Hafeez Contractor

Hafeez Contractor
Born 1950 (age 65–66)
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Nationality Indian
Alma mater University of Mumbai, Columbia University
Occupation Architect
Practice Zoroastrianism
Buildings 23 Marina-Dubai, Imperial Towers-Mumbai, Infosys GEC & SDB 4- Mysore, ICICI Headquarters, Hyderabad

Hafeez Contractor (born 1950) is an Indian architect.[1] He was member of the Bombay Heritage Committee and New Delhi Lutyens Bungalow Zone Review Committee.

He was awarded Padma Bhushan in January 2016 by the Government of India.

Early life

Hafeez Contractor was born in Mumbai in a Parsi family. He earned his graduate diploma in architecture from the University of Mumbai in 1975 and completed his graduation and MS in Architecture from Columbia University, New York City on a Tata scholarship.[2] He studied at the Academy of Architecture in Mumbai and then went on to pursue a post graduation degree from Columbia University in New York.

Career

The Imperial Towers

Hafeez Contractor started working in 1968 as an apprentice with his uncle T. Khareghat even while working toward his architecture degree. In 1977, he became the associate partner in the firm. Between 1977 and 1980, he was a visiting faculty member at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai.

Architect

He designed The Imperial I and II, the tallest buildings in India.[3]

Despite being one of India's most successful architects, he publicly stated that Western standards for "green" buildings are a joke arguing that the problems present in India require unique solutions and the country should not blindly follow the west,[4] although according to an article in the New York Times, one of his works were cited to look like the St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.[5]

The man who draws India- The Slumdog Millionaire Architect

"The offices of Hafeez Contractor, India’s most commercially successful architect, are on Bank Street, just around the corner from the Mumbai Stock Exchange. The prestige of the address, however, is undermined by the beleaguered state of the Raj-era building. In the reception area, a flat-screen displaying a loop of Contractor’s futuristic projects is mounted on a cracked, stained plaster wall. Upstairs, hundreds of designers sit shoulder to shoulder at long rows of computer monitors, packed in almost as mercilessly as on the commuter trains that ferry them to work each day. The office has struggled to keep up with the firm’s expanding work force and is perpetually under construction. Staff members were known to walk 15 minutes to the five-star Taj Mahal Palace Hotel rather than brave the employee-restroom line. Contractor has vastly increased his square footage by building a loft, but a day at the office now entails ducking through archways, dodging stray wires and ignoring the wail of power saws.From this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of 21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched poverty that looks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.” More than anyone else, it is Contractor who is responsible for building those “islands.” He has done this in part by designing elaborate corporate campuses on the outskirts of cities, like his projects for Infosys, the Bangalore-based technology giant that employs more than 160,000 people. For Infosys, he built a software-development park outside Pune that features two avant-garde office orbs, which Contractor calls his “dew drops,” and a 337-acre corporate educational facility near Mysore that is laid out around a columned structure Contractor designed to look like St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. In New Delhi’s D.L.F. CyberCity, Contractor constructed a sprawling office development for blue-chip companies including Microsoft, KPMG, Lufthansa and American Express. His most famous project is Hiranandani Gardens, in suburban Mumbai, not far from the airport, where Contractor designed the domestic terminal. The 250-acre mixed-use neighborhood achieved some measure of fame when it served as the backdrop for India’s breakneck development in the 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire.” In one of the movie’s more famous scenes, a character gazes out at the neighborhood’s skyline, dominated by what appear to be Greek temples stretched 33 stories into the air, and declares, “India’s at the center of the world now."

In an interview with the New York Times,[6] he was profiled for his influence on modern architecture in India and as Bollywood's "Starchitect". According to the article, "Stylistically, Contractor’s buildings have no signature, save a penchant for glitz." Contractor said, "I always say... that you definitely like a woman with lipstick, rouge, eyelashes. So if you make your building more beautiful with some appliqués, there’s nothing wrong." Instead of a style, what most unifies Contractor’s projects is that they actually get built.

Architecture has long been described as the most political of the arts, and the key to Contractor’s success is as much his mastery of the policy levers of the world’s largest democracy as his talents as a designer. Combining the skills of an architect with those of a political operative, Contractor has had the ability to read new regulations and immediately find exploitable loopholes and work behind the scenes to shape legislation that serves his business. He is known to cultivate friends in high places, and he has learned to time his public statements judiciously. Most crucially, he has mastered the art of rhetoric, of phrasing his private interests in terms of the public interest.

Projects

Discovery Offices, one of his green buildings
Lokhandwala Minerva, Mumbai

Master Planning

Residential

Affordable Housing

Commercial, SEZ, Corporate & IT Campus

Institutional

Hospitals

Shopping Malls

Hospitality

Public

Gallery

  1. ↑ TNN, Dec 18, 2010, 09.53pm IST (2010-12-18). "Architect for conserving rare heritage monuments - The Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
  2. ↑ "Building dreams". Indian Express. 1998-12-30. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
  3. ↑ "From 50 floors to 80 plus, Mumbai grows taller". IBN Live. 2010-02-03. Retrieved 2011-03-03.
  4. ↑ "Green buildings are a joke: Hafeez Contractor". The Times Of India. 2011-09-14.
  5. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/magazine/the-slumdog-millionaire-architect.html
  6. ↑ Daniel Brooks (June 19, 2014). "The Slumdog Millionaire Architect". New York Times.

External links

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