Tamil Nadu | Auroville architect Roger Anger’s centenary year spotlights the visionary who sought simplicity in design

Roger Anger, whose centenary falls on March 24, 2023, had realised over a hundred high-rise residential schemes in Paris and was known for individualising collective housing, with rhythmic human-scaled facades and sculptural plasticity. It was Mirra Alfassa (the Mother), Sri Aurobindo’s collaborator, who invited 42-year-old Roger Anger to be the chief architect of Auroville near Puducherry. In her letter to the acclaimed Parisian architect in 1965, she expressed her joy and no surprise that he had accepted, as she had always felt him to be the L’homme de ce Projet, meaning ‘the man of this project’.

It was Mirra Alfassa (the Mother), Sri Aurobindo’s collaborator, who invited 42-year-old Roger Anger to be the chief architect of Auroville near Puducherry.

In her letter to the acclaimed Parisian architect in 1965, she expressed her joy and no surprise that he had accepted, as she had always felt him to be the  L’homme de ce Projet, meaning ‘the man of this project’. Already in 1938, she had ushered in India’s modern architecture period by inviting architect Antonin Raymond from Japan to design the Aurobindo Ashram’s dormitory, ‘Golconde’.

I first met Roger (1923-2008) in Auroville in 1990, and our association grew progressively as he asked me to develop urban design details for specific areas, including the city centre, and later while preparing the township’s approved Master Plan Perspective 2025. With time, our conversations got deeper as I authored a book on him.

Anger, whose centenary falls on March 24, had realised over a hundred high-rise residential schemes in Paris and was known for individualising collective housing, with rhythmic human-scaled facades and sculptural plasticity. His rigorous experimentation spanned architecture’s various scales, from the urban to the interior.

Neither the founder of Auroville nor the architect was satisfied with Chandigarh’s urban vision as an example of a city of the future although Anger admired Le Corbusier’s genius.

Instead of celebrating newfound individualism of emerging post-industrial lifestyles, Anger’s visions for urbanism had included the necessary course correction, repositioning architecture and city-making as essentially social endeavours that were human-centric, steering the evolution of human society.

For Auroville, he began by raising the question, “Shall we allow the presence of cars?!” and warned, “Probably in just a few years India will know, same as Europe and the U.S., the major urban problem the automobile is. The reign of cars has conditioned the urbanism of the 20th century and continues to tyrannize it”.