Mahendra Raj (Gujranwala, 1924) graduated in civil engineering from the Punjab College of Engineering and Technology (Lahore) in 1946. Soon after, he joined the Punjab Public Works Department and was attached to the Soil Stabilization Department to learn the art of using stabilized soil in buildings and roads. After Partition, he moved to Shimla where he was in charge of maintaing all government properties and the Shimla-Kalka road. By 1952, he was transferred to Chandigarh where he became Executive Engineer and worked both on the High Court and Secretariat buildings by Le Corbusier. "Every day was a day of learning something new, which I enjoyed considerably. It was a delight to study the American codes and design aids of Portland Cement Association, and apply this knowledge to the design and detail of one part of the High Court or the other and prepare construction drawings." After the work in Chandigarh was completed he moved to the US and in 1956 he obtained a Master degree in Structures at the University if Minnesota and a CE at Columbia. In New York he worked for three years at Amman & Whitney to gain expertise in large-span structures.
The Structure. Works of Mahendra Raj. Zurich: Park Books, 2016.
"The construction of large-span structures was a carefully staged process and meant analyzing the different structures that emerged due to changing forces and shifting loads at different stages of construction." When he moved back to India in 1959 and started his own firm "the construction of these complex and large buildings, with no previous precedence and with the rudimentary and manual construction technology of the early 1960s to 1980s, required instilling courage and confidence in the contractors, which was done through detailed communication. The notes helped analyze and resolve issues such as economy of time, material and construction resources, and reduce the use of scaffolding and other materials while ensuring the required strength for the setting concrete."
Raj's drawings resonate the words of Pier Luigi Nervi: "The pattern of steel should always have an aesthetic quality and give the impression of being a nervous system capable of bringing life to a dead mass of concrete."
"Engineering is not an exact science. As a structural engineer, you try to idealize the structure, understand its behaviour and then make some assumptions on your own. You can never be sure that the properties will, in fact, follow the assumptions, and you are not sure of the loads, the placement of materials and the strength; yet you are required to design a building and put reinforcement in it - very accurately. Analysis and design have a large number of grey and dark areas, but you can't say that you won't design something or the other for this reason; you have to decide upon some strength and materials on the basis of assumptions and experience."
For an overview of Mahendra Raj's work see also MRC.
