28/04/2026
Our Director, Adrian, had yearned to visit this building since he came across archive photographs of it in the RIBA picture library 30 years ago. He finally got there last week.
St Martin’s Garrison Church in New Delhi was designed by Arthur Shoosmith, who was out there to supervise the construction of Edwin Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House down the road. As the pics show, he chose to use nothing but bricks - 3.5 million of them. This singular approach was supported by the great man himself who advised: ‘My Dear Shoo, Bricks! A building of one material is for some strange reason much more noble than one of many. It may be the accent it gives of sincerity, the persistence of texture and definite unity.… Don’t use, whatever you do, bricks on edge or any fancy stuff. It only destroys scale and promotes triviality…. The Romans did it! Why should not Britons? You will get a fine wall, and their mass, proportion, with precious fenestration, will do the rest.’ Too bloomin right.
The church’s centenary is coming up in three years’ time. It looks as magnificent as it did in those archive photos, albeit now thoroughly bedded into its context of lush green gardens and school playgrounds; it is still in use with three separate congregations every Sunday. It is, IMHO, as powerfully resonant as the works of those other Europeans who did their stuff in India later in the century - le Corbusier and Kahn. This is not to diminish their achievements in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh, just to say that Shoosmith got there first in his small but mighty way. Corb eschewed adornment and defined architecture as the “masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”; Kahn eulogised brick and its desire to be an arch. This building is a prescient embodiment of both their manifestos.
