Essential reading on Ahmedabad’s Bauhaus-inspired National Institute of Design, blueprints for a utopian effort to forge an alternate modernity for India that attracted collaborators like Louis Kahn, David Tudor, John Cage, Charles Eames, among others, spearheaded by Indian luminaries Dashrath Patel and Gira Sarabhai. This document, produced at NID in 1970, shortly after its shift fom its original offices in the Corbusier-designed Sanskar Kendra to a purpose-built campus nearby, records the heady experimentalism that emerged from NID’s alt-pedagogical early years. It wasn’t meant to last, this first flush of optimism and world-building: by 1973 the institution was in the midst of an existential crisis that drove out many of its founders, and left those who stayed behind disillusioned — it was the only way to be, considering that the dark days of the Emergency lay just ahead.

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