The audacious man behind the iconic Bombay Stock Exchange building

At the cusp of the 1990s, on every working day, I took an elevator to the 26th floor of the second most-photographed building in India. This was the Bombay Stock Exchange building, and I was privileged to work for its architect, Chandrakant Patel.

His design studio, the Architectural Research Unit, offered views and inspiration, as ribbon windows swept over the panorama of the harbour across the bay to the hills on the mainland. Patel passed away late in April. I take this moment to ruminate on his times through the building he is most known for.

Lesser known in the canon of modernists who designed the buildings of independent India, Patel’s work bookends a period that started with the Nehruvian vision of what the Nation State was to look like and ended with liberalisation in 1990.

Chandrakant Patel graduated from Sir JJ College of Architecture, a contemporary of Bombay architects Kamu Iyer and Rusi Khambatta. In 1958, he attended the International Congress of Architects in Moscow as the only Indian representative, and went on to work for Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish architect and designer.

Patel imbibed Aalto’s vision of architecture as a complete work of art, with functionalism and materiality as its rationale. I recall Patel’s resistance...

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