280px, Narayanhity Palace Museum (formerly Narayanhity Royal Palace) in Kathmandu,_Nepal_.html" ;"title="Nepal.html" ;"title="Kathmandu, Nepal">Kathmandu, Nepal ">Nepal.html" ;"title="Kathmandu, Nepal">Kathmandu, Nepal Benjamin Kauffman Polk (18 May 1916 – 23 April 2001) was an American designer and architect, best known for his work in India and Nepal. Polk was raised by his parents, Harry Herndon Polk (30 November 1875 – 28 August 1949) and Alice Kauffman (12 August 1878 – 30 July 1973) in Des Moines, Polk County, Iowa. He practiced architecture in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

from 1948 to 1952, where he met his future wife and companion, Emily Despain (née Isaacs). The couple moved to India in 1952, where they would remain until September 1963. Polk designed both in the public and private sector. In 1955 he formed an association with another expatriate American architect, Joseph Allen Stein, later adding civil engineer Binoy K. Chatterjee, to form the firm of Stein, Chatterjee and Polk. Polk and Chatterjee left the firm in 1961, moving their new office to Calcutta named Chatterjee and Polk. Notable among his work include the

Times of India ''The Times of India'', also known by its abbreviation ''TOI'', is an Indian English language, English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the List of newspapers in India by circulation, t ...

main building, Buddhist Tripitaka Library in

Rangoon Yangon ( my, ရန်ကုန်; ; ), formerly spelled as Rangoon, is the capital of the Yangon Region and the largest city of Myanmar (also known as Burma). Yangon served as the capital of Myanmar until 2006, when the military government ...

, the

Royal Palace This is a list of royal palaces, sorted by continent. Africa * Abdin Palace, Cairo * Al-Gawhara Palace, Cairo * Koubbeh Palace, Cairo * Tahra Palace, Cairo * Menelik Palace * Jubilee Palace * Guenete Leul Palace * Imperial Palace- Massa ...

for His Majesty the

King of Nepal The King of Nepal (traditionally known as the Mahārājdhirāja i.e. Great King of Kings; it can also be translated as "Sovereign Emperor" ( ne, श्री ५ महाराजधिराज)) was Nepal's head of state and monarch from 1768 ...

Kathmandu , pushpin_map = Nepal Bagmati Province#Nepal#Asia , coordinates = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = , subdivision_type1 = Province , subdivision_name1 = Bagmati Prov ...

, and the beautiful

Jallianwala Bagh Jallianwala Bagh is a historic Bāgh (garden), garden and ‘memorial of national importance’ close to the Harmandir Sahib, Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, Punjab, India, Punjab, India, preserved in the memory of those wounded and killed in ...

Memorial in

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. In all these projects he was assisted by Indian architect Suraj P Subherwal. Suraj P. Subherwal, later, won a National Architectural Competition to become Architect of XXXVIII International Eucharistic Congress held at Bombay in December 1964 and attended by Pope Paul VI. Polk returned to the United States in 1968, where he took up teaching architecture at the California Polytechnic University in

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. He was the author of several books, primarily concerning architecture, and most notably "Buddhist Monastic Architecture in Sri Lanka" and "The India Notebook," which he wrote with his wife. He died due to natural causes in 2001.

References

*http://www.sundeepbooks.com/servlet/sugetbiblio?bno=003918 *https://web.archive.org/web/20070203012844/http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/cedarchives/profiles/bpolk.htm 20th-century American architects 1916 births 2001 deaths {{US-architect-stub