Living in a cube: Corbusier designed some of Ahmedabad’s most iconic buildings

While Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris’s career in India is identified with the grid-like structure of Chandigarh, a city he built to realise first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s modernist vision, far little is known about his link with Ahmedabad. Between 1951 and 1957, Corbusier visited the city many times, on the invitation of Ahmedabad’s civic elite —mill owners and mahajans who wanted a modernist architectural lineage for the ancient city. In that period, he designed five buildings, two homes — Shodhan Villa and Sarabhai Villa — and two public buildings — the Mill Owners’ building on the banks of the Sabarmati and a museum, the Sanskar Kendra.

“In the 1950s, when Le Corbusier came to India at Jawaharlal Nehru’s insistence, he met Surottam Hutheesing, a leader of mill owners of Ahmedabad. In 1952, when he visited the city, leading industrialist and former mayor Chinubhai Chimanbhai commissioned him to design the Mill Owners’ Building and work on four other commissions in consultation with Hutheesing and Kasturbhai Lalbhai, the other textile barons who were important decision-makers of the city back then,” says Abhinava Shukla, secretary general at the Ahmedabad Textile Mill Owners’ Association that owns and maintains the building.

When the city woke up and slept to the rhythm of the mills, the building was a thriving public space. As the mills declined, so did the building, till its revival a few years ago by architects and academics. “The building built between 1954 and 56 is a demonstration of a cube with free forms within, creating contemporary spaces to express his understanding of traditional classic Indian buildings. It is trying to find its feet again and reconnect to the city through events and thoughtful use of space,” says BV Doshi, who had worked with Corbusier for four years in Paris and returned to Ahmedabad to supervise these buildings between 1951-54, until he started his own practice.

Corbusier also designed the Sanskar Kendra in 1954, which he envisioned as “a museum of man, popular tradition and scientific research.” It made provision for a “roof garden”, a green cube with ivy growing all over it for cooling effect, with vegetables growing on the rooftop. Doshi likens it to a ‘thermos box’, created to gain artificial air conditioning, and ventilation crafted to create the best display area for exhibitions. The roof garden was never built, and the museum fell into disuse till was restored as a city museum in 2000 by city-based architects.

In the Villa Sarabhai, too, the roof becomes an organic space, and demonstrates Corbusier’s idea of “experiencing architecture” within an extremely simple “ground hugging brick box”. “The Sarabhai villa was meant for a mother and two children and had a more cozy modest structure, a parallel wall with a Catalan vault, tucked away in the greenery.

“Corbusier’s buildings were climate responsive and locally interpretable, at a time when modernism was always accused of egocentrism,” says Yatin Pandya, a city-based architect. “The house took two years to complete, from 1953 to 1955, and has been a pleasure to have. We moved in the house in 1955 and while it may have become iconic in hindsight, it was just home to us,” said Suhrid Sarabhai, who lived in the Sarabhai Villa with his mother Manorama and brother Anand. Sarabhai, then 12, recalls suggested having a swing which allowed one to jump into the swimming pool at the house.

According to Doshi, Corbusier was not just an architect who imposed a European version of order and simplicity to the hybrid aesthetic of Indian living but someone who was influenced by it. He remembers taking Corbusier around the city. At a tiny jeweller’s shop in Manek Chowk, he lay down on the floor and measured it, and found that it was no more than the length of his body. When he visited Sarkhej Roza, a complex of mosque and tombs in Makharaba near Ahmedabad, Corbusier remarked to Doshi: “Why do you need to visit the Acropolis in Athens when you have this here?”

“His work in India is his first reaction to what he experienced in World War II, technological advancements fuelled by unbridled human aspiration that brought on human catastrophe. Once here, he discovered how people lived generously in a pact with nature and with frugality; it impressed him. This challenged him to question his own theories that he came up with in the 1920s, and he did so through his work in Ahmedabad,” says Doshi.

Doshi recounts how Corbusier’s buildings drew noted 20th century American architect Louis Kahn to Ahmedabad. “When I requested Louis Kahn to come to Ahmedabad to do the IIM-A, the biggest pull for him was Corbusier’s buildings here. He accepted the assignment without even signing an agreement as a mark of reverence to Corbusier who he considered his guru much like Eklavya, because they had never met each other,” he says.