Sen Kapadia Architect NID Post-Graduate Campus Gandhinagar, Gujarat

A project from the office of architect Sen Kapadia — a campus for an academic institution in Gandhinagar — aims for monumentality through enduring spatial values rather than exaggerated scale.

- Sen Kapadia, Kaiwan Mehta

To discuss this project, we visit some earlier notes of Sen Kapadia as they appeared in a conversation he had with the architect and long-time friend B V Doshi, published in the book In Conversation: On Contours of Contemporary Indian Architecture (Macmillan India Ltd, 2007).

“Similar to these traditional qualities of timeless spaces, contemporary architecture is also exploring a new spatial planning strategy. In an adventurous approach, architects are generating experiential spaces rather than iconic forms. Subverting the external image in a larger schema of planes and places, a fragmented architectural assemblage is generated that is iconoclastic and presents an asymmetrical sequence of exhilarating spatial experiences. Unlike the studied and focused composition of the classical style that generates aesthetics of its harmonious details, we now have dislocated and multifocal forms releasing a few unexpected and many exciting space configurations.

It is the notion of a personal discovery with which this new discourse of aesthetics is centrally concerned. Such a vocabulary is born between a dialogue of the human body and clutch of material spaces sublimated to their ethereal manifestations. A vision is now being projected of a new universal order of free, unequal and autonomous form obeying a non-orthogonal spatial planning of selfreferential dispositions. Such aesthetics discover the law in the depth of their own identity, like in a Tyeb Mehta painting. The liberated will express this law as the principle of the non-autonomy, rather than a by-product of some obsessive borrowed motif.