Public lecture by Vikram Prakash

Born in colonial India, Aditya Prakash (1924-2008) – architect, painter, writer -joined the Chandigarh project in 1952 in response to Nehru’s call to build a new independent nation. He belonged to the first generation of modernists who sought to describe the entire cosmos of modern life for his country via art, architecture, design, planning, and theatre. Aditya was one of the Indian architects who collaborated with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to turn Chandigarh - the famous modernist new capital for the state of East Punjab (India) - into a reality.  

Based on the concept of Non-Aligned Modernism, Vikram Prakash’s lecture will discuss the work of mid-century modernists, such as his father, as an effort to advance global modernist thinking beyond binaries like East–West, local–global, and regional–universal.

Axonometric drawing and model of Tagore Theatre by Aditya Prakash, 1963

About Vikram Prakash

Vikram Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He is co-design lead of O(U)R: Office of Uncertainty Research, a conceptual design research practice dedicated to rethinking architecture in terms of the emergent scientific, social and political parameters of the 21st century. O(U)R has exhibited at the 2022 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 2022 ECC Time, Space and Existence exhibition in Venice.

Vikram works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and architecture. His books include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Revisited, A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek), Colonial Modernities(co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma, Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial (co-edited with Maristella Casciato and Daniel Coslett), and A House Deconstructed (with Mark Jarzombek). His first novel, Death of a Modernist, will be published in January 2026.