What is the legacy of BV Doshi?

How a dormant Brutalist theatre in Ahmedabad reveals Doshi’s provocation

25 Aug 2025

On the occasion of Dr BV Doshi’s birthday, it is worth asking: can the life of an architect be read through the buildings he leaves behind? For Doshi, arguably the most celebrated figure in Indian architecture, his institutions, his housing projects and his humanistic pedagogy are discussed regularly. Yet Premabhai Hall, designed in the late 1960s and completed in 1972, somehow lingers on the periphery. Despite its marginal status in mainstream discourse, the building commands an urban presence of formidable clarity, acting as a hinge in Ahmedabad’s historic core. Doshi himself once remarked, “Premabhai Hall stands like an animal, but it stands powerfully,” suggesting its almost sentient corporeal presence within the city.

The theatre weaves together scales of collectivity from the intimate to the civic. Its significance lies not just in its function but in its provocation. Doshi framed the project’s central dilemma: “The question was, can we really build something new alongside these monuments, and if so, what should be the nature of our design?” Commissioned by the Gujarat Vidhyasabha and completed after his celebrated Tagore Memorial Hall, the structure is a remarkable sculpture in concrete. It is a complex built form to interpret. To its west rises Bhadra Fort, to its east stands Achyut Kanvinde’s Bank of India (another Modernist icon), around it are mosques, old dwellings, memories of fortifications and the palimpsest of Ahmedabad’s history. In this dense urban ensemble, the auditorium emerges as an in-between: neither a reproduction of heritage nor turning away from it, but a negotiation and a slice of time.

"Is Premabhai Hall now safely confined to be a monument? If so, what does it stand for? Will it fall into disrepair and may someday too be forgotten, like fort next to it?"

The adjoining photographs are part of a series by Fabien Charuau. Abstracting the volumes into frames, Fabien captures the fragments of what makes the near-Goliathian whole. Light filtering in through precise apertures. Textures that have aged with the structure. And the shadows that fall in geometric precision. The grand staircases and sharp outlines, conceptualised in initial sketches. A concrete edifice in flight, the Hall reveals itself in parts. Constructed in exposed reinforced concrete, Premabhai Hall stands as a legacy of India’s entanglement with Corbusian Brutalism during the formative decades of independence. Concrete, at once pragmatic and symbolic, became a medium for articulating both the nation’s emerging identity and its aspirations towards modernity. Over subsequent decades, the building has remained a witness to urban metamorphosis. It embodies what might be described, borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, as a state of perpetual becoming: a structure that never arrives at a fixed condition but continually negotiates new meanings through its urban milieu.

Around its mass gather the frictions of contemporary urbanism: encroachment and informality, bustle and congestion, harmony and cacophony. Impermanence and permanence. Premabhai Hall is not a neutral object but an active interlocutor, simultaneously participant and spectator in the unfolding life-world of the city. In 1958, when Doshi was commissioned to design the new auditorium across from Bhadra Plaza, the project became an opportunity to propose an early scheme for the area’s revitalisation. The envisioned plaza was to host a variety of activities across multiple levels, serving as a public foyer that led into the cultural heart of the auditorium. Architecture, for him, was not an object in isolation but an opportunity to question the way we interact with the world around us.

Fabien Charuau's photographic tribute to B.V. Doshi’s human-centered architecture that began as a project for ELLE DECOR India grew into a lasting dialogue with the architect. The exhibition was curated by HN Safal as a space for reflection and dialogue in Ahmedabad

“To revisit its architecture on Doshi’s birthday is to recognise that his legacy does not lie in the strength of his architectonics or the beauty of his material genius, but also in the often complex dialogues his built forms continue to sustain with their contexts”

Dotted in blue tarpaulin and surrounded by a crowd that will perhaps never see the Hall as the auditorium it was designed to be, the sight of the dormant giant leaves behind a strange lingering apprehension: Is Premabhai Hall now safely confined to be a monument? If so, what does it stand for? Will it fall into disrepair and may someday too be forgotten, like fort next to it? When the concrete decays for lack of care, will it too fall squarely under the chopping block? Looking at it from an urban condition of the present marked by gentrification and erasure, it is difficult to ignore this line of thinking.

What do we look for in Premabhai Hall? The test of time or the courage of an idea? It exemplifies Doshi’s persistent concern with architecture as an extension of public life. An artefact that resists closure and instead cultivates new imaginations of community, identity and space. To revisit its architecture on Doshi’s birthday is to recognise that his legacy does not lie in the strength of his architectonics or the beauty of his material genius, but also in the often complex dialogues his built forms continue to sustain with their contexts.