42 SANGATH Balkrishna Doshi Kazi Khaleed Ashraf From The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture, Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Balkrishna Doshi, Sangath, 1981.
S
angath (1979–81) sits between two phases in the oeuvre of the Indian master architect
Balkrishna Doshi: a first phase, in which machine-like cubic masses are raised aloft in the landscape; and a second, characterized by crustacean-like creatures lying embedded in the ground. The first includes the Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad (1957–62) and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1977–85), and the second the eccentric Husain-Doshi Gufa (1992–95) that followed Sangath. Sangath is a key project that takes Doshi from an explicitly rational and objective approach to architecture toward an openly oneiric and mythopoeic way of working. As a stalwart of the first generation of Indian architects to emerge following national independence in 1947, Doshi took on the enormous task of graduating
India into a “brave, new world,” as proposed by the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Since then, through a powerful body of work, Doshi has been instrumental in framing a modern architectural idiom and ethos for the country. This was made possible through his personal commitment to nation-building and a unique background, with two of the foremost form-makers of the modern period. The experience of working with Le Corbusier in his Paris studio (1951–57) on his buildings in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad destined Doshi to take on bigger challenges. He set up his practice in Ahmedabad (1958), a city that had already positioned itself, with work by Le Corbusier and later by Louis Kahn (whom Doshi had invited and was involved with in the Indian Institute of Management project), as a site for demonstrative modern architecture. Doshi also founded an architectural school (1962) that he directed and established as one of the distinguished schools in India. Besides his intimacy with both the mission and realization of modern architecture, Doshi has remained deeply in touch with the ethos of India’s ancient civilization. He continues to reflect on and draw inspiration from the vast repertoire of Vedic and Hindu traditions. It is this presence of two civilizational and philosophical strands in Doshi’s work that has always offered new possibilities and excursions, as well as debates, in the evolution of modern Indian architecture. What distinguishes Sangath from Doshi’s earlier projects is a more unabashed narrative of the Indian strand as well as a deeply personal mythography. In line with his expanded commitment to architecture involving professional practice, research, and teaching, Doshi conceived of his design work in wider terms, as a laboratory for the creation of new architectural paradigms. On a parcel of land on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Doshi designed and created a miniature complex starting in the 1970s that came to reflect his synthetic vision of practice and research. He gave that expanded practice the title of Sangath, or “moving together through participation.” It was to include his architectural office and the Vastushilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design. Sangath was conceived, William Curtis notes, as Doshi’s version of an architectural laboratory in the likeness of Corbusier’s atelier at 35, Rue de Sevres, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. In characterizing Sangath as a turning point that marks both a crystallization of earlier experiments and deliberate movement toward a new stage, three principal themes stand out among all the interesting topics: an intimate conversation between architecture and landscape; an architectural formation that acknowledges a climatic imperative; and choreographed movement in a highly structured spatial matrix.
Grounding What immediately characterizes the physiognomy of Sangath is the proposition of architecture as a topographical manipulation. Producing an ambiguity between building and landscape, the configuration is best understood as something that has evolved out of the ground, or, recognizing the fact that it is an artificial work, sculpted from it. The visual imagery of Sangath is a group of vaulted shapes oriented in one direction that rise from a constructed landscape of planes, terraces, walls and steps. Water runs along the interstices of the vaults, on channels and troughs, often cascading down, to create a pool. While the interior of the building is a mystery from the exterior, indications of subterranean conditions are already
indicated in the overall ensemble. The “miniature” drawing series generated by Doshi following the construction shows the site with a veritable catalog of architectural and landscape motifs: wall, steps, terraces, trees, artifacts, architectural fragments distributed throughout the larger landscape. While the compact ensemble sits on the site as if it has been there for a very long time, architectural critics have ventured to suggest a range of metaphors: a group of buildings on a hill, a small village, or a traditional building grown from the ground. A reference to traditional Indian architecture invoking either an earth architecture or the profile of domical architecture is only allusive and without any particularity. An Indian context is more compellingly present in the climatic responses and peripatetic experience on the site. Some of the textural modulation, although suggestive of the work of the Spanish-Catalan architect Josep-Maria Jujol (1879–1949), with whom Doshi has expressed a new kinship, may also be found in unspecific vernacular traditions of India. Sangath’s figural alignment may be closer to the other repertoire of Le Corbusier, the work that involves a deeply imbricated mutuality between building and landscape, not the polemical antithesis represented in the Swiss-French master’s cubic projects. Two residences designed at the same time by Le Corbusier for Ahmedabad represent these dual and antagonistic strands: Villa Shodhan, as a tropical reincarnation of the cubic Villa Savoye; and the Sarabhai House as recalling an earth-hugging Mediterranean vernacular ethic. Sarabhai House, especially with its Catalan vaults, structural parallelism, grass-covered roof, and unabashed “merging” with the landscape, exonerated the territorially detached ideology through a “pact with nature.” The grounded physiognomy of Sarabhai House can be traced back to Le Corbusier’s other, but consistent attempt at translating vernacular types, works that were kept in the background in the primetime of his cubic ideology in the 1920s. The strand of this series of work proceeds from his own Weekend House with the vault and grass roof (1920s) to the radical post-war design of Maison Jaoul (1951). Sangath, in bringing to the foreground the ancient relational theme of architecture and landscape, and challenging the “two-ness” of the two, also remains an homage to the other Le Corbusier.1 Doshi’s desire for collaboration between architecture and landscape, where the continuum of the landform merges with the autonomy of the former, produces what many see as an ambiguity. This interaction may be better described as an affirmation of architecture as a landscape event, aware of the inevitability of the building being sited and emplaced.2 Doshi’s subterranean quest, and a profound mutation of the cubic paradigm inaugurated at Sangath, turns toward the mythological – the realm of ruins and monsters – finding its explicit expression for the gallery designed for the iconoclast artist M. F. Husain, the Husain-Doshi Gufa at a site not far from Sangath. Starting from Sangath, however, Doshi increasingly seeks mythological verification in the grounding of architecture, and the valorization of a primordial relationship with the earth. While at Sangath, embedding part of the building into the ground was carried out as a tectonic and climatic strategy, the Husain-Doshi Gufa was conceived as some kind of reptilian creature slithering in the ground. One had to enter that part-reptilian and part-cavelike project through a mouthlike orifice. Doshi himself speaks of dream encounters of divining the site and
figuring out the form-shape. The elaboration of a subterranean creature-form is not unlike a resurrection of Vrtra, an aquatic-terrestrial monster in Vedic mythology who was once slayed by the celestial god Indra. Nor is it unlike Pythia, slaughtered by Apollo in Greek imagination to inaugurate a new imperiumof the celestial over the terrestrial. Such imagery points to Doshi’s engagement with ancient Vedic and Hindu narratives, and his own deeply personal oneiric imagination in form conception. With the deep symbolism of the cave, the Gufa reimagines architectural origins, or the original conditions of architecture submerged in the onslaught of a marketplace mechanism or displaced sacrality. A disposition toward earthbound construction was also developed in other projects; in fact, whenever an opportunity offered itself. Even in a project with commercial currency, such as the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi (1997), a project somewhat dressed-up with postmodern paraphernalia, Doshi discovered an ancient well that led him to an excavated parti in the courtyard of the project site. Doshi’s Sangath phase speaks of his attempt to literally dig down into some primordial depth for a new foundational and ontological verification for architecture in India. “I tried to listen to the vibrations and activities that lay deep in her womb,” Doshi confesses. “The earth always rekindles many dormant ideas in me.”3 Even though Sangath does not refer directly to any particular architectural tradition of India, it proposes a new mythos: it presents itself as an easy and natural collaboration with the site, as if it has been there a long time.
The “Vault” Sangath has also a rigorous plan, one that began as a rectilinear parti on a rectangular plot constituted by two bays of vaulted space, a part of which gets skewed into a diagonal motif to receive a layered land-form shaped as an amphitheater. The amphitheater serves as the linchpin on the site, around which a circulatory rotation is articulated. An earlier plan shows the site organized through four parallel rows of vaulted spaces alternated by a sliver of “servant space.” Such a plan diagram recalls the intertwined spatial and structural articulation of both Le Corbusier’s Sarabhai House and Kahn’s Kimbell Museum at Fort Worth, Texas, making possible a rich tapestry of layered and overlapped spaces. The vaulted roofscape is a defining element for Sangath. Although it is essentially a structural shell shaped as a vault, the upper enclosure is a carefully wrought iconographic device that complements the landscape narrative, insofar as the natural tendency of a raised vault is to return to the ground. Doshi’s form has a number of possible sources: from the Sarabhai House to Doshi’s early work with brick vaults for the housing for ATIRA (1957–60) and Bhandari House, New Delhi (1966). He talks about appreciating the visual and material economy in roofing an outhouse on the site with bent corrugated sheets.4 His sketch of a museum in Egypt by Wissa Wassef, an associate of Hasan Fathy, is telling of discovering an architectural idiom for a hot and dry milieu (1978). After the adoption of the vault as a principal structural and spatial organizing element in the design schema, its shape and geometry were studied closely through drawings and various models. While the geometry required a structural and volumetric discipline, the rigor was inflected by a largely irregular distribution
of walls and piers from which the vaults emerged. Techniques of vault construction were explored through the participation of native communities. The experiments led to new possibilities, later carried out rather persuasively in the Gufa. Sangath is also a catalog of environmental cooling practices, in which the vaulted shell structure is a key performer. Doshi realizes the sensibility of locating a habitable space in Ahmedabad’s unforgiving hot and arid climate in a sheltered cocoon. Besides the vaulted canopy, digging into the ground provides another means of finding a cooler environment. Doshi speaks of a suggestion made by the artist M. F. Husain in the early 1970s of going underground for climatic reasons.5 In a climate-centered investigation of this kind the “vault” is conceived as a shell structure created by two thin, hand-layered, ferrocement layers with hollow terracotta tubes in between them. The shell’s hollow layer provides an insular envelope for the interior spaces. On its outer surface the shell is layered with a mosaic of white broken china, the intention of which is to reflect the sun. Openings are minimal and when they do occur, the entry of light and view is highly modulated. Water channels and troughs form a shallow area between the vaults, which in turn provides another insular layer to the roofscape. In some instances, the channelized water cascades over a window opening, invoking a vernacular practice of cooling an interior by spreading moistened fabric over a window.
The Itinerary A choreographed movement is the third distinctive feature of Sangath. Upon arrival at the entry court that faces the vaulted end of the building-form, one is immediately directed toward the left, away from the building to encounter a series of shifting axes, crossing of thresholds, and panoramic views of the main building. The choreographed journey from the entrance to the inside of the vaulted space couples one’s sense of far and near, surface tactility, and precisely located objects (earthen jars and sculpture) conducted through a promenade architecturale. Along this itinerary one experiences earthen jars as markers, metal sculpture, passages through trees, views from under trees, landscaped grounds, water pools, low walls and layered plinths, pavings with pebble textures, a grass-stepped amphitheater, and a canopy under which a conversation can be held. Located like a little plaza in a hillside town, the amphitheater is used for meetings and performances. Axial shifts in movement allow explorations of terrain that has been structured through the techniques of landscape design. Akin to the order of movement in a Japanese garden, shifts are accompanied by textural changes and moments of pause and reorientation. The construction of pauses – transitional spaces and thresholds – in the spatial matrix becomes for Doshi a mark of Indian architectural experience. Describing the spatial quality created at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1977–85), where a monolithic block has been disaggregated to create a matrix of spaces and volumes with various degrees of inside and outside, Doshi proposes that “supreme among architectural experiences are ones which occur in spaces which could be characterized as pause or ambiguous, plural spaces.” In terms of a corporeal experience, pauses initiate a breaking down of the scale for a more humanized encounter. Such spaces, Doshi further argues in more mystical
terms, “activate the human psyche and induce it to sink toward the center, the mythical world of man’s primordial being.” From one of the farthest points, along a diagonal axis, the building is revealed in its skewed disposition, revealing coordinated relationships of things far and near, modulating of landscape and building, anticipating arrival. Through these means the elongated building form is revealed at its fullest. It is almost as if Doshi had crafted that axial turn as the perfect moment to take in the full panorama of Sangath: a visually controlled vantage point that establishes the image of the vaults raised from the ground and modulated by terraces, plinths, walls, and steps, with a grassy surface and water pools in the foreground. The final steps toward the building pass through a tight entry, almost an inadvertent opening in the folds of the building. The itinerary continues into and within the interior landscape, as one proceeds through a maze of layered spaces that often connect the various levels, creating experiences of compactness and openness, giving different heights to the vault, as stairs mysteriously rise and fall, in a tightly packed spatial drama. The condensed and rich overlay of architectural pieces is a snapshot of some old city in North India. Ultimately the itinerary climaxes toward a long vista along the vaulted studio space where windows are few, but the most prominent ones are those in the half-circle under the vaults that give a glimpse of the Ahmedabad sky, bringing the visitor to the heart of Sangath: the long row of architects’ desks in a kind of near-monastic setting not unlike, for those who know, Le Corbusier’s Paris studio. Sangath, in its several ambiguities – vacillating between urban and un-urban models, paying homage to an old master and attempting to discover something new, offering the experience of a clear structural logic and a dreamlike inner journey – still constitutes a wonderful, and wonderfully dense, example of modern Indian architecture. Notes 1. In interviews, Doshi has likened Sangath to an homage to Le Corbusier, and his later Gufa to Kahn, two architects with whom he worked closely and enjoyed a unique symbiotic relationship; interviews conducted with writer, 1994. 2. The idea of “architecture as landscape event” is discussed in Kazi Ashraf, “Taking Place: Landscape in the Architecture of Louis Kahn,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 2 (November 2007): 48–58. 3. Balkrishna Doshi, “The Revelation,” in James Steele, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi (Mumbai: Super Book House, 1998), 146. 4. Steele, The Complete Architecture, 90. 5. Doshi, “Revelation,” 146.