The Ahmedabad Town Hall, officially Sheth Mangaldas Girdhardas Memorial Hall, is an

auditorium An auditorium is a room built to enable an audience to hear and watch performances. For movie theatres, the number of auditoria (or auditoriums) is expressed as the number of screens. Auditoria can be found in entertainment venues, community ...

Ahmedabad Ahmedabad ( ; Gujarati: Amdavad ) is the most populous city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is the administrative headquarters of the Ahmedabad district and the seat of the Gujarat High Court. Ahmedabad's population of 5,570,585 (per t ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. It is named after Mangaldas Girdhardas, a textile industrialist.

History

The town hall was constructed in 1930s as a memorial to Mangaldas Girdhardas, a noted textile industrialist in the 20th century, with funds donated by the citizens. It is owned by the

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation The Amdavad Municipal Corporation, or the AMC, established in July 1950 under the Bombay Provincial Corporation Act (1949), is responsible for the civic infrastructure and administration of the city of Ahmedabad. History On 21 April 1831, the ...

. It was renovated in the 1960s under

B. V. Doshi Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi OAL (born 26 August 1927) is an Indian architect. He is considered to be an important figure of Indian architecture and noted for his contributions to the evolution of architectural discourse in India. Having worked ...

. He had opted for a false ceiling for better

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

. Extensive renovation was carried out in 1997-98 under architect Kamal Mangaldas, a grandson of Mangaldas Girdhardas. He removed the false ceiling and added a podium around the original building.

Architecture

The town hall was designed by British architect

Claude Batley Claude Batley F.R.I.B.A., F.I.A.A., (17 October 1879 in Ipswich – 20 March 1956, Bombay) was an English architect who as practitioner, teacher and President of the Indian Institute of Architects from 1921 to 1923, played an influential role ...

in 1939, who also designed the M. J. Library next to it. It is an example of an

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

building. The plan of the building is designed by using two rotating squares placed at 45 degrees forming a star-shape. The resulting

octagonal In geometry, an octagon (from the Greek ὀκτάγωνον ''oktágōnon'', "eight angles") is an eight-sided polygon or 8-gon. A '' regular octagon'' has Schläfli symbol and can also be constructed as a quasiregular truncated square, t, whi ...

space is designed as a seating area. Rectangles are added to the front and rear of the central square which formed a vestibule and a stage respectively. The star-shaped building is capped by a dome on an octagonal space. The whole plan takes inspiration from the ''mandapa''s of Gujarati Hindu temples. The exterior has exposed bricks with stepped back corners invoking the complex exterior of Hindu temples. The thick walls were constructed from bricks and an octagonal concrete dome was constructed over it. The ''

Chhajja A ''chhajja'' is an overhanging eave or roof covering found in Indian architecture. It is characterised with large support brackets with different artistic designs. Variation is also seen in its size depending on the importance of the building on ...

'' and ornate grills in the structure show influence of Gujarati architectural heritage.

References

External links

Building plan drawings
{{Ahmedabad topics, status=collapsed Auditoriums in India Buildings and structures in Ahmedabad British colonial architecture in India Art Deco architecture in India Buildings and structures completed in 1938 Māru-Gurjara architecture

History

Architecture

See also

References

External links