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.

Shah chose the Architectural Association in London for his graduate studies, rather than harvard where his family had expected him to go. he arrived in London in time to study history and theory under the direction of robin Middleton and roy Landau and at that magical moment when Alvin Boyarsky was chairman of the AA. (Also, by chance, he came to work on our magazine, International Architect.) to round off his architectural training before returning to Ahmedabad to establish a practice, Shah learnt italian and worked for two years in Switzerland as an assistant to Mario Botta – who as a young man had worked not only for Kahn but also Le corbusier and carlo Scarpa.

Kahn and Le corbusier, two great masters of modern architecture, had the measure of india: its climate and building technologies and its people. Only a single and closely connected generation – Botta and Doshi – stands between them and Snehal Shah. he has had (largely by accident) a privileged architectural education, and to understand his architecture one must appreciate the influence of the various strands of this education.

this book separates Snehal Shah’s oeuvre into three periods. One section deals with the early years of practice, showing projects executed before he turned 40. the reality that it takes many years to master the technical craft of architecture, to hone managerial skills and clarify a design philosophy, gives rise to the truism that architects do not begin to produce mature work until they turn 40. in this respect, the projects from his early years of practice are instructive. they reveal a young architect, supported by his clients, seeking what a writer might call his ‘voice’.

Shah’s first house is full of ideas – and a critic might say, too full of ideas – that are to be recurring themes in later works: the central atrium space; the north-south orientation of habitable rooms; the modular geometry and symmetrical ordering of the plan; exposed masonry (brick) construction; decorative patterning based on masonry coursing and craftsmanship; the deeply incised, four-square, muscular simplicity of the building form; and the figuring of squares, circles and 45 degree angles in plan and section and at a variety of scales. Lessons learnt from Botta and from the Gujarati vernacular are being synthesised here, and in the concrete rainwater spouts there is a glimpse of the impression Le corbusier makes on later work.

Snehal Shah’s moment of architectural maturity arrives in the design for his own office. By this stage he has established the limits of indian craftsmanship and the need for ever more restrained and muscular architectonic forms to offset crude workmanship and inattention to detail frequently encountered in the local construction industry. the lessons of Le corbusier’s climate-controlling brise-soleil (‘sun breakers’) are adapted here to counter the east-west orientation of the site; and the plan is arranged around an open-sided atrium to promote cross ventilation in all the office/studios. Since then there has followed a series of projects of increasing formal sophistication and clarity as he pares back extraneous detail and simplifies the palette of finishes: exposed concrete, painted render, stone cladding. the figurative modelling of facades – particularly the curves in plan, the circular windows and the rectilinear incisions – express the plastic nature of the underlying in situ concrete structure. Shah’s understanding of local stonemasonry skills is particularly apparent in his country houses, where traditional random stone finishes are juxtaposed against polished marble reveals, and in the inventive use of thin slabs of roughhewn granite as brise-soleil.

internally the buildings now exhibit a spatial clarity of geometric purity. the squared-circle drum form of the entry hall of the Amrut Mody School of Management, with winding double flights of stairs, daylight-washed curving walls and supporting paired columns, is a volumetric tour de force worthy of Louis Kahn – to which the design pays homage. the marble paved, cloister-like, colonnaded courtyard funnels in breezes at every corner to offer cool and shaded relief to the parched grounds and roaring city traffic beyond.

the software campus designed for the tata conglomerate was built to accommodate 12,000 workstations plus support staff (to put things in perspective: that’s about the same number of people at work in the empire State Building). By any standard this is a building of considerable scale, but for all its size, it seems to hover ever so slightly above its garden site, while reinforcing the earth colours and the horizontality of the surrounding plain in the cladding of alternate bands of red Agra and pink Jodhpur sandstone. Deep incisions model the stone-clad facades, limit solar heat loads, reduce glare internally and provide office workers with shaded break-out spaces.

inside, the vast north-south-oriented modular floor plates are brought to order and given legibility with three curving longitudinal atria that plunge to the full depth of the main office building. each atrium is wider at the base than at the roof. this shelving form – narrowing towards the light – helps maintain consistent light levels on every floor. in practice this ensures that the thousands of workstations are, to a functional degree, naturally lit. On a more poetic plane, there is a cultural memory here in these long, narrow, top-lit spaces of the cool depths of Gujarati stepwells.

it is this lyrical dimension of Snehal Shah’s work that appeals directly to us. in a practice that now spans 25 years, we have seen him learn how best to fuse the rough materials and the limited construction skills of indian building sites into a concrete poetry, designing works of contemporary architecture that are in tune with the people and the dusty plains of Gujarat.