AHMEDABAD: On Monday, the ongoing demolition activity on the IIM-A campus caught international attention after a consultant, Jon Wright with a British conservation architecture firm Purcell, tweeted a picture of partly demolished buildings within the campus. Wright tweeted, “There should be an international outrage about the ongoing demolition of Louis Kahn’s Faculty Houses in Ahmedabad, India.” He further added, “Exemplary domestic architecture from a modern master being lost as a result of no heritage protection.” 

The construction is part of an ongoing six-year long conservation work
The construction is part of an ongoing six-year long conservation work © Times of India

There should be international outrage about the ongoing demolition of Louis Kahn's Faculty Houses in Ahmedabad, Ind… https://t.co/6qS8TP5bTt

— Jon Wright (@jonmodern) 1574697512000

The IIM-A has contradicted Wright by claiming that the buildings demolished were not Kahn designed “faculty houses”, but were “staff quarters”, which were designed after 1969 by a different team of architects1 who had worked for Kahn. Two staff quarter sites on the campus are being demolished to give way to a 12-storeyed and an 11-storeyed faculty accommodations which were planned in 2012-13. 

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  • 1. According to architect A V Joshi, who was then working on the main National Institute of Design (NID) campus in 1963-1969, most of the IIM-A staff quarters meant for office assistants were designed by architects Anant Raje and Chandra Sen Kapadia. Kapadia along with architects and professor Anant Raje, 2018 Pritzker prize winner, Kahn’s site architect B V Doshi, and professor Kulbhushan Jain had been assisting Louis Kahn in the project.