Christopher Charles Benninger

Dr. Lawrence Joseph Benninger(Christopher's father), hailed from a working-class Czechoslovakian immigrant family. He was a professor of economics, specializing in accounting systems, publishing articles and books, and was popular on the lecture circuit in his field. He advised the governments in Central and South America on economic development, helping to found a college for young professional managers in Medellin, Colombia.

Growing up under the influence of a “thinker-doer,” exposed Christopher Benninger to debates over capitalism versus socialism, balanced versus skewed development, and public policies for equality. Visits to his parents in Medellin, Colombia introduced him first hand to abject poverty, exploitation of immigrant populations, and the imposition of western cultural norms over ancient indigenous civilizations. As a youngster, walking amongst the barrios (slums) on the mountain slopes of South America, and adventuring deep into the rural jungles of the Andes, left an imprint in his mind of the ground realities of major global issues of development in a rapidly changing world.

In contrast, Christopher Benninger’s mother, Ernestine Minerva Eberlein, hailed from a French aristocratic family focused on a western urbane lifestyle of music, art, drama and architecture. His mother’s sister Roxane Eberlein was close to Christopher Benninger’s “uncle,” Adlai Stevenson, who was twice the Democratic nominee for the office of United States President, and was the American Ambassador to the United Nations under Kennedy. Spending impressionable days, living in the U. S. Embassy in New York, attending United Nations Security Council Meetings as an observer, and meeting other guests at the Embassy, opened up an entirely new world to Benninger’s young mind. Stevenson’s close circle of associates brought him close to personalities like Sir Robert Jackson, Chairman of the United Nations Relief Organization, and an advisor to India and Bangladesh. Sir Robert Jackson gifted Christopher Benninger a lifetime subscription of the development journal Ekistics, introducing him to an international association of people committed to an ethical world community, with a common code of development. Barbara Ward, author of India and the West, Five Ideas that Changed the World and Only One Earth, became Professor Benninger’s lifelong mentor, inviting him to the Delos Symposium in Greece (1967), where he reached by cycling 1,500 kilometers from Paris to Athens. This adventure introduced him to struggling rural peasants, and less developed areas of the European countryside, including cycling through Communist Yugoslavia, giving him a balanced view of life under Communism. At the Delos Symposium, held on-board Doxiadis’ boat in the Aegean Sea, included world thought leaders like Buckminster Fuller, Arnold J. Toynbee, Barbara Ward, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Margaret Mead and Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis presented their theories and practice of development, reviewing Barbara Ward’s plan for the first Habitat Forum at Vancouver, Doxiadis’ plan for Islamabad and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s strategies for sheltering the poor in India as a UN human settlements advisor, setting up India’s department of housing. [5]

These childhood and youthful influences had a powerful impact on Christopher Benninger’s life. At the University of Florida, he was a student founder of Freedom Party, standing for integrating the university, stopping racial segregation, opening more admissions for women, ending compulsory military training on campus, and other social goals. Under Martin Luther King’s leadership, he and his sister, Judith Benninger Brown, actively supported the Congress for Racial Equality, entering segregated cinema halls and restaurants with their coloured friends forcing the owners to allow access of coloured into their establishments.

Leaving Florida for Cambridge, Massachusetts, Christopher Benninger entered Harvard’s Graduate School of Design as one of 12 students studying under Josep Lluis Sert, Joseph Zaleski, and Jerzy Soltan, all Le Corbusier collaborators. There he studied art under Mirko Basaldella, the Italian sculptor. Life in Cambridge allowed Benninger to “walk on two legs,” following his mother’s love of high art, while pursuing his father’s socio-economic development interests. He studied development economics under John Kenneth Galbraith, past Ambassador to India and author of The New Industrial State. He continued his post graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under Horacio Caminos, working on the book Urban Dwelling Environments. Famous theorists taught from their writings like Kevin Lynch from the image of the city; Hebert Gans from The Urban Villagers, and John F. C. Turner taught how from his book The People Build with Their Own Hands. All of these teachers, their ideas and methods gifted Christopher Benninger a treasure house of foundation ideas and concepts that guided him through his entire life. Through directed readings, new knowledge systems, advanced analytical techniques, research methods and thoughtful planning and design procedures at MIT, he learned concepts which he carried on with him to India, applying them in his teaching, institution building, writing, practice as an architect and leading urban planner, and expressing them through his many lectures and writing.

Christopher Benninger is married to Aneeta Gokhale Benninger, an eminent environmentalist, and has one son Lawrence Siddhartha Benninger, a development planner who has developed new digital planning analysis and management tools.[6]

Benninger studied under Josep Lluis Sert and worked in his studio. On the invitation of B. V. Doshi, in 1971 he resigned from his tenured post at Harvard and shifted to Ahmedabad, India as a Ford Foundation Advisor to the Ahmedabad Educational Society, where he founded the School of Planning.[7] In 1976 he shifted to Pune, India, where he founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities.[8] In 1983 Benninger wrote the Theme Paper for the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 1984. In 1986 he was engaged by the Asian Development Bank to author their position paper on Urban Development, arguing successfully the case for extending financial assistance to the urban development sector. Benninger is on the Board of Editors of CITIES journal (UK).[9]

Professor Benninger evolved a complex career history, over more than six decades in Asia, as a practitioner in: architecture and urban planning; academics and institution building; international development consulting; and writing.

Career as an Architect: Early Work

• Benninger’s first architectural commission was for the Alliance française Cultural Centre at Ahmedabad which is an intricate, independent structure of exposed brick, integrated carefully into the context of a late nineteenth century college campus. There are language classrooms, an exhibit-cum-meeting hall and small library collection [1973-76]. This international cultural centre opened a window for youngsters in a traditional society into world views and a global way of thinking, which helped them later in life to create more successful enterprises and pursue higher standards as professionals.

• The SOS Children’s Village at Bawana near New Delhi is an orphanage composed of twenty houses, each accommodating ten children and a foster mother. This socially oriented project became a model for creating humane model community accommodating abandoned children. The village is ordered around a hierarchal series of courtyards at the house level, small neighbourhoods and a central plaza, having its own gober gas, water supply and self-sufficient infrastructure [1973-75]. This project created a model for SOS Children’s Villages created across the subcontinent.

• The SOS Children’s Village at Calcutta was built for Mother Teresa and a trust in Calcutta after the Bangladesh war, accommodating orphaned children and widowed women, who were trained as “house mothers.

• The Site and Services Shelter Program at Chennai (based on Benninger’s Harvard thesis) was the first project of its kind [1973-75], moving World Bank funding away from providing completed “houses” to providing opportunities for families to build their own homes on small self-owned plots, using recycled materials, local craftspeople and their own labour, incrementally according to their ability to pay for work. As a consultant to the World Bank Christopher Benninger worked with the development authority creating fifteen thousand sites with essential infrastructure at three large pockets in the city of Chennai. This was the beginning of his dream of putting a student research project into practice in solving the problems of poor households. It became a global shelter model adapted across the world by development institutions.

• As a Fulbright Program fellow Benninger gave free service to a Gujarati NGO, resulting in his being awarded the Low Income Housing Scheme at Jamnagar, Gujarat at the age of 29. This small township of growing courtyard houses, was the first Economically Weaker Section [EWS], group housing project focused on the poorest urban households to be undertaken [1972] by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation [HUDCO] of India. The project became a model for thousands of subsequent EWS projects across India in the years to come.

• The Yousufguda Low Income Township at Hyderabad [1975-1998], a township of two thousand houses, neighbourhood shopping, amenities and community facilities, was designed by Benninger, and the fees donated to start the Centre for Development Studies and Activities [CDSA]. Small, growing core houses were provided on plots of a hundred square meters with a sanitary core, which could grow and be densified. The project introduced a new concept of owner managed low income rental housing, wherein the better off amongst the poor who were low level government workers, became shelter managers, adding rooms onto their own small homes, renting them out to their family and village mates, removing landlords from the rental market, replacing them with community members.

• The Centre for Development Studies and Activities at Pune. This project socially focused institution includes classrooms, offices, a library, computer laboratory, a twenty-four room guest house, seminar facilities, with kitchen and dining area, on a fifteen acre experimental farm. The CDSA campus supports pioneering research and post graduate education in urban and rural development, creating leaders who work for the uplift of the nation. The project has been published widely in India and abroad due to its application of a local building culture using local materials like Basalt stone walls, tile rooves and Shahabad stone paving. The roof shapes guide the breezes into the rooms that are naturally lite via carefully placed fenestration. There is no air-conditioning and the project is a leading example of “sustainability by nature,” instead of by moderating wrong systems approaches, like making air conditioning more efficient, when natural systems can solve the problems.

• The Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics [GIPE], Pune, is India’s leading institute devoted to economic development and equity, founded by the stalwarts of the freedom movement, it continues to play an essential role educating world class analysis and doing fundamental research in development. Benninger sensitively added a library extension and women’s hostel, allowing more women to pursue advanced education, merging his designs with the historic campus.

• The Krishi Vignyan Kendra at Jalna, Maharashtra, continues Benninger’s philosophy as “design as a social tool,” creating a training centre for marginal and small farmers in this isolated rural region. Covering ninety acres it is a centre for arid crop farming, specializing in drought prone areas land and water management. It has been built with local stone and lime by traditional masons. Furthering Benninger’s approach of employing local skills, materials and crafts traditions.

• The Nagaloka Institute designed by Benninger at Nagpur is a residential and academic campus focused on the social up-liftment of India’s scheduled castes and creating a meditative place for the practice of Buddhism. Courses in social work are taught here as well as retreats for the study of Indian culture and spiritual practices. It employs a comprehensive site development plan integrating twenty buildings, including a dhamma hall, library and training centre, administration building, several dharmshalas, catering center, shrine, multi-purpose hall, boy’s and girl’s hostels, meditation pavilion, community living areas and extensive gardens. Benninger has done extensive work with the scheduled castes across Maharashtra, his native state in India.

• The UWC Mahindra College near Pune, became India’s first International Baccalaureate college acting as a model for many that followed. This design won numerous awards and citations internationally as a model of contextuality within a natural landscape and community design that separates vehicles from pedestrians, integrates interior spaces with the out-of-doors, and integrates with the surrounding mountain landscape, using the roof silhouettes to bring harmony between the natural setting and built form. This is a self-sufficient residential campus, with classrooms arranged around an academic quadrangle, each classroom having its own secluded courtyard garden for out-of-doors learning, housing for directors, faculty and staff; a library; catering centre; science centre; a meditation space; administration building; multi-purpose hall; an art’s centre; and amphitheatre. This large campus sits on a three hundred foot high hillock over-looking the Mula River, with a backdrop of the Sahyadri mountains. Nelson Mandela was the President of the College at the time of the campus’s design, with the concept being to impart a world view and ideas of global harmony and cooperation to students. The project introduced India to the twentieth century reality of globalism that is propelling the nation forward.

• The Institute of Social Sciences at New Delhi is a training and research institute that focuses on participatory development and village-level self-governing panchayats, reflecting amendments to the Indian Constitution that decentralizes governance. Given the bland urban setting the spaces of this institute are set in two wings, creating , on all sides of the buildings gifting three “green” atria, providing visual and noise protection. The finishes are of tooled Jaisalmer stone, on a narrow and deep site, sharing one with the neighbouring institute. Along with the other institutes noted above, the ISS established Benninger’s studio as the leader in institutional design for colleges, research institutes and the universities that followed.

• The Headquarters Building of the Cochin Refineries Limited, at Cochin, was designed as the corporate headquarters for Kerala’s largest industry. A highly advanced structure, it employed the latest energy saving technology, and energy saving devices. The entire building is enclosed with aluminium louvres so that the hot sun never touches the building, allowing sliding windows to gift fresh air to blow in off of the Kerala Backwaters. The annual energy cost savings, generating savings paying for the building in twenty-one years.

• The Centurion Hotel in Pune, India, provides shelter for travellers, disembarking at the nearby Shivajinagar Railway Station and State Transport Bus Depot. While the city was expanding into a metropolis adding many high end hotels, this became a unique model of providing middle class travellers with economical accommodation.

• Center for Life sciences Health and Medicine, India, draws inspiration from village lanes and high density, single level rural dwelling systems, giving the challenged children a safe and secure feeling. The project focused on creating better lives for mentally challenged children employing Arya Vedic and allelopathic medicines and physical therapy.

• Basant Bahar 2, The Gala Housing Scheme provides middle income families in Ahmedabad with a low rise, high density, yet individual row houses. The project includes community infrastructure, with a community “meeting house,” recreation facilities, and detailed site development. It is a model middle class community, with sharing walls on small plots, yet allowing a variety of room arrangements within the same shelter envelope.

• Vakil Farm House is the rare example of Christopher Benninger designing an individual bungalow, but the project allowed innovative ideas of “design with nature” to be explored, integrating built form into the Konkan rural context, with house is centred around an internal courtyard and each room having its intimate garden court.

Architecture: Contemporary Work

In 1993, with his partner, Akkisetti Ramprasad, they founded his first architectural firm, Christopher Charles Benninger Architects, and more recently with Akkisetti Ramprasad, Daraius Choksi and Rahul Sathe as Directors, founded CCBA Designs Private Limited.

• The Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies, was created for a Singapore shipping firm that employed only Indian mariners. It employs photovoltaic cells that are integrated within the architectural language, becoming integral with the walls and elevations of the campus buildings spread over one hundred acres. The ninety meters long, seven meters tall photovoltaic wall of the campus workshop, became one of the largest in-situ energy producing walls in the world. The institute, incorporating all of Benninger’s principles for campus planning, is now ranked number one in the Subcontinent as a centre for maritime studies.

• Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, was the first national institute of management to be established in India, yet always suffered from poor infrastructure, in comparison with other leading institutes. Christopher Benninger was engaged to fulfil growing needs of additional classrooms and hostels, while being challenged to overcome the legacy of substandard campus buildings, designed by government engineers in the early 1960’s. Benninger created a new central academic quadrangle, gifting the campus an identity and memory point, created a new island campus by creating an iconic foot bridge connecting the old with a new functional campus having single seated hostel rooms, with private balconies. The sloped glass facades surrounding the academic quadrangle, gift protection from Kolkata’s continuous rains, while allowing natural light and air movement abetted by self-driving roof ventilators. The new campus is acknowledged as the primary factor raising the IIM, C to the number one position amongst the elite management schools in the Subcontinent.

• India House, Pune, is acknowledged as an outstanding example of multi-functional urban design incorporating public art galleries, a commercial studio, residential facilities, an auditorium, and recreational facilities. In addition, more than any other structure in Pune, it showcases Indian culture, being filled with exquisite art works, integrated into the design and chorography of movement through spaces. The design reflects the city’s tradition of courtyard “wadas,” or traditional houses, that one enters through a portal, into a courtyard and then disperses on to other functional areas.

• Supreme Court of Bhutan, was designed in a matter that it became a national icon to highlight the importance of protecting the democratic Constitution that had been promulgated at the time. Moreover the building is a noteworthy example of employing what Benninger calls, “the culture of construction,” employing contextual construction methods, regional materials, local craftspeople, and traditional building management methods, resulting in respect for its classic setting aligned with the fortress monastery, that dates from the twelfth century and gifts Bhutan its national identity. The Supreme Court is part of the National Capitol Complex urban design, planned to accommodate the country’s new democratic, people centric government.[10]

• National Ceremonial Plaza [Tsechu Ground] at Thimphu, Bhutan, is a key component of Benninger’s urban design concept for the National Capitol Complex, while restoring the north wall of the fortress monastery, it brings out of the secluded monastery ceremonies onto a public venue, so that up to twenty thousand people can observe coronations and the swearing in of elected Prime Ministers. The annual Tsechu Festival is held here, which is a religious occasion famous for mask and black hat dances, honouring Guru Rinpoche, where the unfurling of a thongdrel-a large appliqué thangka depicting the Padmasambhava, cleansing viewers of their sins, is unravelled before dawn and rolled up by morning.

• United Nations House, in Thimphu Bhutan accommodates the United Nations staff and visiting development experts, who play an important role in the nation’s development.

• IIT Hyderabad, is one of the new, advanced centres of scientific and technological research and education. The Hyderabad campus integrates designs from German, Japanese and Benninger’s India studio into an international centre of excellence. Most outstanding is the Knowledge Street created by Benninger that integrates fifteen auditoria around a central interior “pedestrian street,” that houses indoor amphitheatres engaging five thousand students at a time in educational activities. This iconic structure becomes the memory point for generations of graduates and visitors, gifting a unique identity to the institute. Benninger has also designed the staff and faculty housing, the computer and software engineering centres, the science and social science buildings. The faculty housing is unique in that it accommodates three apartments on each of eighteen floors allowing each home three open sides, with no neighbouring flat able to look into their apartments.

• The Forbes Marshal Industrial Pavilion is a large manufacturing plant, housing five production lines, measuring about 110 meters square, with five high level gantries moving up and down each production bay, under twenty meters high ceilings, with skylights providing daylight. This facility was recognised as one of the ten best places to work in India, the others being air-conditioned corporate and IT buildings! The canteen, offices and sanitary facilities are in the north façade, looking through glass walls into a lush garden. The south glass wall gifts daylight, but is tempered by a large aluminium jaali. The entire facility runs in the daytime on free natural lighting, and natural ventilation obviating the use of mechanical ventilation. This building is but one of many structures on the fifty acres campus, including packaging and shipping plant, utilities centre, vendor’s workshops, scrap metal pavilion, amenities centre with a large canteen and vehicle movement areas, security areas and a large break-out garden creating a “green spine” running through the campus. The project was honoured by the Indian Institute of Architects Annual Award for Excellence.

• The Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, is a campus devoted to the mission of enhancing primary education at the village level in the less developed regions of India. The campus amplifies this noble cause providing informal learning areas, classrooms, amphitheatres, laboratories, seminar rooms, faculty and administrative offices and on-campus student and staff housing. This three million square feet campus, on eighty acres, aims eventually to house half of the twenty thousand students who are planned to be studying here. This necessitates the employment of high-rise accommodation for students and staff in forty-storied towers. The campus is a pedestrian enclave, linked together by shaded walkways, indigenous gardens, teak forests, water catchment ponds and recreational spaces. It is a rare example of a large university campus being awarded to a single architect.

• The Krohne Marshal Workshop program was in reality the rehabilitation of an old structure, including structural strengthening, while adding a new wing to the complex, upgrading all of the technology at the same time, without stopping production. The project was also an unusual case of an industrial project winning the Annual Award for Excellence from the Indian Institute of Architects.

• The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research [TIFR], Mumbai, is India’s most advanced centre of fundamental, scientific research. The original campus was built in the early 1950’s by a Bauhaus master architect, but with ad hoc, inappropriate additions added over decades. Benninger was engaged to first prepare a new master plan, with the task of integrating many new laboratories, faculty residences, married student housing and a guest house within the existing campus boasting of a splendid sea front garden. Benninger’s plan treats all of the existing trees and seafront garden as sacred precincts and works in the new facilities in the historic context of TIFR, by selecting footprint areas where new, modern laboratories are being created.

• The Lodha Belmondo Township is the most favoured apartment complex in the Pune Metropolitan area, creating a park-like ambiance on the hundred acres site, where the seventy meters tall apartment buildings cover only ten percent of the campus. Nine percent of the area is in roads and sixteen percent in ground level parking, leaving a wonderful sixty-five percent of the site open for a riverfront garden and boating, a nine hole golf course, a pocket playgrounds, a temple, and the best clubhouse in the city of Pune. The three thousand apartments are accommodated in distinguished minimalistic facades, keeping nature in the foreground and the thirty-two towers in the background. There are also villas facing the golf course and row houses and a shopping arcade integrated into this community.

• CEPT University Lecture Amphitheatre and Studio Enclave form an integral part of India’s highest ranked private university of design. This enclave includes an indoor, airconditioned amphitheatre style lecture hall for 450 students, and architectural studios, classrooms and faculty offices. The design respects the style, materiality and geometry of Balkrishna Doshi’s famous School of Architecture building created in the 1960’s. It does this by employing the same exposed brick structures, with exposed concrete work, employing the same floor to floor heights and studio widths, bringing it into harmony with the existing campus. Like the School of Architecture it leaves open the ground floor allowing a spatial flow of vision under the complex into the central campus lawn, which is an iconic feature of the CEPT campus. These structures are so arranged to create a wonderful community courtyard, terminated by a traditinal kund water tank, to collect overflow water in the monsoon. This open to sky urban courtyard is now the favourite meeting place for early morning concerts, jam sessions, dance parties, festivals and just hanging-out. The building is notable for its exposed concrete jack-arch ceilings, expansive art and mural work by Benninger in the walls and ceilings, gifting the structure a unique identity. The ceiling murals explain Le Corbusier’s Modular System and concepts in graphics like Benninger’s Principles of Intelligent Urbanism.

• New Era School in Panchgani is a junior college focused on eleventh and twelfth standard students. Sitting on a step hill slope, like a hill town, it sensitively uses classrooms, boys’ and girls’ hostels, a dining hall and kitchen, faculty housing, and administrative building to create a stepped, hillside walkway meandering through the spine of the campus. Like most of Benninger’s work this campus explores a unique design in harmony with its unique site.

• The Transport Terminus at Bhubaneshwar posed a new challenge to architecture to bring functional and cost-effective utilitarian design to city infrastructure projects. The management team of the mass transport bus system in Bhubaneshwar worked closely with the architects to create a highly functional, yet attractive, bus terminus, which includes security facilities, electric charging stations, fuel pumps, large parking areas, repair workshop bays, administrative and workers rest and canteen facilities. The project sets a new standard for high quality work environments, within a rational project cost horizon.

Christopher Benninger has authored major books and chapters in books on topics of Indian culture, architecture, development administration, regional and urban planning. His chapter on Indian architecture through history recently appeared in Connecting Through Culture, published by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Art, that was released by the Honorable Minister of External Affairs in New Delhi. Christopher Benninger is on the Board of Editors of CITIES journal (UK) and EKISTICS (Australia).

The books below were both released by Professor Kenneth Frampton at the Center for Architecture in New York City, at functions organized by the American Institute of Architects.

• Letters to a Young Architect, published in 2011, is South Asia’s most popular book authored by an architect. It found its place on the Top Ten Best Selling Books in India, over an eighteen-week period. It was subsequently translated into Chinese in Shandong, into Bengali in Dhaka, and into Gujarati in Ahmedabad. It was published in America by CreateSpace, and was the first book by an Indian Architect to be published on Kindle. As the most read book by any Indian Architect, it is popular for its articulation of the author’s philosophy, discussions of modern urban life, social and economic issues of urban planning, theories of architecture and city planning, and discourses on the search for meaning in life. It was awarded the Best Book on architecture in 2012. The Foreword was written by Padma Bhushan Balkrishna Doshi reviewing the intellectual partnership with Christopher Benninger, over fifty years. [11]

• CHRISTOPHER BENNINGER An Architecture for Modern India, was published in 2016. This book, written by Christopher Benninger, was edited by Akkisetti Ramprasad and Rosa Maria Flavo is the most comprehensive book on Christopher Benninger’s designs and plans over a half century. Akkisetti Ramprasad, who curated the book, and is the Director of the India House Art Gallery, laid out in great details Benninger’s most important architectural designs and planning projects over the past half century. It is a reference book for all architectural schools in India and is a popular source of inspiration for design focused architects and students. There are Forewords by Fumihiko Maki and Liane Lefaivre who discuss the impact of Christopher Benninger’s work on society and on architectural thinking. [12]

This book is an international portfolio publication by SKIRA Publishers in Milan, Italy, one of Europe’s leading cultural publishers since the 1930’s. In the Western Hemisphere the book is jointly published by RIZZOLI of New York, America’s leading publisher in the field of the arts and culture.

• Urban Dwelling Environments, Editor, H. Caminos, John F. C. Turner, et. al., MIT Press [Authored chapters on "El Ermitano," Lima, Peru and the "North End" of Boston], 1969.
• Mishra, R. P. Editor: Benninger, C. "Rules and Regulations," Settlement in South-East Asia, United Nations Publication, Institute of Development Studies, Mysore University, 1976.
• "Situations and Settings," International Year Book of Child Psychiatry, 1978.
• Habitat Asia, Ed., R. P. Mishra et. al., "Ahmedabad, A Variety of Urban Forms," 1979.
• Readings in Decentralized Planning, Vol. I, Edited by B.N. Yugandhar and Amitava Mukherjee, "District Planning Methods and Techniques: An Overview," Christopher C. Benninger, pages 367-430, Concept Publishing, New Delhi, 1991.
• Regional Planning and Development, Edited by K.V. Sundaram, "New Institutional Systems for Enhanced Regional Planning and Management," Christopher C. Benninger, pages 137-166, Heritage Publishers, New Delhi, 1990.
• Conflict Resolution Through Non-Violence, Edited by K.D. Gangrade and R.P. Mishra, "Development, Resources and Conflict," Christopher C. Benninger, pages 193-230, Concept Publishing, New Delhi, 1990.
• "Poona: A Modern Metropolis," in The Million Cities, edited by R.P. Mishra, 1994.
• Politics of Modern Maharashtra, “Participatory Governance,” Pune University Press with S. P. College, August 2000, Pune, India.
• Indian Medium Towns, Edited by Jaymala Diddee, “Towns in the Development Scenario,” pages 48-54, 1997.
• Economic Development Alternatives, “Participatory Governance: Some Issues,” pages 171-206, Institute of Social Sciences, 1997, New Delhi.
• Timeless Inspirator, Edited by Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, “Architecture as a Social tools,” pages 114-123, 2010.
• Urban Design Practice: An International Review, Edited by Sebastian Loew, “India,” pages 218-236, Royal Institute of British Architects, London, 2012.
• The Urban Fringe of Indian Cities, Edited by Jutta K. Dikshit, pages 64-67, “Conundrums, Visions and Devices of Urban Form,” New Delhi, 2011.
• Livable Cities from a Global Perspective, Edited by Robert Caves and Fritz Wagner, “Pune Metropolis: Unlivable Cities within a Livable Metropolis,” pages 93-107, Routledge, 2018, New York.
• Connecting Through Culture, Edited by Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Sachchidanand Joshi, pages 139-151, “Built Heritage: Quiet Flows the Ganga,” New Delhi, 2022.

Benninger is the sixth winner in India of the Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement (2006), conferred in May 2007 by the A+D and Spectrum Foundation.[13] Six Indian architects had previously been honored with the Great Master's Award.[14] Over several years he was recognized as one of the top ten architects in India by Construction World Magazine.[15] He was conferred with the Singapore Lifetime Achievement Award by the Singapore-based Business Excellence & Research Group (BERG) in 2015.[16]

• 2000 | Top 10 Best Buildings of the World | The Business Week Architectural Record Awards of American Institute of Architects, USA for Mahindra United World College of India.[17]
• 2001 | The Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Mahindra United World College of India as the top 20 best projects of the world.[18]
• 2002 | The World Architecture Awards, Berlin for Mahindra United World College of India as a finalist. [19]
• 2006 | Recognition for Excellence in Design, U.K. - Lifetime achievement award. [20]
• 2006 | Golden Architect Award for Lifetime Achievement by A+D and Spectrum Foundation [21]
• 2010 | World Architecture Community, U.K. - Citation for Nabha House, Haryana Cultural Centre, New Delhi, India. [22]
• 2011 | Holcim Sustainability Awards, Switzerland for Lifecare Multi-specialty Hospital, Udgir - Certificate of Appreciation. [23]

• Letters to a Young Architect | 2009 [24]

Letters to a Young Architects is a sensitive memoir of Christopher Benninger's life in India and his personal concerns about Architectural Theory and contemporary urban issues.[25]

• Architecture for Modern India | 2015 [26]

This is a book about the practice of Architecture in South Asia and the kinds of artifacts CCBA Designs has produced over the past many years.[27]

• Ekistics
• Suzlon One Earth

• Official website