HOCHHAUS

Annette Kisling, Jens Franke
Leonard Wertgen

Exhibition from 19 January to 2 June 2021

Doshi Doshi Doshi

Born in 1927, the architect Balkrishna Doshi has decisively shaped the Indian city of Ahmedabad with his architectural work and his social commitment. In addition to his work as an architect, he is an urban planner, professor, theorist and founder of the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad.

Since 2009, Leonard Wertgen and Jens Franke (in collaboration with Niklas Fanelsa, Marius Helten and Björn Martenson) have been investigating the city of Ahmedabad with their continuing research. Their interest is to understand the city’s built environment in its diversity and contradictions and to make perceptible the parallelism of spatial concepts that always include social, political and historical moments. In 2016, they had the opportunity to talk to Balkrishna Doshi about his work and the city of Ahmedabad. This conversation forms the starting point of the exhibition “Doshi Doshi”. In addition, as a further part of the research project, film footage and photographs of the following buildings from Ahmedabad by Balkrishna Doshi will be shown: Institute of Indology (1962), Central Bank of India (1967), Premabhai Hall (1972), LIC Housing (1976) and Sangath (1981).

Annette Kisling’s photographic work is dedicated to a very well-known building by Balkrishna Doshi, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (1963 to 1983). In the winter of 2014, she had the opportunity to walk through and photograph the campus of the Institute of Management during the day and at night over the period of two weeks. The place is designed in such a way that interior and exterior spaces correspond with each other, merge into each other. For the exhibition, mainly photographs were selected that provide insights into precisely these in-between areas, in addition to some interior spaces, for example the library of the institute.

All Videos: Uwe Jonas, Pictures: Thomas Bruns