Louis Kahn-Designed Dorms in India May Be Razed

A world-class architectural-preservation controversy is brewing in India, the place the administration on the Indian Institute of Administration in Ahmedabad had introduced plans to raze 14 of 18 pupil dormitory buildings designed by the architect Louis Kahn and constructed within the 1960s and 1970s.

After a neighborhood and worldwide outcry, an internet assembly to start searching for new bids for the demolition was canceled.

Kahn, one of the crucial vital American architects in historical past, is finest identified for masterworks just like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the Kimbell Artwork Museum in Fort Value, in addition to the Philips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H., and the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, N.Y. (He additionally famously had three families, talked to bricks and died on the men’s room floor in Penn Station.)

The uncovered red-brick pupil dormitories in Ahmedabad are integral to the institute’s holistic campus design and are thought of among the many architect’s most interesting works — with repetition, geometry and the manipulation of sunshine and shadow. They exemplify Kahn’s capacity to design buildings in “response to the cultures, climates and traditions of their respective locations,” stated the historian William J.R. Curtis, who has written op-eds for Architectural Record and The Architectural Review in help of the dorms’ preservation.

In a press release, the World Monuments Fund known as on the institute’s administration to rethink, citing the mission’s affect on the “trendy growth of Indian greater training,” and the environmentally delicate design that continues to be an instance of tips on how to construct for a neighborhood local weather. “Conceived as an ensemble, the Kahn campus have to be preserved in its entirety to guard the aesthetic, practical and symbolic values imbued inside,” the assertion stated.

Supporters of the dorms embody the Council of Structure, India, in addition to architects and teachers together with the Pritzker Structure Prize laureates Rafael Moneo, Alejandro Aravena and Balkrishna Doshi (the architect who introduced Kahn to India within the early 1960s), who’ve posted an open letter. A Change.org petition had over 12,000 signatures on Thursday afternoon.

The administration institute’s director, Errol D’Souza, defended the demolition plans in a letter to alumni, calling the constructions “unlivable” due to points together with “concrete and slabs falling from the roofs”; brick deterioration inflicting cracking and water seepage; and structural points ensuing from a 2001 earthquake.

The college had beforehand commissioned an intensive restoration mission for the buildings, however reversed course with a plan to construct anew.