On the morning of May 7, a bitter stand-off between the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the city’s architect fraternity came to an end. The AMC, which had planned to construct a two-storey control room adjacent to the Sanskar Kendra, was forced to abandon its plan. The construction had threatened to eclipse the Le Corbusier-designed museum, the first of three such museums in the world, the other two being in Tokyo and Chandigarh.

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The AMC’s move to build the weather control room was seen not only as an attempt to deface an architectural landmark, but also one that would hurt Ahmedabad’s chances to become a UNESCO heritage site. According to architects, the new construction was violating the very idea of modern architecture, that is, to have a foreground. Foregrounds are kept so that the building can be viewed from a distance. “There was no plan for new construction in the original design by Corbusier,” says Yatin Pandya, an Ahmedabad-based architect and activist. Most of the architect fraternity, including people from CEPT, architect associations and international groups joined in to protest against AMC’s proposed construction.

Two days before the AMC decided to shift the location of the control room, Fondation Le Corbusier’s president, Antoine Picon, sent an appeal to the AMC chief Guruprasad Mohapatra. To the Paris-based foundation, which archives the architect’s works, the building is one of Corbusier’s major realisations.

In the letter, a copy of which is with BLink, Picon writes, “I would like the city of Ahmedabad to make its best effort to find a solution that would permit the new development further away from the museum façade… I would be very pleased if you could take into consideration the violent impact on the integrity of the museum on one side and the awful consequences of the current project on the reputation of the city and of the Foundation, on the other side”.

AMC chief Mohapatra, however, says that the architects assigned on the project didn’t inform the corporation about the key features of the original plan. “In the plan by Corbusier, there was a kind of grid that was to come up surrounding the main building, but that was not shared with us. As soon as this came to our knowledge, we decided to shift the new project,” he explains.