The IIM is spread over 67 acres of lush greenery in Vastrapur and was designed by the famed

American architect Louis I. Kahn. He conceived the design as a blend of austerity and majesty. He

included spaces for casual interaction while achieving a balance between modernity and tradition

that captured the spirit of timeless India. The broad airy corridors, the amphitheatre like

classrooms and transition spaces in the complex enhance interaction among the faculty, students

and visitors. His design was given shape by a team of architects from the National Institute of

Design. This modern residential institute is built entirely in traditional brick construction. Its

contemporary design is responsive to local climate and is now a much admired campus. It has

inspired generations of students to achieve excellence while retaining humility.

The highlight of the campus is the Louis Kahn Plaza, the sheer magnificence

of which has played host to major interactions and celebrations. It is

surrounded by the faculty wing, library and classrooms from three sides.

This close knit feeling supports each individual's personal and professional

growth, fosters a sense of community within the school and encourages them to form close

working relationships with professors and other students. The result is a highly personalised

environment that drives students not just to learn, but to think.

Louis Kahn is one of the great architects of the 20th century. With his tremendous drive, he became an architect of international repute; an enormously charismatic man who easily impressed those around him. Numerous stories are circulating about this free-spirited man; who is Louis Kahn? 

At the end of his life, Kahn had debts of $464,423.83, due to his staff and the engineers with whom he worked closely. He left more than 6,000 drawings behind, of which the University of Pennsylvania became guardian in 1977. His legacy continues to live on; a start was recently made with the construction of another Kahn design: the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. Kahn drew the design in 1973, but it could not be realised at the time because the city of New York was nearly bankrupt. In the 21st century, William Vanden Heuvel took the initiative to try to realise the design after all. The opening of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island is planned for the autumn of 2012.

the Yale commission also offered an opportunity for Kahn to experiment with the ideas he had developed since a trip to Greece, Rome and Egypt when he had become convinced that modern architecture lacked the monumental and spiritual qualities of ancient buildings. “Our stuff looks so tinny compared to it,��? he wrote to his office colleagues in Philadelphia. Kahn was convinced that, as a modern architect, his responsibility was to create buildings with those qualities using contemporary materials and construction techniques.

Working with simple materials, notably brick and concrete. Kahn applied his principles to create buildings instilled with the spiritual qualities for which he strove through a masterful sense of space and light. From the 1951-53 Yale Art Gallery extension, to subsequent projects such as the 1954-59 Trenton Boathouse in New Jersey and the 1957-62 Richards Medical Towers in Philadelphia, Kahn combined visually compelling spaces with drama as the changing light transformed the sensory experience of being in the building at different times of the day and night. By the time he began the 1959-67 Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Kahn had mastered this approach to create his first masterpiece, an extraordinarily inspiring sequence of buildings.

Estonia-born in 1901, Louis Kahn had a steadfast belief that all materials had their own destiny and wouldn’t tolerate any attempt to deviate from that. During the age of cleanmodernism and the use of cutting edge materials, his architecture was often dismissed for being overly symbolic and heavily venerating buildings of the past. Influenced by the arid nature of many of his sites, Kahn’s buildings often took the form of cavernous brick shells with large geometrical cut outs, which he would like to describe them – in his bizarre Kahn-way - as ruins in reverse.

Louis Kahn used to tell his students: if you are ever stuck for inspiration, ask your materials for advice. "You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'"

Believing his materials had a stubborn sense of their own destiny was one of the many quirks of this oddball architect, who died of a heart attack in a toilet at New York's Penn Station in 1974. His body went unclaimed for four days, as the much praised 2003 film My Architect, made by his son Nathaniel, detailed. A vast new retrospective of Kahn's work has just opened at the extravagantly contoured Vitra Design Museum in the German town of Weil am Rhein. Kahn, a conjuror of strange, monumental forms that have the gravity of ancient ruins, was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century – yet, even after that film, he is still one of the least known. Why?"His strange, quasi-religious utterances were all rather irritating to me and my generation," says the exhibition's curator, Stanislaus von Moos, an art historian who has produced definitive tomes on Le Corbusier andRobert Venturi. "He is very difficult to characterise. I had always admired his work, but found it a bit intimidating."Born in Estonia in 1901, the Jewish American brick-whisperer is most famous for a series of enormous institutional complexes that stand in swelteringly hot places: the laboratories of the Salk Institute in California; the Institute of Management at Ahmedabad in India, with its dynamic brick colonnades; and the brooding concrete fortress of the National Assemblyin Dhaka, Bangladesh.For Kahn, form did not necessarily follow function; nor did his projects celebrate all the new possibilities of industrial materials. Created from monolithic masonry, and drawing on primary geometries with great circles, semi-circles and triangles sliced out of their weighty walls, his buildings exude a timeless and sometimes sinister presence. They look like the hastily vacated remnants of a future cosmic civilisation.

Alejandro Aravena (born 1967) runs his own architectural office in Santiago de Chile. As executive director of the company Elemental, he has been engaged in social building projects. In conjunction with the exhibition »Louis Kahn – The Power of Architecture«, we spoke with Aravena about Kahn’s work and his relevance for contemporary architecture.

Which of Kahn’s buildings and books made the strongest impression on you and why?

When I arrived in India, in Ahmedabad, for the first time in 2009 – and actually I was not aware of which building was I visiting – I just stepped out of a car and was in this building and my first reaction was, »Fuck! What the fuck is this?!« And, of course, after a couple of seconds you realize this must be Kahn. It was the Indian Institute of Management. And that was a kind of »hit in the face«. A raw thing. A building that could have been two thousand years old, or could have been built in the present decade, it was so hard to tell. So fine-tuned and so appropriate for the context,

for the weather, for the use, for the level of development in India, in the sense of being able to live with poverty, but simultaneously raising the standard of the quality of life, even in very simple terms. That was one of those major impressions that makes you go back to the office and say, »Stop; we have to stop what we’re doing.«And because Kahn believed that the dark shadow is a natural part of light, Kahn never attempted a

pure dark space for a formal effect. For him, a glimpse of light elucidated the level of darkness: “A

plan of a building should be read like a harmony of spaces in light. Even a space intended to be dark

should have just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is. Each

space must be defined by its structure and the character of its natural light.” As a result, the light as a

source is often hidden behind louvers or secondary walls, thus concentrating attention on the effect of

the light and not on its origin.

The “mysteriousness” of shadow was also closely linked to evoking silence and awe. For Kahn, while

darkness evokes the uncertainty of not being able to see, of potential dangers, it also inspires deep

mystery. It is in the hands of the architect to evoke silence, secret or drama with light and shadow – to

create a “treasury of shadows,” a “Sanctuary of Art.”

Thus, walking through the sequence of openings at the portico of the Salk Institute brings to mind the

dark silence of a cloister. Dark shadow lines and holes, from the precise defined moulds, offer a fine

texture on the massive walls. The white stone and the grey concrete walls present a monotone three-

dimensional canvas for the play of shadows. Shade turns into an essential element to reveal the

arrangement and the form of Kahn’s monolithic volumes.

And even though Kahn erected many buildings in regions exposed to extreme sunlight (such as India

and Pakistan), he did not design his buildings to protect users from the sun, but rather to protect the

sanctity of the shadow. He didn’t believe in artificial shade, such as the ‘brise-soleils’, explains

Ingeborg Flagge, the former director of the German Architecture Museum who curated the exhibition

“The secret of the shadow”. Instead he used windows and doors in his double walls to direct the light

into the interior. As Kahn describes the large open windows and doors of the Indian Institute of

Management: “The outside belongs to the sun and on the inside people live and work. In order to

avoid protection from the sun I invented the idea of a deep intrados that protects the cool shadow.”

Indian Institute of Management. Image © Alessandro Vassella 1978

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.

© Dave Morris

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.  The

large façade omissions are abstracted patterns found within the Indian culture that were 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 filters for sunlight and ventilation, the

porosity allowed for the creation of new spaces of gathering for the students and faculty to come

together.

© Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Together, Kahn’s rethinking of the traditional principles of India’s educational system 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 was unable to 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 completely transformed the way in which modern architecture

establishes itself in one’s culture.

You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/louiskahn541025.html#Gu6eBXgI7iD8yaxb.99

A room is not a room without natural light.Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/louiskahn541031.html#8tqr5mFyM2yj0FZi.99

Linear perfection. Monastic lines. Reductionist volumes. Unadorned surfaces. Geometric

harmony. That in a nutshell was the work of Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky),

widely known as one of the most influential architects in the world. There was something starkly

original and intellectually stimulating about his work. His buildings were like mathematical

theorems, well-realised to the last brick but came with a great emotional sweep.

India knows him for his work on the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Even though

we know him today as a masterful architect with buildings whose influence has grown with time,

the tragedy is that in his life, he did not get the acclaim he deserved.

He was an architect who thought, felt and internalised spaces before he built them and that is why his works are not about first rate architecture but a deeply human experience. 

Light and material are one thing

In 1962, Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi invited Louis Kahn, one of the most influential architects of 20th century, to design the building for the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad. It was to comprise a main building with teaching areas, a library and faculty offices around the main courtyard, separate dormitory units for the students that were to be interconnected with a series of arched passages, and houses for the faculty and staff. Kahn’s presence in the 1960s signals a turning point in contemporary architecture in post-independent India. When designing the school, Kahn put into question how and where people learn. Learning was not happening strictly in classrooms, but in the corridors and the spaces in between as well. It was in his uncompromising approach to rethinking the fundamentals of architecture that young Indian architects found in Kahn. Through his massive yet austere brick forms, Kahn offered these architects a spiritual experience that made them believe they could effectively build the new nation and achieve a balance between modernity and tradition. Built between 1962 and 1964, the IIMA complex now sits on a 60-acre campus.