Curtain details at Premabhai Hall, study sketches for the aluminium sliding door, stage backdrop and building sections

Balkrishna V Doshi; Himanshu Parikh; Stein, Doshi & Bhalla

P Hall, Aluminium Sliding Door, 9'-0" x 7'-5" © Balkrishna Doshi, Vāstu Shilpā Consultants

... considerations while designing the project were the functions, which were many. However, we had to explore how the quality of the building could be changed to look light and articulated enough without becoming stylish. Here the designer has to discover once again the virtues of blank planes ... The overall form of the building with its end walls is designed to look almost like an animal standing still. ...

Tapestry, stage backdrop - second version © Balkrishna Doshi, Vāstu Shilpā Consultants

In a philosophic way, this stage connects me, sixty years later, to my beginnings. For example, I had done Premabhai Hall in 1958 and now I am completing Bhadra Square. Many such events in my life are connected, like an open-ended web. I look at the range of projects in this web and question their significance.

Tapestry, stage backdrop - penultimate version, detail of the tree © Balkrishna Doshi, Vāstu Shilpā Consultants

Tapestry, stage backdrop - penultimate version © Balkrishna Doshi, Vāstu Shilpā Consultants

Text from Doshi, Balkrishna. "Architecture and Attitudes." In UNIDO-ICSIID Meeting on Design for Development at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and Interviews conducted by Rajeev Kathpalia and Gautam Bhatia in 2014-15

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Section as elevation, 'mosque'; 16th February, 1969

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"Temptation to show structure/function on the outside is something not necessary,.. Specific character(s) should be expressed", 19th February, 1968 © Vastu Shilpa Foundation

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Main Structure ... BUILDING WITHIN A BUILDING

"... the institute of Indology and the first scheme of the Premabhai Hall belie a similar compositional attitude, which denies any role to the site and its peculiarities. The building does not 'gather',... the spirit of the place and make it explicit. This is architecture as an object rather than a place and recalls the cultural strategies of earlier alien eras ... and, by extension, the projection of values which were absent from the traditional Indian cities.

It must have been during those dozen or so years that it took Doshi to realize Premabhai Hall, that he seems to have come to terms with a different spatial conception. The final version, is not one of his best works, though it does recognize and, acknowledge, albeit tentatively, the presence of the city around it. This recognition of the city is evident in Doshi's [scheme for the] Bhadra Square. It is a recognition of the reciprocity between the individual and the community." - Jaimini Mehta, 1988

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Curtain details at Premabhai Hall, study sketches for the aluminium sliding door, stage backdrop and building sections

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Sangath, architect's office and research centre in Ahmedabad

Bhadra Square Redevelopment Plan

Escorts Factories

Demonstration houses and masterplan for Aranya Community