Hasmukh Patel was at the forefront of modern architecture in India. His completed projects include over 300 buildings of many types: private bungalows, theatres, speculative office buildings, banks, schools, religious buildings, factories and many others. He did not speak often about his architectural philosophy. Yet his buildings are full of ideas. In his houses, he explored how traditional Gujaratis could be made comfortable in a modern home. His banks explored how large institutional buildings could contribute to extending the public realm. Each of his projects is a built manifesto, a testing of his ideas at full scale through construction. These explorations demonstrate a profoundly pragmatic approach to design. He focused on practical problem solving, building to address the issues of a modernising Indian population. He invented a contextually relevant, modern architectural idiom suitable for India, and combined this with an intuitive ability to make beautiful spaces. Hasmukh Patel?s practice bridged rapid changes in social and economic policy. These directly affected the types of buildings being constructed and their procurement and financing. As his practice grew, the state sponsored nation-building of the Nehru years gave way to the rise of speculative buildings financed by private developers and in turn to the sweeping changes unleashed by liberalisation. He navigated the challenges and opportunities each shift provided, bringing his talents to bear equally on institutional, private and speculative projects. Hasmukh Patel?s work helped define modern architecture in India. This book documents and discusses sixty of his buildings, many for the first time. Catherine Desai is an architect and graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has had a long association with India, first visiting to study the country?s modern buildings in the early 1990s and returning regularly to continue her research. Her knowledge of modern Indian buildings encompasses both well known and obscure work and she is an advocate for the preservation of India?s modern architectural heritage.