The robustness of the Lilavati Lalbhai Library building, designed by Rahul Mehrotra, is of a bold, young, vibrating-with-ideas, respectful youth. The campus is undergoing changes, and opening up new vistas to review with fresh breath even the older buildings. The new library building is large in size and has a visibly strong presence – housing a large collection of books but also exhibiting some strong architectural ideas. The building adopts a characteristic language – that of the louvers – an architectural element much debated and discussed within schools and traditions of critical regionalism, to architecture of a global south in the wake of an Internationalism within the modern style.

In India, louvers became a key element to imagine modernism that was local, because it responded to the regional climate. The language of louvers that the building adopts and the way it’s ground floor turns into a series of solid-relief formations, the building extends itself into the landscape of the surrounding public zones, and makes for a beautiful and unique presence. And as you enter this building, the form-mass of changing valencies and formations, the building behaves and operates much like a kaavad – a traveling shrine where multiple doors keep opening to reveal inner layers leading to a core.