IIM Ahmedabad campus

Louis Kahn's red-brick masterpiece, India's top business school

The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad is India's most famous business school, and its campus is one of the great modernist buildings on the subcontinent. The original 1962 design by Louis Kahn — vast red-brick volumes pierced by huge unglazed circular openings, with internal cloister-like passages — covers about 35 hectares of the Vikram Sarabhai garden suburb.

The campus is private and access is restricted, but visitors with an interest in architecture can request day passes from the gate office on weekdays. The Faculty Building, the dormitories, and the central library are the must-see structures. A newer extension across the road, completed in the 2000s by the firm HCP, deliberately echoes Kahn's brick palette.

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Louis Kahn designed the original campus in the 1960s without ever specifying the bricks as anything but **'load-bearing brick'**. The local craftsmen suggested traditional Gujarat clay bricks fired with care, and the result is one of Kahn's most celebrated buildings — the geometry of his Western forms in the texture of vernacular Indian materials. He visited often and is said to have made detailed sketches in the IIM library, several of which are still on display.

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