Tshechu National Ceremonial Plaza, Thimphu, Bhutan (Christopher Charles Benninger Architects).THE Urban Design Centre of Western Australia is hosting a visitor from India on April 9, 2010. Christopher Charles Benninger, architect and planner, was born in the US in 1942, and has lived and worked in India for the past 40 years.

Christopher Charles Benninger: “Architecture is a curious craft. One structure may follow all the laws of design, yet be worthless, while still others may break all the principles and be profound. A building may be bad without doing anything wrong, while yet another work may have to sin against architecture to reach perfection.”Recently presented with the ArchiDesign Architect of the Decade Award in India, Benninger will be presenting a public lecture at the Urban Design Centre of Western Australia on the theme ‘A Timeless Way of Living’. This lecture will cover the current work by the studio of Christopher Charles Benninger Architects on the Capital City Plan for Thimphu, a new town in eastern Bhutan, its National Secretariat complex and the architecture and culture of this Himalayan Kingdom. On the theme of critical regionalism, Benninger will also present various large architectural campus designs that CCBA has developed in India as part of a modern interpretation of cultural continuity in local architecture.

He studied City Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed his Master of Architecture at Harvard University, where he was later Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

YMCA International Camp Site, Nilshi village, Western India (Christopher Charles Benninger Architects).Benninger went to India on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1968, and again in 1971 as a Ford Foundation consultant to set up the School of Urban Planning at CEPT, Ahmedabad, jointly with architect Balkrishna V. Doshi. In 1976 he founded the Centre for Development Studies and Activities in Pune and has since lived and worked in India and the South Asian region on a “self-imposed exile”.

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