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