Modern Architecture And the excAvAtion of the PAst: Louis KAhn And the indiAn sub-continent This is the paradox: how to become modern and return Modern Architecture to sources: how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization. and the Excavation Paul Ricoeur1 of the Past As the work of Louis Kahn recedes into history its long-term implications for world architecture become ever more evident. Much has been written about his monumentality, his metaphysics, his ideas of construction, and his debts to classical antiquity. William J. R. Curtis The same is true of his beaux-arts formation, his obsession with ruins, and his interest in the geometrical structures of nature. Several later schools of thought have tried to “claim” Kahn as their chief mentor, from post-modernists to minimalists, but his architecture escapes these easy categories, as it touches much deeper, not to say archetypal, levels in experience. At times he even transcended the limits of Western architectural discourse, as when giving shape to the social and political aspirations of nations newly liberated from imperialism on the Indian sub-con- tinent. With both the National Assembly Complex in Dacca, East Pakistan (now Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962-1983)), and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (1962-1974), Kahn penetrated the substructures of the past and transformed them through his usual abstraction into resonant emblems of mo- dernity. To later architects seeking touchstones in tradition and preoccupied with questions of post-colonial identity, his solu- tions revealed new ways of synthesizing the new and the old, the local and the universal.2 It is impossible to understand Kahn’s Assembly in Dacca separately from the processes of nation-building. Monuments play a role in the marking of new territories, the establishment of symbolic centres and the construction of foundation myths. In the confusion surrounding the independence of India from British rule in 1947, several new capitals were created to deal urgently with the reconfiguration of frontiers. With the Partition of 1948, Pakistan was founded as an Islamic state but its two halves were over 600 miles apart: West Pakistan with Islamabad as its eventual national capital, and East Pakistan with Dacca as a subordinate administrative head. The Eastern territory corres- ponded to part of Bengal, cut in two in 1905 by the Viceroy George Curzon; this left Calcutta, then capital of the British Raj, in the Indian half. Another result of the 1948 Partition was the sectioning of the State of Punjab, which left Lahore, the old state capital, in West Pakistan. It was this that led to the creation of a new capital on the Indian side: Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier. Its monuments were supposed to exemplify the values of the newly founded secular and democratic republic of India. 353 sher-e-Bangla NagAr, 354 sher-e-Bangla NagAr, Capital of Bangladesh, Capital of Bangladesh, dhaka, 1962–83. Aerial view dhaka, 1962–83. national of the entire complex under Assembly building. construction. William J. r. curtis 1 Modern Architecture And the excAvAtion of the PAst: Louis KAhn And the indiAn sub-continent Modern Architecture And the excAvAtion of the PAst: Louis KAhn And the indiAn sub-continent East and West Pakistan were different in numerous ways—inclu- a nationalist mythology which included a range of symbols such ding climate, landscape, history, ethnic make-up, attitudes to reli- as memorials to martyrs and freedom fighters who, with support gion, and of course language. Dacca stood in the tropical delta from the Indian military, had “liberated” the territory from the of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, a liquid landscape of hold of General Ayub’s West Pakistan. Like so many other monu- shifting channels and humid vegetation. The syncretic versions ments in the history of architecture, the National Assembly of Islam in East Pakistan resisted the imposition of an Islamic in Dacca was born out of a history of violent conflicts. state ideology from outside. Bengalis preferred their own lan- With its bold concrete volumes cut by shadows, the main guage to the imported Urdu, and were underrepresented in the Assembly Building dominates the ensemble and has a slightly legislative assemblies in West Pakistan. In 1962, the President, otherworldly quality [ → 354 ]: a luminous citadel rising out of General Ayub Khan, decided to reset the balance and assuage the waters on a platform of red brick. It is a grandiose statement separatist tendencies by offering Dacca an entire Assembly and which affirms the state in forms both modern and archaic. The Governmental complex. Initially, the project was to have been networks of luminous lines on the cylinders and rectangles of given to Muzharul Islam who for some years had been develop- silver-grey concrete are rims of white marble marking the daily ing an architecture adjusted to his subtropical country and its pouring joints, but seen at a distance they read almost as bind- distinctive cultural traditions.3 Inspired by great Bengali writers ings, recalling the weaving of bamboo huts. This “house for such as Rabindranath Tagore, who contributed to world literature the people” has a fortified appearance and is aloof in effect. It is while returning to his roots, Islam felt that provincial regiona- approached by processional ramps which lead to the main lism and superficial internationalism were both ills to be avoided. entrance under a mosque which has four cylindrical towers at its He had studied at Yale University in the 1950s where he had met corners and is skewed off the geometry of the rest of the build- Paul Rudolph (whose work in Florida established an effective ing so as to align with Mecca. The Assembly in Dacca combines modern response to tropical conditions) and Louis I. Kahn, who secular and religious elements, and is a democratic symbol in a designed the Yale Art Gallery and taught at the school. Islam was country without a fully functioning democracy. It is modern yet willing to give up the great opportunity offered to him in favour contains echoes of a rich architectural heritage running back of an architectural “master” of the first order, so approached Le through the periods of the Moghuls (sixteenth century), the Mus- Corbusier (who refused), Alvar Aalto (who was not well), and lim Sultanates (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries), and Hindu finally Kahn, who was happy to accept. kingdoms, to the early phases of Buddhism in the first millen nium. Kahn was at the peak of his creativity and working flat out It reactivates a deeply embedded tradition of centralized forms.5 on a series of major projects, but the Dacca commission offered The National Assembly Building is a cousin of Kahn’s other him an unprecedented opportunity to deal with one of the most late works and like them fuses space, geometry, structure, and ancient tasks in architecture: the symbolization of the power of the light in an effort to reveal an immaterial dimension. The massive state in monumental forms. Designing a modern parliament forms suggest an impenetrable citadel but the giant rectangular, was inherently ambiguous, as it required a judicious balance triangular, and circular openings are detailed so that the walls between authority and representation. The site selected for the read as thin planes of light emerging from deep reveals of Government enclave was a grassy plain to the north of the city shadow. The same materials are used inside where layers of struct- and the programme was to include a hall of justice and hos- ure cut by huge round apertures generate a ring of tall streets tels for representatives as well as the main Assembly building and galleries lit from above. The mosque creates the sen- [ → 353 ]. Kahn sculpted the land with platforms and bodies sation of an eternal space beyond its walls, the corners of water, envisaging a Citadel of Assembly aligned axially with a dematerialized by glazing. The central Chamber of Representa- Citadel of Institutions (not built).4 The complex of buildings in tives is an anticlimax by comparison, with its feeble parasol roof Dacca now known as Sher-e-Banglanagar (after Sher-e-Bangla, perhaps intended to refer to a Buddhist umbrella over a sacred the Tiger of Bengal) was supposed to anchor in place a political centre.6 Kahn maintained a dialogue with the past but he was system which in reality had its seat elsewhere. It was only after a thoroughly modern architect, who used abstraction to create the War of Independence in 1971, during which East Pakistan a new order, one in which voids are as important as solids, and seceded from West Pakistan and became the new nation of in which structure is dramatized by a controlled tectonic expres- Bangladesh, that the main parliament building was completed sion of materials and construction. Behind the apparent simplic- as part of a national capitol in the full sense. It was absorbed by ity of Kahn’s bold volumes, there is a complex content linking essays 2 Modern Architecture And the excAvAtion of the PAst: Louis KAhn And the indiAn sub-continent Modern Architecture And the excAvAtion of the PAst: Louis KAhn And the indiAn sub-continent 355 sher-e-Bangla NagAr, Capital of Bangladesh, dhaka, 1962–83. early sketches stressing centralized idea of assembly. visible and invisible realms. In his designs he struggled to unite half-veiled symbols with the material order of architecture. In Kahn’s view, a monument should crystallize the aspirations of an institution while transmitting over time and adding in the long term to the collective memories of a society. In 1944 he wrote: Monumentality in architecture can only be defined as a quality, a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed.