creating an imperial environment.

Baker, who designed Connaught Place, then went off to South Africa to design Pretoria. Instinctively, he have carried some of the designs from New Delhi there, though, of course, the designs for Canberra made no impression on Lutyens' design for New Delhi even though the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, had insisted on getting Griffins' plans for Canberra to Calcutta before work on the new Indian capital began.

Since the three architects eventually created three totally different cities, what was Vernon's point? That, coincidentally, all three had been drawn to India to work. Lutyens' work is very well known, and enough people know that Baker and he worked together before Baker left to design Pretoria. But the surprise is that Griffin too found his way to India soon after "" specifically, to Lucknow, where he lived after he left Australia in 1935.

The size of his commissions was small enough "" maybe a dozen-odd projects that included the university library (originally to have been designed by Lutyens) and the printing press of The Pioneer (since torn down and turned into an eight storey block).

But Griffin had an accident and died in Lucknow. Vernon's attempt to find his grave proved unsuccessful, but he says it is amazing that though they had little influence on each others' work, and the three cities bear little of each others' influences, their professional lives all brought them to India.

And to think that for most, it is the turn of the 21st century that seems to have laid the foundations for global architecture...