Architecture History | CEPT School of Architecture — The 1966–1968 Studios That Made Learning Visible

Walk under the School of Architecture at Ahmedabad’s Kasturbhai Lalbhai Campus and the building does not resolve into a sealed academic block: brick bearing walls, exposed concrete beams, deep openings, terraces, steps and an occupied undercroft keep studios, circulation and shaded ground visually connected.

The Ahmedabad Education Society established the school in 1962 with government support, and although Balkrishna V. Doshi served as founding director and directed the campus architecture, CEPT’s own archives also identify Bernard Kohn and R. N. Vakil as co-founders, with Kohn helping develop a pedagogy that moved students into villages, work sites and communities.

The first permanent block cannot responsibly be reduced to a single uncontested date: CEPT has described it as built in 1965, its archival exhibition catalogs School of Architecture sections and elevations dated from December 1966 through July 1967, and independent architectural records give 1966–1968, so this memory uses 1968 as the end of the documented first phase rather than as a precise opening day.

Working through Vastu Shilpa, Doshi organized that phase as north–south parallel bays of brick walls and concrete beams and floors, with double-height drawing studios beside smaller teaching spaces, north-facing openings and deep recesses that moderated glare while allowing air to pass through.

Raising much of the school above the ground—on a site shaped by an earlier brick kiln—made the shaded level below an exhibition, meeting and work landscape rather than leftover space, while changes of level and routes between courts allowed teaching to spill beyond assigned rooms.

This was architecture used to test an educational proposition: the studio was not simply a room where an expert delivered knowledge, but one part of a connected setting where students, faculty, drawings, models and informal discussion remained visible to one another.

CEPT later expanded with planning, technology, design, arts and library buildings, and that growth turned the original school into one layer of a campus rather than a finished monument; faculty members and students participated in the longer making of the place under Doshi’s overall direction.

The surviving block has also changed: open areas have been enclosed, adjacent construction has altered its relationships, and although CEPT announced a conservation campaign as complete in 2022, SOS Brutalism’s review of 28 October 2024 still classified the building as endangered because alterations continued to affect its open character.

Today the Faculty of Architecture remains in use at CEPT University, and the official campus program permits individual visits to key public areas, but working studios and classrooms should not be treated as unrestricted visitor space; from the public campus routes, the brick-and-concrete frame, shaded undercroft, deep bays and stepped landscape still show how the first phase joined pedagogy to section.

Photo: Maulik Joshi, 3 January 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.