International pressure has at the last minute prevented the demolition of the Indian Institute of Administration in Ahmedabad, the belated work of one of the geniuses of modern architecture.
January 26, 2021, 4:28 PM
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At the end of 2020, amid the omnipresent news about the COVID pandemic and the soap opera of the presidential elections in the United States, the alarm of information related to one of the jewels of modern architecture was raised: 14 of the 18 dormitories of the Indian Institute of Administration (IIA), designed by Louis I. Kahn in Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, were to be demolished.
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The IIA was one of the few commissions Kahn carried out outside the US, along with the Bangladesh Assembly in Dhaka.
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The worldwide protest reaction was overwhelming and ultimately providential. Faced with public derision for its responsibility in disgraceful size, the governing board of the institution thought better of it and retracted its decision, apparently loosely supported by the effects that an earthquake had caused on the building twenty years ago .
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In the project, Kahn deployed his idea of the play of light with architectural space through voids and fills.
The IIA, whose construction began in 1962, corresponds to the stage that cemented the international prestige of Louis I. Kahn. It is one of the few projects that the architect carried out outside the US That same year he was commissioned for his other great international work, the Bangladesh Assembly in Dhaka. Although the IIA took more than a decade to build, its author had time to see the nearly completed building on his last visit to India, in 1974. Upon his return to the US, he was found dead under strange circumstances at the station. train station Pennsylvania from New York.
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Kahn’s style was strongly marked by the constructions of Antiquity, with a great tendency, like those, to timelessness and monumentality.
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Originally commissioned by a young Balkrishna Doshi – 2018 Pritzker Prize – he advised that the project be carried out by Louis I. Kahn, whom he had met in Philadelphia. The American architect deployed his ideas about the play of light and architectural space in his design – his is the well-known phrase “the sun never knew of its greatness until it struck the face of a building” – as well as his predilection for the brick to create an architecture that is both austere and majestic, indebted to his admiration for the constructions of the Roman and Egyptian times.
With the news of the salvation in extremis of the IIA, the international community of lovers of the legacy of the American architect of Estonian origin can breathe easy.
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