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
wouldnt 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, Kahns 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 Kahns work and his
relevance for contemporary architecture.

Which of Kahns 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 were
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 Kahns 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 didnt 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 Indias 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
Indias best and brightest. Kahns 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 Kahns 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 faade extractions as homage
to Indian vernacular architecture. It was Kahns method of blending modern architecture and Indian
tradition into an architecture that could only be applied for the Indian Institute of Management. The
large faade 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 Indias harsh desert
climate. Even though the porous, geometric faade 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, Kahns rethinking of the traditional principles of Indias 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 ones 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. Kahns 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.