Doshi Hussain Gufa – Get Caved in Art

If at any point of time you are in India, then you would certainly want to see the beautiful arts and crafts that exist here. This is the land of architectural elegance and beautiful monuments. India is also land of tradition and culture. Ahmedabad is one part of India which you would love to visit just to see the beautiful monuments and galleries here. The exquisite nature of these monuments give you all the reason to feel excited about and this is one place where you would see Indian tradition at its best.

The Doshi Hussain Gufa is one such place which you must visit in the city of Ahmedabad. Situated in the CEPT campus of Ahmadabad, the scenic beauty of the campus is the first thing that takes you aback. With the beautiful greenery here, the area also has the best variety of birds incidentally. The students of the CEPT University throng this place and the Art Gallery lying in the campus justifies its presence amidst students of Architecture and planning who come here and plan for a futuristic India.

Located in the Navrangpura area of the city of Ahmedabad, the Doshi Hussain Gufa is a perfect showcase of art and tradition. Shri Balkrishna Doshi was its main architect and he did it in collaboration with M/s Stein Doshi and Bhalla. Then S.L.Shah and V.V.Ranga Rao, Vishnu Joshi, and Lise Trottier were the associates in this project to encourage art forms in this part of India. Vishnu Joshi was the consultant on structural matters, and Ravindra Vasavada was the Structure Form Consultant. Western India Engineers were the contractors to execute this lovely place of art at its best. The entire area is around 1000metres square and the built up area is around 280 meters square.

The whole idea to bring this structure up was to encourage the art form in India and the cost came up to around 1.8 million. This was in the year 1993.

This is a gallery for art and for exhibitions of paintings and also sculptures. Here the mainstay is the works of the great artist M.F.Hussain. So the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology or the CEPT University Campus boasts of this structure and has managed to maintain a balance between the architecture educational institutions and the science advancements.

The art gallery has a great collection of the painting abstractions of the Paleolithic kind of art. There is a great feeling of ablution and the subterranean kind of comforts here. These are the reminders that one gets visually here and they resemble the Ajanta and the Ellora forms. The entire thing is under the influence of the image of a cave for the museum. The basic plan came out of the module of the ellipse and the intersecting circles. The amorphous spaces inside are also contiguous and the domes are all at an incline. The walls have planes at curvilinear angles and the floors here are undulating. The columns inside add beauty and they are rectilinear. There is a footprint of around 280m by 2 and it increases the surface area if the painting has to be through convoluting planes. There are various things protruding out like the domes, the skylight and the shells. They actually float on a space that is buried and has gutters extending above the ground. This actually increases the feeling and allows the object to be fixed to the ground. The entire space is lighted up with the skylights that project our and there are skin cutouts too which allow the light to come in. there are mythic shafts and the light spots together make the place look like a galaxy with lot of stars.

Earth mounds, spaces buried and china mosaic has made the architectural elegance of this place intriguing and the energy intake here is not much because of this. Construction techniques that have been adopted to build this are all material resource optimized thus improving the quality. There is a wire mesh with mortal and this lines the floor which resembles a cloth and thus the foundation is not required at all. Again the roof shells are in the pattern of a computer design thus eliminating the need for expense. Hand tools have been used for construction and the workers are skilled as well as semi skilled who have worked on this.

This underground art gallery has all the sculptures and paintings of the great painter and artist M.F.Hussain. The entire structure resembles a skeletal wire mesh and skin combination which is embedded by cements layers.

So come here and enjoy the quiet surroundings after the hustling activity outside in the city. The trees that surround this place render the place absolutely calm and there is a fantasy attached to this lovely land of art and beauty. It is known as the Amdavad ni Gufa and is on the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Campus. The result of the creativity of two great artists M.F.Hussain and B.V.Doshi, this place is a must visit.