Calligraphic Poem on IIM Ahmedabad, by H. Masud Taj

You were inspired by Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management building in Ahmedabad. You even wrote a poem in calligraphy about it.

As a student, I was at CEPT in Ahmedabad for a month, participating in a workshop designing shells upside down. In the evenings, I’d sprawl on the IIM lawns. Once at dusk, above several storeys of brick arches, right on axis, was the upturned crescent. That’s when the Brick Poem occurred. Decades later when I began to study Sinan in Turkey, I understood what that poem really meant; poets can lag behind the curve of their poems. I’ll be giving a talk at CEPT and that’s when after more than three decades the Brick Poem will return to its site.

Where bricks leap from point to point and freeze in their flight.

Where bricks are the lips of mouth open forever.

Bricks being bricks know the reason why

The essence of the arch is the crescent in the sky.

– H. Masud Taj

Excerpt from Masud Taj’s Interview with The Indian Express. Link Here. Republished with permission from H. Masud Taj.