Christopher Charles Benninger

Christopher Charles Benninger is an Indian architect and urban planner with origins in the United States. Born in the US in 1942, he permanently migrated to India in 1971. Benninger is an important figure in Indian architecture and planning and is noted for his contributions to the evolution of critical regionalism and sustainable planning in India.

Following his departure from the position of professor at Harvard in 1971, Benninger came to Ahmedabad, where he was appointed as a Ford Foundation Advisor to the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology. In collaboration with B.V. Doshi, he co-founded the Faculty of Planning at CEPT University, where he currently serves on the Board of Management. He also founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities in 1976 with Aneeta Gokhale Benninger.

He has provided advisory services to international organizations such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for the formulation of investment and development policies. He has worked on the preparation of regional and urban development plans for Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, and various Indian states. 

Benninger is also an author in the field of architecture and urbanism. His book, "Letters to a Young Architect, " a collection of past lectures and articles, has achieved significant popularity amongst architects in India. 

Benninger's architectural studio CCBA Designs based out of Pune specialises in sustainable design solutions.

Early life and education
Christopher Benninger’s father, Dr. Lawrence Joseph Benninger, hailed from a working-class Czechoslovakian immigrant family to America and was a professor of Economics. Benninger’s mother, Ernestine Minerva Eberlein, came from a French aristocratic family that lived a Western urban lifestyle centered around music, art, drama, and architecture. 

His mother's sister, Roxane Eberlein, was in a relationship with Adlai Stevenson II, a connection that allowed Benninger to attend United Nations Security Council Meetings as an observer. Stevenson's circle of associates brought Benninger close to people such as Sir Robert Jackson, Chairman of the United Nations Relief Organization. Jackson gifted Benninger a lifetime subscription of the development journal Ekistics, introducing him to an international association of people committed to an ethical world community with a common code of development. Barbara Ward became Benninger's lifelong mentor, inviting him to the 1967 Delos Symposium in Greece. He traveled to Athens from Paris by bicycle, where he experienced less developed areas of the European countryside, including Communist Yugoslavia. The Delos Symposium featured world thought leaders, including Buckminster Fuller, Arnold J. Toynbee, Barbara Ward, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, who presented their theories and practices of development. They reviewed Barbara Ward’s plan for the first Habitat Forum at Vancouver, Doxiadis’ plan for Islamabad, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s strategies for sheltering the poor in India as a UN human settlements advisor, setting up India’s housing department. 

These influences had a powerful impact on Benninger's life. At the University of Florida, he was a student founder of the Freedom Party. He stood for integrating the university, stopping racial segregation, opening more admissions for women, ending compulsory military training on campus, and other social goals. Under Martin Luther King's leadership, he and his sister, Judith Benninger Brown, actively supported the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), entered segregated cinema halls and restaurants with their African-American friends, forcing the owners to allow access of blacks into their establishments.

Leaving Florida for Cambridge, Massachusetts, Benninger entered Harvard's Graduate School of Design as one of 12 students studying under Josep Lluis Sert, Joseph Zaleski, and Jerzy Soltan, who were all Le Corbusier collaborators. He studied art under Mirko Basaldella, the Italian sculptor there. He studied development economics under John Kenneth Galbraith, past Ambassador to India and author of The New Industrial State. He continued his post-graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under Horacio Caminos, working on the book Urban Dwelling Environments.

Personal life  
Benninger is married to Aneeta Gokhale Benninger, an environmentalist, and has one son, Lawrence Siddhartha Benninger, a development planner who has developed new digital planning analysis and management tools.

Career 
Benninger studied under Josep Lluis Sert and worked in his studio. On the invitation of B. V. Doshi, in 1971, he resigned from his tenured post at Harvard. He shifted to Ahmedabad, India, as a Ford Foundation Advisor to the Ahmedabad Educational Society, where he founded the School of Planning. In 1976, he shifted to Pune, India, where he founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities. In 1983, Benninger wrote the Theme Paper for the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 1984. In 1986, he was engaged by the Asian Development Bank to author their position paper on Urban Development, successfully arguing the case for extending financial assistance to the urban development sector. Benninger is on the Board of Editors of CITIES journal (UK).

Architectural works
Benninger's designs include the Center for Development Studies and Activities, the Mahindra United World College of India, the Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies, the YMCA International Camp, Nilshi, India, the Kirloskar Institute of Advanced Management Studies, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru and the International School Aamby. The Centre for Life Sciences Health and Medicine in Pune radically departs from his earlier work.

The Mahindra United World College of India won international recognition as the recipient of the Business Week/Architectural Record Award for Excellence in 2000. This award was sponsored jointly with the American Institute of Architects. Business Week called the Mahindra United World College of India one of the ten super structures of the world in 2000. The project also won the Designer of the Year Award  in 1999.

Benninger's work in urban design, city management and town planning resulted in his principles of intelligent urbanism, which guided his planning of the new capital of Bhutan.

Awards and recognition
Benninger is the sixth winner in India of the Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement (2006), conferred in May 2007 by the A+D and Spectrum Foundation. Six Indian architects had previously been honored with the Great Master's Award. Over several years he was recognized as one of the top ten architects in India by Construction World Magazine. He was conferred with the Singapore Lifetime Achievement Award by the Singapore-based Business Excellence & Research Group (BERG) in 2015.

Awards 
 2000 | Top 10 Best Buildings of the World | The Business Week Architectural Record Awards of American Institute of Architects, USA for Mahindra United World College of India.
 2001 | The Aga Khan Award for Architecture nomination for Mahindra United World College of India as the top 20 best projects of the world.
2002 | The World Architecture Awards, Berlin for Mahindra United World College of India as a finalist. 
2006 | Recognition for Excellence in Design, U.K. - Lifetime achievement award. 
2006 | Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement by A+D and Spectrum Foundation 
2010 | World Architecture Community, U.K. - Citation for Nabha House, Haryana Cultural Centre, New Delhi, India. 
2011 | Holcim Sustainability Awards, Switzerland for Lifecare Multi-specialty Hospital, Udgir - Certificate of Appreciation.

Publications 
 Letters to a Young Architect | 2009 

Letters to a Young Architects is a memoir of Christopher Benninger's life in India and his personal concerns about Architectural Theory and contemporary urban issues.

 Architecture for Modern India | 2015 

This is a book about the practice of Architecture in South Asia and the kinds of artifacts  CCBA Designs has produced over the past many years.

See also
Ekistics
Suzlon One Earth

References

External links

1942 births
Living people
American urban planners
Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni
MIT School of Architecture and Planning alumni
Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty
Architects from Ohio
20th-century American male artists
21st-century American male artists
20th-century American architects
People from Gainesville, Florida
New Urbanism
American emigrants to India
People from Butler County, Ohio