Architect

Mahendra Raj

1924–2022 · Indian · 6 buildings on the wall

Mahendra Raj (1924–2022) was an Indian structural engineer whose solutions for exposed concrete made possible many of the boldest buildings of post-independence India. Born in Gujranwala, he studied civil engineering in Lahore, moved to India at Partition in 1947, and as a young engineer worked with Le Corbusier on the High Court and Secretariat at Chandigarh. After a master's degree at the University of Minnesota and work in New York, he founded his own consultancy in Bombay in 1960. Over six decades he worked on more than 250 projects with architects including B. V. Doshi, Charles Correa and Raj Rewal.

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With Correa he built the Hindustan Lever pavilion in New Delhi (1961), sprayed concrete folded like a crumpled sheet of paper. The Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts in New Delhi (1969) and Akbar Bhawan (Akbar Hotel) (1970) were designed with Shiv Nath Prasad. The Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi (1972), designed with Raj Rewal, was one of the largest space-frame structures in the world, which the New York Times called a "brutalist masterpiece". Mahendra Raj's work is studied for how engineers shape architecture.

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