Sangath, in the wet season

Balkrishna Doshi called his Ahmedabad studio Sangath — “moving together through participation.” Built in 1980 as the workplace for his own practice, it became one of the most-studied buildings in modern India, and a touchstone when Doshi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018. It is also, quietly, a lesson in living with water.

The first thing you read are the vaults: long, low barrel roofs, half-sunk into the earth and sheathed in broken white china-mosaic. The curve sheds the rain; the white mosaic bounces away Ahmedabad's punishing sun; and the earth banked against the lower walls keeps the rooms cool without machinery. The form is doing climate work before it does anything else.

Around the vaults, the ground is shaped to handle water rather than resist it. Terraced channels, steps and a small amphitheatre guide the monsoon runoff across the site and slow it, turning a downpour into part of the experience of the place. The landscape is not decoration laid over the building; it is part of the same hydraulic idea.

Even the signature skin earns its keep. The china-mosaic that gives Sangath its shimmer is also durable, reflective and — on a curved vault — sheds water cleanly and dries fast. It is Doshi taking a cheap, local, almost throwaway material and making it both the building's climate strategy and its face.

That is what makes Sangath worth standing in when it rains. It does not seal itself against the monsoon and hope; it is bermed, curved, channelled and surfaced to move heat and water the way Gujarat's climate demands. The rain is written into the design as a guest the building was built to receive — which is the whole argument of this issue, built once, beautifully, more than forty years ago.