This article explores architect BV Doshi’s final and only project outside India, the Doshi Retreat at Vitra Campus in Germany. Created with Khushnu and Sönke Hoof, the project uses recycled XCarb® steel, brass, and sound to shape an immersive spatial rhythm. The piece traces how this final work extends Doshi’s lifelong pursuit of architecture, rooted in material honesty, movement, and human experience.
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi belonged to a generation of Indian architects who rewired the relationship between modernism and everyday life. Trained by Le Corbusier and influenced by Louis Kahn, Doshi turned those lessons toward questions that mattered in India: housing at scale, public institutions, and architecture as civic practice. His work from Sangath, his Ahmedabad studio, to the Aranya low-cost housing in Indore and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore insists on economy, craft and human scale. These projects, and his commitment to architectural education, earned him the Pritzker Prize in 2018 and a reputation as a builder of social as well as formal wisdom.
That sense of purpose and material honesty is also what guided Doshi’s last design, now completed at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein: the Doshi Retreat — the first building by Doshi to be realised outside India, and the last project he worked on before his death in 2023. The commission began as a simple invitation: to design a 'shrine' of sorts for a campus already threaded with works by leading architects like Frank Gehry, Tadao Andō, and Buckminster Fuller. Doshi conceived the Retreat as a short, intentional pilgrimage — a path that leads the visitor inward.
Formally, the Retreat unspools as a gently sinking walkway that begins above ground and slopes below the surface into a circular, open-to-the-sky chamber. The geometry is curved with a sinuous corridor whose turns are measured to compress and release the body’s pace, so the architecture itself modulates attention. The project draws on images Doshi shared with his collaborators — his granddaughter Khushnu Panthaki Hoof and her husband Sönke Hoof — including a dream of two interweaving cobras and references to Kundalini energy; these metaphors became spatial decisions for this project.
Materiality is where the Retreat speaks most clearly. The primary shell is forged and formed XCarb® steel — a low-carbon, recycled steel supplied by ArcelorMittal that will develop a warm, controlled patina over time. Within the subterranean sequence, concave recesses house a subtle sound system that diffuses gongs and ceramic-flute tones; at the chamber’s crown, a hand-hammered brass mandala, crafted in India, refracts light and anchors the space. Gravel underfoot, the cool weight of steel walls and low, resonant sound together produce an architecture shaped by movement and sensoriality.
The Doshi Retreat insists on the same discipline that marked his career — an architecture attentive to movement, material and it's relationship with humanity. In translating those preoccupations for a northern European campus, the project closes a circle: a lifetime of work rooted in Indian conditions now reaches, uncompromisingly, beyond them.
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