Brutalist Delhi: A Guide to Ten Buildings
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
In this post we’ve mapped a list of ten brutalist buildings in Delhi worth visiting for anyone interested in design and architecture. We've ordered the list so you can use it as a pocket guide. It took us about two and a half hours to drive through the whole route on a Sunday morning, when the traffic is lighter.
Every image in this post was shot on Sarojini's grandfather's old Minolta film camera, and the photographs from this self-guided tour have since become the basis for a line of products inspired by Delhi's brutalist architecture. If you take on this excursion yourself, we'd love to see how you document it — tag us, or send us your favourite frame. If you just want to skip ahead to the map, click here.
Brutalist Architecture in Delhi
Brutalism is a modernist architectural style that triggers visceral reactions from deep love to profound dislike; with its bold labyrinthine forms, and characterised by raw unfinished concrete. Brutalist architecture is most well associated with Eastern-European soviet architecture, and post-war Britain, with the concrete housing estates and council buildings that rose out of bombed-out cities in the 1950s and 60s. It isn’t the architectural style one might immediately associate with Delhi. But moving through the city, there are scattered between the British bungalows of Lutyens’ Delhi and the remnants of Mughal monuments–bold geometries and modernist concrete structures–built by a generation of Indian architects trained at British and American universities, who returned to envision and build a new nation. It is one of the most controversial (and dare we say, graphic) forms to emerge in post-independent India.
Brutalist architecture tells an important narrative of newly-independent India, and we want to highlight the design, aesthetics, and broader narratives behind these buildings. For us, mapping these buildings and visiting them, was an exercise in looking deeply at things that we had forgotten to see. Whether you are a Dilliwaala or just passing through Delhi, we hope this list inspires both exploration and enjoyment of the era’s unique and awe-inspiring public architecture.
Demolitions and a Fading legacy
We compiled this list in order to highlight the importance of these sites. Unfortunately, one of Delhi’s most iconic brutalist buildings, the Hall of Nations complex was demolished in 2017. It featured the world's largest-span space frame concrete structure built entirely without internal pillars, resembling an intricate, self-supporting house of cards. Petitions to the Delhi High Court to protect the building were unsuccessful. The court ruled that in order for the building to qualify for heritage protection it needed to be at least 60 years old. The building had been standing for 45 years when it was demolished. Some of the buildings in this post are better preserved than others. However, our hope is that by putting them on this list, we can draw attention to these sites, and encourage their preservation.
Asiad Tower. 1982. Delhi Development Authority (DDA)
The first stop on our tour is the Asiad Tower. It is the tallest building in several miles (53 metres high), acting as a lighthouse in South Delhi's urban landscape. It is located in Khel Gaon Marg, adjacent to the Asian Games Village and the Siri Fort Auditorium. All three structures were built in 1982, in time for the Asian Games. The Asian Games village was designed by Raj Rewal and the Auditorium was designed by Jasbir Sachdev, however comparatively little is known about the Asiad Tower, which was built and designed by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). It was initially designed to be a three-tiered revolving restaurant and bar. Due to some safety issues (the security guard at the parking lot of the Asian Games Village tells us), the use of the building as a restaurant was discontinued in the early 2000s. It is currently under the authority of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). While one cannot enter the building, it is still a rather impressive building to look at from the outside.
National Co-operation Development Corporative(NCDC). 1980. Kuldip Singh.
The NCDC building is a short drive from the Asiad Tower, also in the Siri Fort institutional area. It was built in 1980, by the architect Kuldip Singh and the engineer Mahendra Raj (the two had worked together in the 70s on the Hall of Nations building). Auto rickshaw drivers ferrying passengers past it, refer to it as the 'pyjama building' because of its unique appearance. Two concrete office wings zig-zag to reach the top, while a central corridor ties the wings and the service core together.
National Dairy Development Board (NDDB). 1985. Achyut Kanvinde.
Achyut Kanvinde graduated from Mumbai's Sir J.J. School of Art in 1942. The Government of India later sent him to Harvard University, where he studied under Walter Gropius, pioneer of modernist architecture.
That influence is visible in the National Dairy Development Board building (1985). Kanvinde attempted to fuse a modernist vocabulary with an emerging Indian architectural language. Clean planes give way to sloping balconies planted with greenery, an effect closer to hanging gardens than office architecture, while stacked, cantilevered volumes give the whole structure a sense of organic, almost improvised growth. One could read the building as Kanvinde's vision of an India that could hold its own industrial ambitions and its older aesthetic instincts at once. It was one of the 'prettiest' buildings we saw on our tour, and the most well-maintained.
Akbar Bhavan. 1969-1972. Shiv Nath Prasad.
Akbar Bhavan was designed by Shiv Nath Prasad together with structural engineer Mahendra Raj. Today it is considered one of Delhi's defining works of brutalist architecture. The building's form echoes Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. It was originally opened in 1972 as an India Tourism Development Corporation hotel, the building was converted into office space in 1986. Today it looks derelict, decaying behind locked gates.
Polish Embassy. 1978. Witold Ceckiewicz and Stanislaw Denko.
Unfortunately we weren't able to photograph this building, as it isn't allowed to photograph embassies in Delhi. We were however able to see it quickly as we drove by. The Polish Embassy is also the only building on this list designed by international architects. Built on a strict mathematical grid, the structure balances massive reinforced concrete volumes with visual lightness.
Palika Kendra, 1984. Kuldip Singh.
Palika Kendra is 21 storeys and 91 metres of exposed concrete. It is the headquarters of the New Delhi Municipal Council. It was designed by Kuldip Singh and engineered by Mahendra Raj. Despite how often it gets walked past without a second glance, it's remained one of the clearest statements of post-independence modernist architecture in the city. This béton brut tower was Delhi's tallest building in its early years, and it's still the tallest structure the NDMC owns today. It is right across the street from the Jantar Mantar, and its form mirrors some of the astrological tools used to map the skies.
Shri Ram Centre for Performing Art and Culture. 1969. Shiv Nath Prasad.
Shiv Nath Prasad designed the Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts in the early 1960s. Today it is regarded as one of Delhi's landmark theatre spaces. Run by the Indian National Theatre Trust, it sits on a quarter-hectare plot on Safdar Hashmi Marg, right in the heart of Mandi House, an area known for its status as Delhi's cultural hub. The neighbourhood's density of institutions, including Triveni Kala Sangam and the National School of Drama, makes it a natural draw for students and artists alike. It is one of the few structures on this list that non-bureaucrats can walk through and explore.
Doordarshan Bhawan. 1970s. Raj Rewal.
Right across the street from Shri Ram Centre for Performing Art and Culture is Doordarshan Bhawan, India's national television centre. It was built in the 1970s by Raj Rewal, and is characterised by massive exposed concrete and red sandstone forms. The street view of the building is unfortunately camouflagued by trees, but still, we would recommend driving past it to have a look.
Tibet House. 1974. Shiv Nath Prasad.
Tibet House was founded in Delhi in 1965, as part of an international network of Tibet Houses established at the Dalai Lama's request to preserve Tibetan culture. Today it functions as a centre for Buddhist and Tibetan studies. The Dalai Lama himself laid the foundation stone for the current building in 1974, designed by Shiv Nath Prasad. The building reads as a stack of monolithic forms: a three-storey cuboid wrapped in vertical concrete fins sits atop a smaller cuboid, pierced by a semi-cylindrical staircase that breaks up the structure's angularity. The concrete throughout still carries the grain of the timber shuttering used to cast it — a detail worth looking for up close. Inside, five floors hold a library, a small museum, seminar and classroom space, and administrative offices, with the ground floor given over to reception.
National Science Centre. 1992. Achyut Kanvinde.
The last item on our list is a museum. The six-storey building sits within the Trade Fair complex and holds roughly 14,000 square metres of space across an auditorium, conference rooms, a lecture hall, library, training centre, exhibition halls, and a cafeteria. A first-floor entrance concourse opens onto multi-level display space, with terraces adding further exhibition areas outdoors. The finishes are distinctly local: aggregate plaster made from Delhi blue quartzite chips banded with Dhopur stone, and floors of polished Kota stone striped with ochre Jaisalmer stone. Unfortunately it is not a very good museum, but the facade of the building is definitely worth stopping for.
Design Delhi: The Products
Sarojini and I designed this collection collaboratively. We started with the images, and then worked together to bring those to a limited range of products: stoles, neckerchief, tote, postcards, and a necklace. Our aim in designing this collection was to draw attention to Delhi's brutalist architecture. The buildings include bureaucratic offices, museums, and abandoned structures. Delhi's brutalist legacy is often overlooked. This collection was our attempt to make people look twice, and bring these buildings back into our collective consciousness. Shop the full collection here.
