National Institute of Design Case Study: Plan, Structure and Campus (Gautam and Gira Sarabhai)

The main building of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad was designed by Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai and built between 1964 and the end of 1968, according to the most detailed study of it. It is one square structural unit of 12.30 m, repeated: concrete columns and beams, thin precast shells in the floors, a shell roof over every unit, and a working floor lifted 3.25 m above an open ground floor. Below: what is documented, and what is not.

National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad: the facts

Designers: Gautam Sarabhai (1917 to 1995) and Gira Sarabhai (1923 to 2021), with a team of collaborators. Shell roofs: developed with the engineer G S Ramaswamy. Sources we opened name no other architect or contractor.

Client: the National Institute of Design, set up in 1961 by the Government of India with the Ford Foundation and the Sarabhai family, on the recommendations of Charles and Ray Eames's India Report (1958).

Location: Paldi, Ahmedabad, on the west bank of the Sabarmati near Sardar Bridge, across the road from Le Corbusier's Sanskar Kendra.

Designed and built: first drawing dated 5 May 1964; built 1964 to the end of 1968 (Alessandrini, 2012). Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation gives completion as 1964 to 65; Apollo gives 1966.

Type: design school: workshops, classrooms and offices on columns over an open ground floor. Size: the central spine is about 37 m by 86 m. We found no sourced floor area or campus area.

Status: in use as NID's Ahmedabad campus; the east wing was never built and the interiors have changed over the years. On the city's heritage portal. Open to visitors on weekdays with a pass.

The brief: the Eames India Report

NID's history page says Charles and Ray Eames presented the India Report to the Government of India on 7 April 1958, and that on its recommendations the government, with the Ford Foundation and the Sarabhai family, set up the National Institute of Industrial Design, as it was first called, at Ahmedabad in September 1961. It credits Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira with "a major role in the establishment and early years of NID". (Elisa Alessandrini's doctoral thesis gives November 1961; we use NID's date.)

The report set the tone. Its section on the physical plant, reproduced by Design Observer, asks for the most "unmonumental, anonymous, pleasant, unpretentious, workable, unshoddy, national buildings possible", if not Fatehpur Sikri. NID's own 1969 documentation, quoted by Alessandrini, set the method: "Problems of architecture, structural design and construction techniques are interrelated and should be resolved integrally."

NID adopted learning by doing, so workshops had to sit beside, and in sight of, the rooms where students drew.

NID Ahmedabad architect: who designed the building

The building is credited to Gautam and Gira Sarabhai by NID, by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation's heritage portal, by Christopher Turner in Apollo (January 2024), and by the one full study of it: Elisa Alessandrini's 2012 doctoral thesis at the University of Bologna, co-supervised by Rabindra Vasavada of CEPT, which worked from the original drawings in Ahmedabad. Much of what follows comes from it, in our translation from the Italian.

Gautam Sarabhai ran the family's Calico Mills with Gira, per Mihir Bhatt's obituary of her; Apollo calls him a Cambridge-educated mathematician.
Gira Sarabhai trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, per Apollo, which calls her contribution to Indian modernism "insufficiently recognised". Alessandrini records that the siblings worked with Wright for about a year and a half in the 1940s.
Collaborators are not named in the sources we opened. Alessandrini found no early sketches except a 1963 sheet by Duncan Buell, an architect in Louis Kahn's office, on how workshops, individual work and shared spaces should relate.
G S Ramaswamy, the engineer who founded the Structural Engineering Research Centre in 1965, helped test materials for the roof shells.

Alessandrini also writes that Gautam Sarabhai invited Kahn to Ahmedabad in November 1962, as a consultant to NID, for the Indian Institute of Management.

Site and context: Paldi, by the Sabarmati

NID started without a building. Apollo says it began in a studio at Calico Mills and then moved into Le Corbusier's museum, then standing empty; Alessandrini says the Sanskar Kendra was rented for seven years, until the new building was ready.

The new site was across the road. It faced the Calico textile works, where students could follow production, in Paldi, then a growing part of the city, beside the cultural centre Le Corbusier had planned. The land was bare except for trees along the road, so the design planted trees around and inside the building. The municipal heritage page now describes a green campus with an amphitheatre set against an old tomb.

Concept: one unit, repeated

Alessandrini describes one structural unit: a square 12.30 m by 12.30 m, three columns to each side, a slab at the first level and a thin shell on top. It was quick to build, let the plan grow by whole units, and left the floor free of walls.

The unit comes from a glass pane. Panes 1 m wide with 5 cm frames give a module of 1.025 m; two modules give the 2.05 m spacing of secondary beams, six give 6.15 m between columns, and twelve give the 12.30 m unit.

National Institute of Design Ahmedabad plan and zoning

A central spine three units wide (about 37 m) and about 86 m long, running north to south. Its corridor, more than 12 m wide, works as an internal street for meeting and study, with classrooms and staff rooms on a level above.
Workshops on the west in three blocks, with two courts between them: one with a pool, one with a tree that had outgrown the building by 2012.
A second phase of workshops on the east and a library and auditorium block of the same unit. The building seemed large enough without them, and they were never built.
An entrance at the north, where a ramp was to rise through a square court under a raised shell. The ramp was never built.

Schematic plan of the NID Ahmedabad main building: a central spine three 12.30 m units wide and about 86 m long running north to south, with a central street and classrooms above, a raised shell over the entrance court at the north end, and on the west side three blocks of workshops separated by two open courts, the south-west block holding the wood and metal workshops where building started; a dashed outline on the east side marks workshops planned for a second phase and never built — The plan grows from one repeated unit: a spine of 12.30 m bays with workshops and courts on the west. The east wing and a library and auditorium block were planned but never built. Schematic, not to scale. Diagram: MOA

This is MOA's schematic of the zoning, not a copy of the Sarabhais' plan; the sizes of the workshop blocks and courts are indicative. For the real drawings, see Alessandrini's thesis and the June 1967 issue of Marg (vol. 20, no. 3, "Design for Living"), which she names as the one magazine that published the project in detail. If you are documenting the building yourself, our field checklist for an architecture case study will help.

NID building section: three levels and a free ground floor

Ground floor, about 3 m high, on columns. Largely open, crossed by two north to south paths and independent of the grid. Glass rooms for meetings, exhibitions, a shop for students' work and a canteen line the main path, with the administration. The floor steps between 30 cm below and 20 cm above datum, so paths sit above sunken pools and dry stone gardens.
Main floor at +3.25 m, which Alessandrini says kept it safe from flooding by the river, with double-height workshops.
A second level in the spine for classrooms, glazed towards the workshops, so students watch work below and take a spiral stair down into their workshop.
Roofs rise to 10.70 m at the crown of the shells; the entrance shell is lifted about 3 m higher, to 14.70 m.

Schematic section of the NID Ahmedabad main building: an open ground floor about 3 m high on concrete columns, with glass rooms for the shop and canteen and water and stone gardens set slightly below the paths; the main floor at plus 3.25 m carrying a double-height workshop on the west under a 12.30 m shell roof whose crown is at plus 10.70 m, with a brick cavity wall below and glazing above; the central street in the spine with glazed classrooms above it looking into the workshop and a spiral stair down; a raised entrance shell beyond reaching plus 14.70 m; and dashed east workshops that were never built — The working floor sits 3.25 m up, clear of the river's floods, over a shaded open ground floor; classrooms look down into the double-height workshops. Schematic, not to scale. Diagram: MOA

Structure and construction

The frame is reinforced concrete columns and beams; the floors and roofs are where the building experiments.

Floor shells for machine loads

The workshop floor had to carry machines, designed for 1,000 kg per square metre per the 1969 documentation. So it is a grid of beams at 2.05 m both ways with a reinforced concrete shell, 5 cm thick and curved both ways, in each bay. The shells were cast on site but not in place, by a method G S Ramaswamy published in 1968: hessian and steel mesh stretched on a timber frame, wet concrete poured on so the cloth sags into a double curve, and the set shell turned over and dropped between the beams.

Roof shells: five ways with brick

Each unit has one roof shell 12.30 m square and 1 m high at the crown, cast on timber formwork: a funicular curve along the diagonal, a shallow arch across the middle of a side. With Ramaswamy, the Sarabhais built five versions, each using less steel, which Alessandrini notes was scarce:

Type A (drawing January 1965): reinforced concrete only.
Type B: brick in the centre, concrete on the four sides.
Type C (September 1965): brick spaced with steel.
Type D: brick with small concrete pieces at the corners.
Type E (drawings December 1966 to April 1969): brick only, in parallel rows, over the raised entrance.

The 1969 documentation gives another reason: brick was used "on account of the prevailing shortage of cement in the country", and "is also more handsome than concrete". Twenty-five roof shells were built, each showing its materials on the underside; presumably what Apollo calls "brick dome vaults".

Schematic of one NID structural unit: a 12.30 m square plan with three concrete columns to each side at 6.15 m, beams at 2.05 m both ways and a thin precast shell in each 2.05 m bay; beside it, two cuts through the 12.30 m roof shell, a funicular curve along the diagonal and a shallow arch across the middle of a side, rising 1 m at the crown; and four steps showing how the floor shells were cast on hessian stretched over a timber frame, left to sag, set, turned over and placed between beams — Everything in the building is a multiple of one unit: a 12.30 m square with columns at 6.15 m, beams at 2.05 m, thin shells in the bays of the workshop floor and one shell over each roof unit. Schematic, not to scale. Diagram: MOA

Built in phases, partly by itself

Alessandrini finds four separate structures in the plan. Work began at the south-west corner with the wood and metal workshops, built in 1965 with roof types A and B; once equipped, they made the building's own windows, doors and timber details. "The construction of NID took place inside the building itself," she writes. (One passage of the thesis says construction began in autumn 1967, which does not fit its fuller account; we follow the latter.)

Materials: concrete, brick and glass

Exposed concrete and brick, which Alessandrini reads as an echo of the Sanskar Kendra opposite. The municipal page calls the facade "exposed brick-and-concrete".
Brick cavity walls in the workshops: infill, 38 cm thick, two leaves with a 2.5 cm air gap against outside heat.
Perforated brick screens as partitions that let air through; our guide to jaali design covers the idea at house scale.
Glass in prefabricated panes of 1 m by 2 m or 0.40 m by 2 m, with an opaque blue band at the top against sun; frames metal in the workshops, timber elsewhere.
Floors of red "cement patent stone" cast in 2.05 m squares, with 5 cm channels between them for machine cables, so machines could move without breaking the floor.

For these materials on an Ahmedabad site today, see our guide to building materials in Ahmedabad and Gujarat.

Light, climate and services

The sources describe no mechanical cooling. The building relies on its section:

Shade below: the low, open ground floor was, in Alessandrini's account, one of the most comfortable spaces in the building, out of the heat and crossed by wind, with light from the courts and openings in the slab above.
Air through: partitions stop short of the ceiling, so with windows open air crosses the building; double-height workshops with high glazing keep it moving.
Heat out: a year after completion, a hole of about 10 cm was cut at each shell's crown to vent hot air, with a sprinkler on each roof run every evening to cool the rooms below.

We found no dated source on later air conditioning or on leaks in the shells. Our guide to roofing materials by climate covers the roof side of these choices for houses.

Influences, as the thesis reads them

Frank Lloyd Wright: the ground floor's water, stone gardens, low ceiling and soft light.
Le Corbusier: exposed concrete and brick, a square grid on pilotis, and the raised entrance shell, compared to the parasol roofs of Villa Shodhan and the Chandigarh High Court.
Charles and Ray Eames: the black-painted, timber-framed glass facades, compared with the Eames House.
Louis Kahn: the repeated unit, the hierarchy of heights, and the wide corridor as a street, as at IIM Ahmedabad.

These are her readings, not the architects' statements.

Reception: a building that stayed in the background

Little written. Alessandrini found NID almost absent from histories of post-independence Indian architecture. Beyond Marg (1967) and NID's 1969 documentation, she lists brief mentions in Lang, Desai and Desai's Architecture and Independence (1997) and an undergraduate thesis at CEPT (2000).
Recognition now. The municipal heritage portal lists it, and Apollo (2024) used it to argue that Gira Sarabhai is under-credited.
Altered. By 2012 Alessandrini described the interior as "completely" transformed by changes over the years. We found no dated source listing them.

What designers in India can take from it today

Our reading:

Let one dimension run the building. A 1 m pane and a 5 cm frame fixed NID's beams, columns and unit. Pick the module from a product you will buy (a glass size, a block, a board) and let the grid follow.
Design so the building can stop. NID was planned in two phases and works with only the first. A repeating unit is complete at every stage, useful when money arrives in parts.
Use the stilt floor as climate, not parking. A low, shaded floor with water and planting gave NID one of its most comfortable spaces.
Test materials on the job. Five roof types in one building is research in brick and concrete. For a structural thesis, see our B.Arch thesis topics by typology.

Visiting NID Ahmedabad

NID's campuses page says its campuses are open to visitors from 9 am to 6 pm, Monday to Friday, except public holidays, with a visitor's pass from the main gate; groups that book ahead can have a guided tour. Some areas are restricted, per the municipal page. Le Corbusier's Sanskar Kendra is across the road, and our case studies of IIM Ahmedabad, Sangath and the L D Institute of Indology cover more buildings for the same trip.

See how MOA members present their own buildings: explore projects on MOA.

FAQ

Who is the architect of NID Ahmedabad?

The main building was designed by Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai, with a team of collaborators. The engineer G S Ramaswamy helped develop its shell roofs.

When was the NID Ahmedabad building built?

The most detailed study dates it 1964 to the end of 1968, with the first workshops built in 1965. Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation gives completion as 1964 to 65 and Apollo gives 1966. The institute was set up in 1961 and first worked from Calico Mills and Le Corbusier's Sanskar Kendra.

What is the structure of the NID building?

A reinforced concrete frame on a 12.30 m square unit with columns at 6.15 m. The workshop floor uses thin precast concrete shells between beams at 2.05 m, and each unit is roofed by a 12.30 m shell, built in five versions from all concrete to all brick.

What is the Eames India Report?

A report by Charles and Ray Eames, presented to the Government of India on 7 April 1958, that recommended a design institute and led to the founding of NID in 1961.

Can you visit NID Ahmedabad?

Yes, on weekdays from 9 am to 6 pm except public holidays, with a visitor's pass from the main gate, per NID. Groups can ask for a guided tour in advance.

Sources

University of Bologna, AMS Dottorato: Elisa Alessandrini, Ahmedabad | Laboratorio di architettura moderna. Il National Institute of Design (1961-68) fra contatti internazionali ed echi della tradizione, doctoral thesis, 2012, chapter 3, sections 3.e and 3.f (PDF) (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
National Institute of Design: History of NID (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
National Institute of Design: Campuses (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, Heritage City: National Institute of Design (NID) (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
Apollo, Christopher Turner: Building Indian modernism in Ahmedabad, 1 Jan 2024 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
Design Observer: India Report, April 1958, Charles and Ray Eames, with an introduction by William Drenttel, 5 Apr 2010 (accessed 4 Nov 2026)
Arquitectura Viva, Mihir Bhatt: Gira Sarabhai (1923-2021), 30 Jul 2021, first published in The Wire (accessed 4 Nov 2026)