New Delhi: The proposal by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad to tear down buildings in the heritage campus designed by famed architect Louis Kahn and replace them with new buildings has triggered an uproar.
The rationale put forward for the proposal is that the 18 student dormitories, built in the 1960s, have suffered structural damage over the years, including during the 2001 earthquake, the Indian Express reported.
The new hostel complex is also expected to accommodate 800 student rooms while the existing buildings could only house 500 students.
Architecture experts, students and faculty are enraged at the administration’s decision to bring down Kahn’s iconic work on the campus.
The decision to raze the hostel was taken even though Mumbai-based Somaya and Kalappa Consultants (SNK) is already working to restore the existing dorms, along with the Vikram Sarabhai Library, the faculty and administrative blocks and the classroom buildings, based on a competition it had won in 2014. The firm had also won a UNESCO award for the library restoration work last year.
“I was not aware of the new bid,” one of the founders of SNK told the Indian Express.
After the furore over the decision to tear down the buildings, an online meeting to open the new bids was suspended. In an eleven-page letter, justifying the institute’s decision to bring down the old buildings, to the alumni, director Errol D’Souza said that the existing structure was “unliveable” with “concrete and slabs falling from the roofs with damaging consequences for the lives of the residents”.
“The existing dorms (D-1 to 18) built between 1968 and 1978 have multiple problems like leakages from roof, dampness in the walls, leakages in toilet walls, etc. Besides, the earthquake of 2001 caused major structural damages. IIMA did try to restore a dormitory building in 2017 but the results were not satisfactory. So, it has been decided to create student housing using the existing footprints (land parcel) of these dormitory buildings,” IIMA stated in the document inviting Expression of Interest for the project.
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D’Souza also questioned Kahn’s signature exposed brick structure and called the bricks substandard. As concrete encasing was not used to protect the embedded reinforcement bars in the brickwork, the bars have rusted and the brickwork cracked, he said in his letter.
D’Souza also wondered if it was “appropriate… to colonise future perceptions of living spaces”.
“We have grappled with questions as to why we should presume that the past is not changeable and why we should assume that future generations will value things in exactly the same way that past generations have,” D’Souza said and added, “In today’s world, our experience is that students hardly use these shared spaces as they have gravitated to virtual modes.”
“Among the major issues is that the cultural heritage associated with the campus will be lost. We can understand that they are doing this because of increasing student count but doing away with these will also mean losing the social and cultural aesthetics of the campus,” a faculty member at IIM-A said.
Kahn has been revered as one of the finest architects of the 20th century and has been credited with creating powerful and evocative compositions of geometry and space. Some of his most famous works, which exemplify his unique style, include the Salk Institute and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Kahn first came to India in 1962 at the invitation of IIM-A founder-director Vikram Sarabhai as a consultant for the National Institute of Design.
“The IIM-A revived a prestigious award from UNESCO for the conservation of the Vikram Sarabhai Library. The award also called out the school’s commitment to its architectural heritage as a model for India. It is a bitter irony to see the administration turn their backs on their own accomplishments. The school and the dorms are a unit. Remove one and the magic dissipates, never to return,” William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design that manages Kahn’s archives, told the national daily.
“Kahn was always in search of the roots of institutions… In this case, it was an institution of learning. He saw every student as a disciple. That value was enshrined in every dormitory, where 10 of them lived together. Out of their classrooms, the dormitories were a space where people could get together to share ideas, without any sense of exclusivity,” said Rabindra Vasavada, one of the first architects to join Kahn as an assistant in the 1960s.