Silent Guidance
The Doshi Retreat is a new space for contemplation on the Vitra Campus which was designed by architect Balkrishna Doshi soon before he passed away in 2023 (image: Vitra).
“It’s really hard to put into words what the Doshi Retreat is, and maybe that’s exactly the point,” says Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, the granddaughter of architect Balkrishna Doshi, who collaborated with him on the newly installed building on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. “It defies definitions and it encourages our presence of being.”
The Doshi Retreat, which was designed to be a space for contemplation, represents both a new typology for the Vitra campus and a memorial to Doshi himself, who passed away in 2023 shortly after completing the design for the building. Doshi, who received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2018, is often celebrated for having adapted the principles of European and American modernist architecture, which he learned while working under Le Corbusier in France, for his native India’s culture, climate and traditional building techniques. His monumental concrete Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, for example, was inspired by maze-like Indian temple cities, while the open-plan art gallery Amdavad ni Gufa took on an undulating, serpentine form inspired by Hindu mythology. Yet the Doshi Retreat – his only design to be completed outside of India – operates in reverse, translating elements of Eastern philosophies for a Western audience. The project was initiated after Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus of Vitra, visited the 11th-century Sun Temple in India’s Gujarat and asked Doshi, with Panthaki Hoof’s practice Studio Sangath, to design a space that could recreate the peacefulness he had experienced inside the temple’s shrine. “It was not about defining what a shrine is,” Panthaki Hoof says, describing how the studio aimed to design something that would evoke a particular sensation, rather than a specific belief system. “It was really about understanding what that feeling was.”
The Doshi Retreat’s pathways lead to a tunnel that opens out into a circular room where visitors are invited to sit and reflect (image: Vitra).
While the Vitra campus initially began as an industrial production site in 1950, it has since evolved into an architectural park with a network of museums, cafés, factories, shops, gardens, and educational spaces, all of which have been designed by leading architects commissioned by the Fehlbaum family. “Given all these new activities, a place of contemplation felt timely,” Fehlbaum says, adding that the project’s relevance has only increased since the retreat was first conceived in 2020. “Confrontation, polarisation, war, authoritarianism have become increasingly prevalent,” he says. “In this climate, we felt that a place representing Doshi’s values feels even more appropriate, because Doshi built bridges between East and West, between science and spirituality, tradition and modernity.” Cultural institutions have often been likened in contemporary society to temples, providing spaces for inspiration, memory, and contemplation, while attendance at traditional churches and their ilk has dropped in the Western world. The Doshi Retreat, however, makes this function more literal, with the building solely designed to provide visitors with a transformative experience, and the architecture itself acting as a teacher rather than the artefacts it holds. “At first we used the word sanctuary, and we were a bit afraid of the word, that it may be too holy,” Fehlbaum says. “But actually, yes, it is that – we all want to lift our spirits, and we all don't know enough.”
The entrance to the retreat is formed of two descending pathways, which disorient visitors by leading them below ground level (image: Marek Iwicki).
Waves of sunset-coloured steel frame the path into the Doshi Retreat, which steadily dips below ground level. Navigating this descending path, visitors quickly gain the perspective of an ant, with the grass topping each node of steel rising from knee-height until it is swaying in the wind above their heads. “The words ‘getting lost’ kept on resurfacing again and again in our conversations,” Panthaki Hoof says, explaining how she and Doshi started the design process by discussing times when they had felt peaceful and contemplative. “Those words really became the seeds of our design.” Surprising Fehlbaum’s expectations for a small shrine, the team imagined the retreat sitting on a piece of land that was large enough for visitors to temporarily feel lost. “We realised that the retreat cannot be a place which you just enter into – it has to be a place that you arrive at,” Panthaki Hoof says. Disorientation also guided the design process, with Doshi handing Panthaki Hoof a swirling, cartoonish scribble of the retreat and asking her to translate it into a finished design. “He truly believed that it was through confusion that the path would emerge, even if it felt blurry at first,” she says, “and that sense of ambiguity, that sense of being unsure, of slight disorientation, was important to achieve that sense of presence.”
Doshi’s original drawing of the design of the retreat, which was created in 2022 (image: Studio Sangath).
After Panthaki Hoof designed a series of potential pathways leading into the retreat, Doshi selected an intertwining path that recalled a dream he had of two serpents wrapping around one another. These pathways, which swirl like infinity symbols from above, also helped to shape the narrative of the retreat. Drawing on Kundalini – a spiritual practice focused on raising a coiled, serpent-like energy from the base of the spine up through the body’s energy centres – the architects aimed to create a journey that would lead visitors through a similar crescendo. “When you enter an Indian temple, you ring the bell, which centres you and focuses you to be in that moment,” says Sönke Hoof, co-director of Studio Sangath, describing the inspiration for the soundscape of gong and flute sounds that follows visitors as they navigate these paths. In the retreat, these sounds are tuned to frequencies associated with each of the body’s chakras, starting with tones related to the base of the spine, which represents our connection to the earth, and ending with tones linked to the crown of the head, which represents our relationship with the divine. “The path is very much like the Kundalini in a symbolic sense,” Panthaki Hoof says. “In this case, it is moving from an inner flutter to a presence of being.”
The entrance to the retreat is formed of two intertwining paths which recalled a dream Doshi had of two serpents coiling around one another (image: Julien Lanoo).
At the end of the path, a tunnel leads into a circular room with a gong at its centre. A recording of the gong plays from a speaker mounted behind it, and the gong rattles from the sound of the recording to produce a strong vibration that encases visitors in sound. “The gong recording was stretched from 22 seconds to about three minutes,” Hoof says, “so you can hear subtleties and undertones which usually you can't hear.” Alongside sound, the retreat uses the elements to create a sense of serenity and connectedness. A large circular mandala made from hand-hammered brass acts as a ceiling, which is framed by crescents of open sky. A rainwater fountain flows behind the semicircle of stone benches where visitors are invited to sit and reflect, while birds chirping nearby add to the gong’s chorus. “It begins a new conversation with the land and the architecture,” Hoof says, pointing out how the retreat is in dialogue with other buildings on the Vitra Campus, acting as a bridge between the straight lines of Tadao Ando’s Conference Pavilion and the curves of Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum, while its grassy slopes mirror the rolling hills across the road from the campus. The landscape will also shape the patina of the retreat’s weathered steel structure, which was designed to disrupt the site as little as possible – only the ground below the gong chamber is filled with concrete, while the rest of the structure is mounted on giant screws.
The final room of the retreat is only partially covered, allowing rain to fill its rainwater fountain (image: American Academy of Arts and Letters).
“Doshi was a teacher in the presence of whom you learned without being aware that you were being taught,” Panthaki Hoof says. The same could be said of the retreat itself, which folds in aspects of Kundalini spirituality while remaining open and ambiguous, privileging sensation over narrative. Panthaki Hoof refers to the retreat as Doshi’s “final lesson”, both to his granddaughter and to the world at large, and one which teaches about the important role that confusion and uncertainty can play in the journey towards clarity and serenity. Despite the fact that sound permeates the whole retreat, the experience aims to provide visitors with an inner silence; the disorientation of the pathways firmly plants their minds in the present, while the soothing soundscape quiets their thoughts, opening them up to knowledge based on feelings rather than ideas. “Doshi said that silence is the most generous form of guidance,” Panthaki Hoof says. “And it is the silence, in his absence, that has guided us in this project.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown