Two great architects

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

- NAUSHAD FORBES

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.