'A Call to Return: A Journey with Didi Contractor' offers a record of the life, values, and creations of an extraordinary self-taught woman architect. Born in the United States to Expressionist painters in 1929, Didi met an Indian student at college, married, and moved with him to India in 1951. She remained in India for the next seventy years and became a legend to many: as a painter, interior decorator (particularly of the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur), furniture and textile designer, and early proponent of solar energy.
In her forties, Didi moved to Kangra in Himachal Pradesh where she studied the vernacular traditions; in her sixties, she began designing adobe buildings with respect for local materials, traditions, and environments. By her eighties, she was gaining students from India and across the world, becoming widely celebrated for her visionary contributions to vernacular architecture, as a radical female outsider to the architectural establishment. During those three decades, Didi has trained artisans and architects inculcating ecological values and reviving local skills. She was featured in multiple articles, theses, a book ('An Adobe Revival: Didi Contractor’s Architecture' (2018)), as well as two documentary films ('Didi Contractor: Marrying the Earth to the Building' (2017), 'Earth Crusader' (2016)), Didi was honoured with multiple awards including the Nari Shakti Puraskar (2019).
'A Call to Return' emerges from a collection of transcripts of conversations that Didi had with students and admirers in the last decade of her life. With her passing in 2021, the emerging transcripts coupled with published interviews and articles continue to offer a source of knowledge and inspiration for diverse undertakings. Collated by her student Lakshmi Swaminathan, this book covers Didi’s biography, philosophy, approach to architecture, ecology, tradition, and the creative process. Each chapter moves between Didi's words and anecdotes of her everyday life.
