The Living and Learning Design Centre in a Kutch village is about dialogue between contemporary designers and traditional artisans and about keeping crafts relevant.
“Why here? Why a design centre of such sophistication in a small village off a highway?” The answer flashes in one’s mind at the same time: “Because that’s the most logical and relevant place for it.” The answer is validated a while later in a conversation with Ami Shroff, the 43year-old project director of the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC). She explains: “My mother, Chanda Shroff, was born in a village in Kutch. She has always been inclined towards art and felt she was privileged to be able to move to a city where she could view art in museums. It got her thinking about rural India and how there is no place to view art. Art is so much a part of the lives of people and yet they cannot see the work created by others. So here it is, a museum in the middle of nowhere!”
It truly does seem that way—a modernist piece of architecture looming up just off the Bhuj-Bhachau highway near the village of Ajrakpur in Kutch, Gujarat, the LLDC was inaugurated on January 23. Ami Shroff jokes about its origins saying: “It all started on an A4-sized paper from which the idea grew. Everyone asked me what it was that I wanted. It was tougher to answer that than my school exams. Ba [mother] would say one sentence, and I would write four pages on it and ask her, ‘Is this what we are planning?’, and gradually it took shape.”
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