to bUIld on dUSty plaInS haig Beck and Jackie cooper
Some architects are fortunate to serve an apprenticeship and learn from masters. in addition, the cultural and physical environment they are born into can also form them. Before Mario Botta – Snehal Shah’s master – before Louis Kahn (Botta’s master), before ancient rome (the masonry source of Kahn’s tectonic philosophy), there were the brick cities of the indus Valley. Just south of Ahmedabad, where the dusty plain turns to salt marsh, lie the archaeological remains of Lothal, one of the great cities of the ancient indus Valley. Like a Leggo city, every surface, every architectural detail and engineering feature of Lothal is made from a single modular unit: a brick. And like the bricks it was built from, the city is modular and geometrically ordered. Snehal Shah may have trained under Botta, and through him received Kahn’s architectural vision, but it was at an early age in his homeland, on the plains of Gujarat, that he imbibed a 5000-year tradition of brick construction. Shah grew up visiting friends and relatives in Ahmedabad’s old city. the traditional houses were designed to counter the heat. they face north-south to avoid direct sunlight, and stand close-packed around narrow lanes. to minimise the conduction of heat, they are constructed from brick and wood, with thick walls and high ceilings. At the centre of these houses is a shaded atrium: a thermal chimney. While a student, and under the direction of George Michell, Shah measured the majestic trabeated granite ruins of Vijayanagara, the abandoned hindu city built on the Deccan plateau. Michell also encouraged him to continue his interest in the stepwells of Gujarat, a project that was to become a life-long work of scholarship. Stepwells cleave the earth with steep-sided, masonry-lined walls buttressed by serried, multi-storeyed platforms of ornately carved stonework. As if treading on the ceiling of an upside-down Gothic cathedral, the descent to the well-head is down flights of steps into a vertical volume pierced by shafts of sunlight: a shadowy place of watery reflections that offers cool relief from the hot dry plain above. Ahmedabad is the site of some of Le corbusier’s and Louis Kahn’s greatest works. Snehal Shah’s family home was designed by an architect. this is the modern architectural context he grew up in. Shah enrolled at Ahmedabad’s cePt (centre of environmental Planning and technology), india’s great architectural school, where he was a student of BV Doshi, the founder of cePt and one of the fathers of indian modernism. Doshi had been Le corbusier’s assistant in Paris before returning to Ahmedabad to supervise Le corbusier’s projects in the city, and Doshi also worked closely with Kahn and Kahn’s assistant, Anant raje, on the indian institute of Management.
12 To BUILD oN DUsTy PLAINs
