Louis Kahn, Institute of Public Administration, Ahmedabad, India, 1963

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While Louis Kahn was designing the National Assembly Building in Bangladesh in 1962, he was approached by an admiring Indian architect, Balkrishna Doshi, to design the 60 acre campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India. Much like his project in Bangladesh, he was faced with a culture enamored in tradition, as well as an arid desert climate.

For Kahn, the design of the institute was more than just efficient spatial planning of the classrooms; he began to question the design of the educational infrastructure where the classroom was just the first phase of learning for the students.

In 1961, a visionary group of industrialists collaborated with the Harvard Business School to create a new school focused on the advancement of specific professions to advance India’s industry.  Their main focus was to create a new school of thought that incorporated a more western-style of teaching that allowed students to participate in class discussions and debates in comparison to the traditional style where students sat in lecture throughout the day.

It was Balkrishna Doshi that believed Louis Kahn would be able to envision a new, modern school for India’s best and brightest.  Kahn’s inquisitive and even critical view at the methods of the educational system influenced his design to no longer singularly focus on the classroom as the center of academic thought.  The classroom was just the formal setting for the beginning of learning; the hallways and Kahn’s Plaza became new centers for learning.

The conceptual rethinking of the educational practice transformed a school into an institute, where education was a collaborative, cross-disciplinary effort occurring in and out of the classroom.

In much of the same ways that he approached the design of the National Assembly Building in Bangladesh, he implemented the same techniques in the Indian Institute of Management such that he incorporated local materials (brick and concrete) and large geometrical façade extractions as homage to Indian vernacular architecture.  It was Kahn’s method of blending modern architecture and Indian tradition into an architecture that could only be applied for the Indian Institute of Management.

Bibliography:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn

http://www.archdaily.com/83697/ad-classics-indian-institute-of-management-louis-kahn

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Institute_of_Public_Admin.html

Reviewed by :

Rémi Farwati, Elena Giannitsopoulos, Nadir Bouchene, Adela Plasilova