Louis Kahn was commissioned to design the campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India in the 1960s. His design reimagined the traditional educational system in India by making learning spaces outside of the classroom, such as hallways and plazas. He incorporated local materials like brick and concrete and drew from Indian vernacular architecture with geometric façade openings. This created a modern campus that blended with the local culture and climate. Though Kahn passed away before its completion in 1983, the Indian Institute of Management campus has become an influential example of educational architecture studied by students and architects.
Louis Kahn was commissioned to design the campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India in the 1960s. His design reimagined the traditional educational system in India by making learning spaces outside of the classroom, such as hallways and plazas. He incorporated local materials like brick and concrete and drew from Indian vernacular architecture with geometric façade openings. This created a modern campus that blended with the local culture and climate. Though Kahn passed away before its completion in 1983, the Indian Institute of Management campus has become an influential example of educational architecture studied by students and architects.
Original Description:
IIM design and architecture
Original Title
Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad- Louis Kahn
Louis Kahn was commissioned to design the campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India in the 1960s. His design reimagined the traditional educational system in India by making learning spaces outside of the classroom, such as hallways and plazas. He incorporated local materials like brick and concrete and drew from Indian vernacular architecture with geometric façade openings. This created a modern campus that blended with the local culture and climate. Though Kahn passed away before its completion in 1983, the Indian Institute of Management campus has become an influential example of educational architecture studied by students and architects.
Louis Kahn was commissioned to design the campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India in the 1960s. His design reimagined the traditional educational system in India by making learning spaces outside of the classroom, such as hallways and plazas. He incorporated local materials like brick and concrete and drew from Indian vernacular architecture with geometric façade openings. This created a modern campus that blended with the local culture and climate. Though Kahn passed away before its completion in 1983, the Indian Institute of Management campus has become an influential example of educational architecture studied by students and architects.
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The key takeaways are that Louis Kahn designed the IIM Ahmedabad campus using local materials like brick and concrete while incorporating large geometric façade elements inspired by Indian architecture. His design transformed the educational practice at IIM by making the hallways and plaza new centers for learning beyond just the classroom.
Kahn began to question the traditional design of educational infrastructure where learning only occurred in the classroom. He believed the classroom was just the beginning of learning and sought to create new spaces outside the classroom like hallways and plazas to foster collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning.
Kahn incorporated large geometrical façade extractions as an homage to Indian vernacular architecture. The façade omissions are abstracted patterns found within Indian culture that act as light wells and a natural cooling system protecting the interior from India's harsh climate.
Indian Institute of Management / Louis Kahn:
Architect: B.V. Doshi (Vastu Shilpa Consultants)
Campus Area: 100 acres Built Up area: 54,000 m Year of Completion: 1983 The campus is a destination and a pilgrimage for students of architecture and practicing architects, with the architecture of the academic and administrative blocks becoming a case study. Some of the features of IIM-B are three storied hallways, open quadrangles with ample area for plants, ample sun light entering through pergolas, geometrical roofs and slits in the roof and rough texture finish. These features provide IIM-B distinctive characteristic which varies with time of the day and with the seasons. The stone texture allows the Climbing Ivy or Kalati (stone climber as called in Kannada) to grow to hug the wall, which adds to the already infinite greenery and is very suitable for Bangalores Climate. While Louis Kahn was designing the National Assembly Building in Bangladesh in 1962, he was approached by an admiring Indian architect, Balkrishna Doshi, to design the 60 acre campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India. Much like his project in Bangladesh, he was faced with a culture enamored in tradition, as well as an arid desert climate. For Kahn, the design of the institute was more than just efficient spatial planning of the classrooms; he began to question the design of the educational infrastructure where the classroom was just the first phase of learning for the students. In 1961, a visionary group of industrialists collaborated with the Harvard Business School to create a new school focused on the advancement of specific professions to advance Indias industry. Their main focus was to create a new school of thought that incorporated a more western-style of teaching that allowed students to participate in class discussions and debates in comparison to the traditional style where students sat in lecture throughout the day.
It was Balkrishna Doshi that believed Louis Kahn would be able to envision a new, modern school for Indias best and brightest. Kahns inquisitive and even critical view at the methods of the educational system influenced his design to no longer singularly focus on the classroom as the center of academic thought. The classroom was just the formal setting for the beginning of learning; the hallways and Kahns Plaza became new centers for learning. The conceptual rethinking of the educational practice transformed a school into an institute, where education was a collaborative, cross-disciplinary effort occurring in and out of the classroom.
In much of the same ways that he approached the design of the National Assembly Building in Bangladesh, he implemented the same techniques in the Indian Institute of Management such that he incorporated local materials (brick and concrete) and large geometrical faade extractions as homage to Indian vernacular architecture. It was Kahns method of blending modern architecture and Indian tradition into an architecture that could only be applied for the Indian Institute of Management. The large faade omissions are abstracted patterns found within the Indian culture that were positioned to act as light wells and a natural cooling system protecting the interior from Indias harsh desert climate. Even though the porous, geometric faade acts as filters for sunlight and ventilation, the porosity allowed for the creation of new spaces of gathering for the students and faculty to come together.
Together, Kahns rethinking of the traditional principles of Indias educational system along with a group of ambitious industrialists helped create one of the most sought after, influential, and elite business schools in the world. Unfortunately, Kahn was unable to see his design come to fruition as he had died in New York City in 1974 before the project was finished. However, there is no question whether or not his design had completely transformed the way in which modern architecture establishes itself in ones culture.