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 Bangladesh project, he was faced with a culture enamored with tradition and an arid desert climate.

For Kahn, the institute’s design 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 advancing specific professions to promote India’s industry. Their main focus was to create a new school of thought that incorporated more Western-style teaching that allowed students to participate in class discussions and debates compared to the traditional style where students sat in lectures throughout the day.

Balkrishna Doshi believed Louis Kahn would envision a new, modern school for India’s best and brightest. Kahn’s interests and even critical views on the educational system’s methods 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 learning; the hallways and Kahn’s Plaza became new education centers.

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

The large facade omissions are abstracted patterns found within the Indian culture positioned to act as light wells and a natural cooling system protecting the interior from India’s harsh desert climate. Even though the porous, geometric façade acts as a filter for sunlight and ventilation, the porosity creates new gathering spaces for the students and faculty to come together.

Together, Kahn’s rethinking of India’s educational system’s traditional principles, along with a group of ambitious industrialists, helped create one of the most sought-after, influential, and elite business schools in the world. Unfortunately, Kahn could not see his design come to fruition as he had died in New York City in 1974 before the project was finished. However, there is no question whether or not his design had utterly transformed how modern architecture establishes itself in one’s culture.

Text provided by the architect.

Concept and planning :

1. At the very onset of the design, it was decided to place the house around the trees without disturbing any of them, which naturally led to a meandering fragmented form of the house.

2. An existing pit in the land on site has been made into a sunken courtyard in front of the house. Trees are grown within almost bringing the green foliage into the house.

3. The house is planned as a large studio space with just one bedroom for the couple. Two guest rooms are stacked in a separate building as an annex to the main house.

Walls and Structure :

1. Walls and structures are placed so as to become sculptural elements and not on a particular grid. The house is a large column-free space, with a seamless flat concrete ceiling with no internal walls that hinder this concrete volume.

2. Three large sloping, cantilevered overhangs defy concepts of structural stability. These are meticulously designed to offer shade to the external movement around the house but also add to an otherwise flat form of the house.

3. The walls of the house range from 450mm thick to 1000mm thick. The thickness of the walls act as a natural insulator making the insides of the house much cooler than the outside.

4. The thickness also allows opportunities to use the volume of the walls to accommodate storage within, recess windows for waterproofing, and in this case the entire cooling system for the house as well.

5. An active cooling method drawing its inspiration from ancient ways of catching cool breeze into spaces, this method of air conditioning uses the thickness of the walls to its advantage, carving out small ducts within them which carry this cool air and circulate it through the large volume of the house in turn also cooling the walls in concrete.

Materials- Concrete : Recycled : Experimental :

1. The house is true to one material; that is cast concrete. The tactile walls are all cast with different experiments in concrete that render specific textures to each of the walls. The experiments include debris cast concrete; waterjet concrete and form finish concrete with pigments.

2. The thick walls of the main house in concrete are cast with debris from the site to reduce the usage of material and render a certain rough texture when the walls are ground and finished. The debris includes stone chips, broken bricks, and at times large pieces of waste stone embedded in the walls almost like a relic.

3. The guest block is cast in pink concrete which is made by adding brick powder in it. This gives a slight blush color to the guest block against the cold grey of the main house.

4. The floors are made by recycling waste stone pieces cast in concrete terrazzo. Black kadappa, white marble, and pink marble are all used in different areas in different forms to make the flooring a large artwork. Bedroom and bathroom floors are done in small broken tile chips laid in cement that gleam and reflect the sunlight brightening up these spaces.

5. Light is a very important building material in all our work. The house has multiple playful skylights, all of the different shapes, sizes, and quirky floors, however all strategically placed to catch the light throughout the day. Sharp rays of light from these fall on the floor creating almost a peek-a-boo of various light patches and shadows throughout the entire house.

The house of concrete experiments is in fact an experiment in all its aspects, its planning, construction, structural design, material usage, the play of light and shadow, and its services. The details incorporated in the architecture and interiors of this house create continual intrigue making the otherwise overwhelming space very intimate and liveable. The house is one that cannot be photographed, but a space that needs to be encountered and experienced.

Text provided by the architect.