Book: ‘Letters to a Young Architect’

Architect Christopher Benninger’s path, like many in his field, started with encountering Frank Lloyd Wright—in his case, through a book gifted to him in 1956, when he was 14. Since then, he’s founded the Centre for Development Studies in India and his projects have been finalists in the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the World Architecture Awards. Now 69, and having practiced in India for 40 years, Benninger has written a memoir that is more of an exposition of the books and people that influenced his philosophy than a straight chronology. In Letters to a Young Architect Benninger shares his life’s insights, which were heavily influenced by Eastern thought, with Western readers. (When he first settled in India in 1971, he had no phone, TV, or Internet. “I was fortunate to ‘miss’ the entire love affair with Postmodernism,'” he says.) His many aphorisms—”It’s better to be what you are than to seem what you are not”—may inspire the young, and reinspire the veteran. But for the young, he has a single message: “I have come to ask you, young architects, to Grab the Flame of Modernism and to Run.” • $12; Christopher Charles Benninger Architects, July 2011