Announcing: Building and Unbuilding the City Museum: From Le Corbusier to Ahmedabad

When it was designed and built just years following India’s independence, Le Corbusier’s Sanskar Kendra in Ahmedabad was intended as a new cultural space. Currently closed, the campus has fallen into disrepair and questions surround its purpose and place in the city’s contemporary life. From what began as an architecture studio offered by Associate Professor Lily Chi and Sarosh Anklesaria (M.Arch. II ’08), a visiting critic on campus in 2018, this volume of essays emerges for a deeper look at the history and present-day questions surrounding this lesser-known slice of early Modernist architecture.

Why did you and your coeditor decide to focus on this particular building for this essay collection and select these contributors?

The City Museum was the site that Sarosh and I had selected for the M.Arch.’s 2018 Expanded Practices Studio. The first of three museums built by Le Corbusier, the museum and the Sanskar Kendra (People’s Cultural Center) were conceived just four years after India’s independence. Great ambition and optimism went into both commission and design. Both client and architect believed that architecture had a role to play in the cultivation of new civic sensibilities — that new cultural programs and new spatial, material, and social formations could contribute to new imaginations of self, community, and nation. And yet, by 2018 there was but a crumbling building in an unkempt void behind high walls. The City Museum barely registers amongst the renowned projects built in the first two decades of the new nation: Gira Sarabhai’s Calico Museum, the Mill Owners’ Association (Le Cobusier), the National Institute of Design (Gautam and Gira Sarabhai), Louis Kahn’s India Institute of Management, Charles Correa’s Gandhi Ashram Museum and Sardar Patel Stadium, CEPT school of architecture (B.V. Doshi) — even the Sarabhai and Shodhan villas are better known. Tensions and ambiguities in both commission and project led to a stillborn “endless museum” and an abandoned multi-programmed urban center, but for B.V. Doshi’s later built Tagore Hall auditorium, built later in the site.

Since 2018, with economic and political developments led by another prime minister with nation-building ambitions, a whole new scale of contradictions have arisen around Sanskar Kendra. The same terms that described the project ambitions in 1954 today mark its unsuitability for contemporary India. We regularly use terms like the public, culture, modern/modernism, or form as if they are universal and static in meaning, but they are laden with agendas, values, and assumptions. The book develops questions we had framed along these lines for the students. Fortunately for the studio, complex, vibrant, creative Ahmedabad makes these questions vivid, compelling, and unavoidable.

What questions and discussions do the essays bring forward?

The story of the City Museum — its ambitions, shortfalls, and uncertain future — offers a unique opportunity to witness the contingency of seemingly neutral terms and ideas circulating in design culture, from Ahmedabad to Ithaca. One of these, for example, is the association of design innovation with visual spectacle — a de facto obligation of contemporary museum design in particular. This idea turns out to be rather novel, historically and culturally. Interestingly, what is still most radical about Le Corbusier’s design of the City Museum is that it is faceless, its facade literally designed for disassembly, as Shubhra Raje (M.Arch. II ’01) and Riyaz Tayyibji write in one chapter — more infrastructure than building in the conventional sense, as Sarosh argues in his study of the design’s prehistory and context. So radical is this idea of architectural agency — so at odds with images of iconic architecture in circulation today — that the building is dismissed not only by conservators, but also by urban officials currently building Ahmedabad for global visibility and investment. This is just one of a number of revealing shifts in common vocabulary around this building — revealing because ideas and motives that need no explanation in their own context can become glaring questions beyond their language communities.

The book makes three passes through the City Museum and Sanskar Kendra. The first reviews the commission, design ambitions, and construction of the building in newly independent, modernizing Ahmedabad. The second locates the project in current debates about museums as civic space; about architectural modernism as heritage, especially for new nations emerging from colonization; and about architecture’s exploitation by global capital and the consequences that follow for cities and publics. The third builds on the latter’s critiques and provocations to speculate on possible futures for Sanskar Kendra, picking up lost threads in the interrupted project but siting it more firmly in Ahmedabad. This section shares authorship with the students in Cornell’s 2018 Expanded Practices Studio, and in Sarosh’s studio at Carnegie Mellon. B.V. Doshi caps these studies in a generous, inspiring conversation with the Cornell students at Sangath.

After working on this book, what is your hope for the future of Sanskar Kendra?

Our hope with this book is to engage a wider public, both in Ahmedabad and beyond, in ongoing debates for Sanskar Kendra. The project is incomplete until we have funds to offer open access to the book.