Sangath
Balkrishna Doshi’s office in Ahmedabad, India, feels more like a community centre or a college campus than it does an architectural practice. An improbable oasis of calm on the furiously busy Thaltej Road, Sangath is a leafy and meditative compound.
Photography: Edmund Sumner
Sangath
Clearly designed with Ahmedabad’s ferocious climate in mind, the office complex is clad in glittering white tile fragments to reflect the sun. And with half its height buried below ground level, all that is visible is a series of low vaulted chambers. Windows and doors are small and deeply recessed, and oversized water spouts channel rainwater into cascading tanks and an underground reservoir.
Photography: Edmund Sumner
Ahmedabad School of Architecture
Ahmedabad School of Architecture built in 1962, now the CEPT University, Centre for Environment Planning & Technology, was founded and designed by Doshi. The concrete and brick buildings feature open plan layouts with a system of courtyards and linking staircases creating a campus.
Photography: Edmund Sumner
Ahmedabad School of Architecture
The architecture shows influence of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn and traditional Indian urban planning. Doshi trained at Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris – yet halfway through his life Doshi abruptly traded the rational for the fairy tale, the international for the local, and became, in effect, a completely different architect.
Photography: Edmund Sumner
Tagore Memorial Hall
This brutalist concrete masterpiece was built in 1966 as a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore, writer and poet. Located in Ahmedabad on the sandy banks of the Sabarmati River, the hall features an auditorium seating 700 within a seating-bowl structure independent from the frame of the building.
Photography: Edmund Sumner
Tagore Memorial Hall
The entrance lobby shows the inverted stepped seating of the bowl-shaped auditorium with decorative interior paintings and hangings included within the architectural design of the space.
Photography: Edmnud Sumner
