The Conundrum of Context and Contemporaneity—Lilavati Lalbhai Library, Ahmedabad, by RMA Architects

The Lilavati Lalbhai Library by RMA Architects, completed in 2017, is sited centrally within the CEPT University campus in Ahmedabad, designed by architect B.V. Doshi. The campus has grown in an accretive manner, with buildings being added by Doshi since the 1960s. The library is part of a larger campus expansion undertaken, in keeping with the masterplan prepared by CCBA Designs. In this analysis, the library is discussed architecturally as

1. an insertion within the modernist, institutional campus and
2. a contemporary building.

In critiquing the library as a contemporary insert within a historic context, comparisons are unavoidable and indeed useful to understand continuities and departures as a theoretical position.

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The Library as an Insertion Within the Modernist, Institutional Campus

The central location of the library, to the south of the Faculty of Architecture (FA) building, was pre-determined by the masterplan. Architect Rahul Mehrotra’s intent to create an “anchorage” to the “fragmented campus”, through his insert, is pursued diligently at the site level.¹ The library is a free-standing object on the campus, devoid of a plinth. However, the definitive alignments of the hardscape from the south-western edge of the administrative block, extending to the front of the library, creates a foreground for it. This extended plinth, viewed from the north, lends a formal, stately platform, reinforcing its intended, pivoting presence. 

This is in studied contrast to Doshi’s site planning sensibility, envisioned in CEPT, to create organic, loosely defined edges, questioning of an overarching, geometric, governing schema (true to his then Team X leanings). The buildings, as definitive as they were, allowed for the interstitial ‘urban spaces’ to emerge and sustain loosely, akin to Indian ‘chowks’.² In keeping with this spirit of porosity between the buildings, the ground level of the library attempts to create a thoroughfare. However, the treatment of the surrounding edges bears a strong compositional logic, in line with Mehrotra’s pragmatic sensibility, integrating accessibility, while suturing the ‘fragmented’ campus.

The library has four entrances, in cardinal directions. Entry from the north is an extension of the visual axis from the iconic twin staircases of the FA building, alluding to the continuance of the ‘promenade architecturale’. The act of penetrating the building through the thick, splayed concrete walls is a visceral act of also leaving behind the existing, literally and figuratively.

Despite the north entrance referencing the existing building, the library is non-frontal in that the entries and indeed the elevations are treated more or less equally on all four sides. The parity in treating the elevations overrides making local adjustments. For instance, the ‘Faculty of Technology’ block to the south of the library is incidentally left behind with no referencing. The non-directional design, while at first curbs an intuitive instinct for movement, also allows for exploring the library without hierarchy – a desirable quality of ease prevails in an otherwise hallowed typology.

Library as a Contemporary Building

The architectural design of the 30,000 sq. ft. library is discussed in this essay, revolving around four conceptual frameworks³ –

1. typological imagination of a library
2. (partially) subterranean architecture
3. idea of weight and lightness
4. response to climate.

Three of the six levels of the library are sunk below the ground, so as to not exceed the height of the existing buildings. The library, as a typology, steers away from post-Rem Koolhaas models of ‘urban living rooms’ towards a tropical imagination of climate-moderated pods for individual, new-age users. According to the architect, contemporaneity ⁴ is also explored by contrasting a heavy base with the lightening of the upper two stories. This, he argues, ushers in a newness, an alternative to Doshi’s heavy set, load-bearing idiom, prominent across the CEPT Campus.

While both Doshi’s and Mehrotra’s are impressed upon the ground, Doshi’s sections allow for the site to meander around and through the parallel walls. The physicality or weight of the building does not make it impenetrable. On the contrary, there is an interplay of the visual girth and a certain accommodation of haptic movement through the building. The library, on the other hand, though comprising of a physically accessible ground floor with visually light upper sections externally, does not translate into a thoroughfare as intended. This could be owing to the fortress-like, dense mass at eye level, coupled with the relatively compact footprint of the library, prompting an intuitive movement around the building rather than through.

The architectural diagram of the library comprises of two, clean, incisive rings—the external envelope and the inner core with a ‘moat-like’ interstitial space. The external envelope demonstrates a material and resultant, spatial lighting of the wall section. Rising from three stories below, the opaque retaining wall of the basement gives way to a punctured, fortress-like wall mass on the ground floor. This further lightens to a custom-designed, louvred fenestration system on the upper two floors.

The adjustable louvres, designed as a passive cooling skin, filters light across the day and seasons, lending a temporal dynamic to spaces. This skin is recurring across all four elevations, with little variation in coverage, porosity or details, regardless of the orientation. While climate moderating screens are not an unfamiliar tectonic device in the hot and dry city of Ahmedabad, which has inspired stone jalis to modernist brise soleil, in the Lilavati Lalbhai Library, the louvres have become a matter-of-fact system (complete with a user manual) – neither a reductive imagery nor a poetic device. An effective but formulaic solution, the louvred system has evolved into a distinct vocabulary, identifiable across institutional projects by the architect in the city. ⁵

The interstitial volume between the envelope and the core reveals the entire section and indeed ‘inner elevation’ of the building. This interiorised interstitial space is a potent architectural idea—while one may question its efficacy in terms of the sheer area allocated across six levels, the spatial quality rendered in the lower levels is evocative.

The building’s core operates as three, distinctly readable sections or containers, if you will:

1. The entry level is a concrete shell
2. The basement is an intense, thermally protected well with wooden, nesting volumes
3. The upper level is a detached, floating, white box in metal and gypsum.

The progressive lighting of the building is thus reinforced materially with changing intensity of light and lightness, from bottom to top—in the external envelope, the core and in the interstitial space.

The literal and figurative core of the building, comprising of books, traverses three levels below the ground. The library inverts tropical and typological tropes of courts and central atriums for reading, to the periphery. This inversion of the book-shaft as the inner core, with a circumambulatory space, affords a metaphoric exploration of the library as a ‘temple of learning’. One is tempted to read further into the temple allusion as an inverted section—the perfectly geometrical, symmetrical, cuboidal object above the ground, with a stepped, receding section below the ground (the Cella on top and the Shikara below?). The triple-height moat with light wells brings in diffused light, often used as a nebulous exhibition space.

While conceptually and thermally an interesting idea, the diffused light in a typology requiring high lux levels warrants the use of artificial light, even in daytime, in the basement levels. This gesture is a considered negotiation between tropical heat gain and light. While the design is articulated with climate as a principal generator of form, all the functional levels of the building are sealed to facilitate mechanical ventilation.

The three levels operate as physically airtight containers. The envelope, though porous at the upper levels, does not make any gestures or departures from the uniform screens, to reference the existing context—a lost opportunity to establish a dialogue between the old and the new. This cut-off from the ‘street’ is more apparent at the upper level, where the envelope behaves as a sheath, clinically detached from the inner core.

The basement volumes are amongst the most delightful spaces of the library. Scaled and intimate by virtue of the quality of light below ground level, the nesting wooden volumes gently levitating into the concrete moat, and the mezzanine sections breaking the floor plate, as well as enabling access to the tall book stacks. The corporeality of the books also lends to granularity and scaling. In contrast, the ‘white boxes’ serving as reading rooms above the ground level, operating within horizontal floor plates, awash with ambient light, are staid, floating containers. Here, the idea of the ‘moat’ ceases to exist with the same potency. It becomes a vestigial, interstitial space, serving only to hold the ideal, concentric diagram.

The basement and upper volumes are catered to by two functional staircases. The autonomy to move around, linger and navigate the building individually allows for the user to become an occupier without any barrier. Typological imagination of the reading rooms as pods is, at once, a commentary on, as well as a response to, this generation of users with earphones, instinctively drawing them into personal territories, allowing for instant engagement with the space.

CONCLUDING NOTES

The architecture of the Lilavati Lalbhai Library is to be read semantically as an individual, context-free entity, notwithstanding the obligatory nod to the existing axis and height.

The non-directional insertion of Mehrotra’s library is a departure from the architecture of CEPT University by Doshi, which deploys discernible, cardinal ordering principles (like north-light sections). The architectural gestures of the library are clear, deliberate, and precise—to create a foreground in order to read a Villa Rotunda-esque object. All the details are considered and efficient with a pragmatic sensibility, be it the louvred systems, the gantry at the upper level for maintaining the louvred systems, the modularity of the carrels, or the industrial staircases. The building does not intend to dramatise through details. It is a Miesian space with tropical subversions. A Cartesian object, where the ideal diagram and the drawing are one and the same.

Neither the syntax of space making nor material and tectonics seek to establish continuity or reciprocity with the existing.

The theoretical position to depart from the existing is a critically measured stance, in keeping with the spirit of inquiry, prevalent in and promoted by the institution. The presence of the library as an independent, complete object and the severance of the inside of the library from its immediate context, begs the question whether the design would change if the context changed.

The ability of the original masterplan to allow for new ways of space making to emerge is telling of the resilience of Doshi’s projects as a work in progress, be it at IIM, Bangalore or CEPT, Ahmedabad. Arguably, there are bound to be challenges in juggling the insertion as a part of the larger tissue versus treating it as an individual entity.

However, the architectural intent of the library deftly nudges an alternative to the status quo, without being overwhelmed by the task at hand. This is achieved at the site level and the building level without ambivalence, but with deference. The project sets the tone for a discourse to evolve on campus planning in India, a much-needed critical exercise, already set in motion in campuses like IIM, Ahmedabad and IIM, Bangalore.

Notes:

1. “Things got built all over the place which have… different footprints… architectures… scales… suggestions… quite logically the discussion has moved to the plaza and trying to imagine the other fragments… because you have no control over the fragments right now”. New Lilavati Lalbhai Library at CEPT. By Rahul Mehrotra. Perf. Rahul Mehrotra. CEPT, Ahmedabad. 19 August 2015. ↩︎
2. Neelkanth Chhayya alludes to the contrasting quality of Doshi’s campus, having a “strong armature” lent by the formal buildings, which are “bold and robust”, while the site plan with the spaces between the buildings is “loosely defined, almost like an urban space”. Chhaya, Neelkanth. “4.2 Doshi: Architecture of the Private and Public Realms.” Rajeev Kathpalia, Dinesh Mehta, Meera Mehta, Neelkanth Chhaya, Riyaz Tayyibji. Harnessing the Intangible: Collected Essays on the Work of Balkrishna Doshi. New Delhi: Council of Architecture, 2014. 12-44. Book. ↩︎
3. Except for the typological imagination of a library, the other three are explicitly emphasised by the architect in several forums while discussing the building. ↩︎
4. “There should be a lightness and transparency so it’s inviting. And it stands apart from the heaviness of the buildings around, which are beautiful in their own way…contemporary expression…was a given” New Lilavati Lalbhai Library at CEPT. By Rahul Mehrotra. Perf. Rahul Mehrotra. CEPT, Ahmedabad. 19 August 2015. ↩︎
5. As seen in the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University and JSW School of Public Policy, IIM Ahmedabad. ↩︎
6. Rahul Mehrotra compares libraries to service-intensive buildings like hospitals, where the technical consultants involved “control the spatial quality”. The “programmatic and pragmatic requirements of a library need another level of precision”. The attempt was to “create an expression of that precision in some ways…”. New Lilavati Lalbhai Library at CEPT. By Rahul Mehrotra. Perf. Rahul Mehrotra. CEPT, Ahmedabad. 19 August 2015. ↩︎