THE URMILA KAILASH BLACK BOX

In a chance meeting on a flight in the early 1980s, Urmila Kanoria and BV Doshi got talking.

- Sridevi Nambiar

The daughter of pioneering industrialist Gujarmal Modi, Kanoria had recently moved to Ahmedabad from Calcutta, and though she admits she didn't know many people in her new city at the time, she carried a vision for it-its scope to host a centre for the arts. Recalling the power of the many museums, galleries and arts institutions on their varied travels, Doshi and Kanoria were in total alignment. Back in Ahmedabad they convinced the city's education society of their vision, obtained land on the same campus as CEPT, and opened the Kanoria Centre for Arts in 1984, with a foundation stone laid by artist MF Husain-not too far from where his radical collaboration with Doshi, Amdavad ni Gufa, would open in the following decade. In the minutes of a meeting of board members and some invited guests from September 1983-which included artists and thinkers such as Bhupen Khakhar, Piraji Sagara and Jyotindra Jain-the consensus was on artistic freedom and interdisciplinarity, and the promise of a versatile centre of exchange, where practitioners could interact and learn from each other. Four decades later, the latest addition to the centre, the Urmila Kailash Black Box, designed by Khushnu Panthaki Hoof and Sönke Hoof of Studio Sangath, embodies the same sense of versatility and exchange-in architecture, as well as purpose.