Sabarmati Ashram: Simplicity in Architecture

On the western bank of the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad stands a group of low, whitewashed, tile-roofed buildings under large trees. There is no grand gate, no dome, no carved facade. Yet the Sabarmati Ashram is one of the most visited places in Gujarat, and for architects it is one of the most instructive. Mahatma Gandhi lived here from 1917 until 1930, and it was from here that he set out on the Dandi March. The buildings he lived and worked in are almost aggressively ordinary — and that is exactly why they are worth studying.

Indian homes today often move in the opposite direction. Flats are filled wall to wall with built-in furniture, feature walls compete with false ceilings, and every surface carries a finish chosen to impress. Clients frequently say they want a calm home, then approve a design with fifteen materials and three accent colours. The ashram, and the museum Charles Correa built beside it in 1963, offer a different model: few materials, honest construction, deep shade, moving air, and rooms sized for the life lived in them rather than for display.

This article looks at the ashram in three layers: its history, the architecture of the original cottages such as Hriday Kunj, and the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, the museum that is one of the finest early works of modern Indian architecture. It then translates what these buildings teach into dimensions, materials, costs and rules for a modern home. Only well-established facts are used; where details of the buildings are drawn, the drawings are schematic and labelled as such, not measured surveys.

A short history of the ashram

Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915 and, in the same year, set up his first Indian ashram at Kochrab, then on the edge of Ahmedabad, in a rented bungalow. The community soon needed more space for farming, animal care, spinning and weaving, and in 1917 it moved to the open land on the bank of the Sabarmati. The new settlement was called the Satyagraha Ashram; most people today simply call it the Sabarmati Ashram or Gandhi Ashram.

For the next thirteen years the ashram was the centre of Gandhi's work in India. Its residents lived by a set of observances that included truth, non-violence, non-possession, bread labour and swadeshi — the use of locally made goods — and the daily routine combined prayer, physical work, spinning, teaching and correspondence. On 12 March 1930 Gandhi left the ashram with a group of marchers on the Dandi March to protest the salt tax, and he resolved not to return to live there until India was free. He never lived at the ashram again. In 1933 he disbanded the ashram community, and the site was later given over to social work.

In the years after independence a memorial trust took care of the site, and in 1963 the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya — a museum and archive designed by the young architect Charles Correa — opened beside the original buildings. Today the ashram remains a working memorial visited by people from across India and the world. A redevelopment plan for the wider ashram precinct, announced by the Gujarat government in the early 2020s, has prompted public debate about how a place defined by its simplicity should be preserved, which is itself a reminder of how much the ashram's modesty is valued.

Hriday Kunj and the ashram cottages

Hriday Kunj is the cottage where Gandhi and Kasturba lived during the ashram years. It is a single-storey house with whitewashed walls, a sloping roof of clay tiles, timber doors and windows, and a shaded verandah along its front. Inside, the rooms are small and nearly empty: Gandhi's room is known for its low writing desk and floor seating, and a spinning wheel is displayed as a reminder of the work done there. There is nothing in it that a village carpenter and mason of the time could not have built.

Around it stand other buildings of the same family. Vinoba–Mira Kutir is the small cottage associated with Vinoba Bhave and later with Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), both close associates of Gandhi. Magan Niwas was the home of Maganlal Gandhi, who managed the ashram's affairs. Upasana Mandir is the open-air prayer ground where the community gathered morning and evening — not a building at all, but a level space under the sky and the trees. Nandini was the ashram's guest house. Each is modest, low and shaded, and they sit loosely in the landscape rather than in a formal axis.

Why the plainness works

It is tempting to see these cottages as simply poor, but they are carefully suited to Ahmedabad's climate, which has a long, very hot dry season, a humid monsoon and a short mild winter. The verandah keeps direct sun off the walls and openings for most of the day and gives a shaded place to sit and work. Clay tiles on a sloping roof shed heavy monsoon rain quickly, and the ventilated space under the tiles loses heat faster at night than a flat slab. Thick masonry walls absorb heat slowly, so rooms stay cooler through the afternoon. Openings on more than one side catch the breeze off the river. Whitewash reflects sunlight and can be renewed every year at almost no cost. None of these devices is unique to the ashram — they are the shared wisdom of Gujarat's vernacular houses — but the ashram uses them without any decoration to hide behind.

The Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya: Correa's museum

When the memorial trust needed a building to hold Gandhi's letters, photographs and papers and to receive visitors, the commission went to Charles Correa, then at the start of his career. The obvious approach — a monumental memorial hall — would have dwarfed the cottages and contradicted everything the ashram stood for. Correa did the opposite. He designed the museum as a cluster of low, square units of the same size, laid out on a grid, some enclosed as galleries and archive rooms and others left open as shaded pavilions. The units are arranged around courtyards, including a central water court, so that a visitor walks in and out of shade, glimpsing trees, water and sky between the exhibits.

The construction is as simple as the plan. Each unit has brick piers at its corners carrying a pyramidal roof covered in clay tiles. Concrete channels run along the lines of the grid on top of the walls, acting as beams and carrying rainwater off the roofs — the structure and the drainage are the same element. Many openings are closed not with glass but with wooden louvres, which let air pass while keeping out sun and rain. Floors are of stone, walls of exposed brick, and the palette is small enough to name in one breath: brick, tile, stone, timber, concrete and water.

The grid also makes the building open-ended. Because every unit is the same, the museum reads less like an object and more like a small village of pavilions, and in principle it could grow by adding units without losing its character. That idea — architecture as a system of repeated, humane parts rather than a single monument — runs through much of Correa's later work, and he wrote about climate as a generator of form, most famously in his essay titled Form Follows Climate. At the ashram, the result is a building that many visitors barely notice as architecture at all, which is exactly what makes it succeed.

The principles of simplicity, stated plainly

Read together, the cottages and the museum suggest a handful of principles that apply far beyond a memorial. The first is economy of means: use few materials, use them honestly, and let each do its work visibly. The second is climate before decoration: shade, ventilation, thermal mass and rain protection are designed first, and anything decorative comes afterwards, if at all. The third is human scale: low eaves, small rooms, verandahs where people actually sit, doors and windows sized to the body. The fourth is non-possession expressed as architecture: rooms that hold what is used, with storage planned so that clutter does not accumulate on every surface. The fifth is openness: the boundary between inside and outside is softened by verandahs, courts and louvres rather than sealed with glass.

None of these principles demands poverty. Correa's museum is a carefully detailed piece of modern architecture, and its quality lies precisely in the detail — the alignment of piers and channels, the proportion of each unit, the way shade falls across the stone floor. Simplicity in this sense is not the absence of design; it is design that removes everything unnecessary until what remains is calm and inevitable. That is harder, not easier, than adding features.

Bringing ashram simplicity into a modern home

Most clients will not build a tiled cottage on a riverbank, but the same thinking transfers directly to a flat or bungalow. In a flat, the first step is subtraction: one main material for joinery, one floor finish throughout the main rooms, walls in a single warm white or lime finish, and no more than one feature element per room. The second step is the threshold: if the flat has a balcony, keep it open and shaded as a verandah rather than enclosing it for carpet area. The third is the floor: low seating, a durrie or cotton rug, and a low table can replace part of the sofa set, which suits Indian habits of sitting on the floor and frees space.

Fig. 4 shows a living-room window wall planned this way. The window is lowered to a 450 mm sill so that people sitting on the floor or on a window seat can still see out — a deliberate choice for a room used at floor level, unlike the standard 900 mm sill that suits a sofa. The window has louvred timber shutters inside the glass, so it can be left ventilating while shaded. A 600 mm deep window seat with drawers below provides seating and the room's main storage. Floor cushions on a 100–150 mm gaddi and a 350 mm high low table complete the arrangement. The wall is lime plastered in a single colour, with no false ceiling and no feature panel.

Simplicity and the future of Indian homes

The ashram's lessons are becoming more relevant, not less. Rising summer temperatures in Gujarat and across India make passive cooling — shade, ventilation, thermal mass and reflective surfaces — as important as air-conditioning, and India's residential energy code, the Eco-Niwas Samhita, now pushes new housing towards better shading and openable windows. Interest in lime, oxide floors, brick and local timber has returned among homeowners who are tired of glossy finishes that date quickly. And smaller urban flats reward exactly the discipline the ashram teaches: fewer things, better chosen, with rooms that can change use through the day.

The risk is that simplicity becomes another style to buy — a beige palette, a few clay pots and a cane chair, applied over the same cluttered plan. The ashram resists that. Its simplicity is a consequence of how its people lived and of an honest response to climate, not a finish. A home inspired by it should start in the same place: with how the family actually lives, what it truly uses, and how the sun, rain and wind move around the building.

Rules for designing with ashram simplicity

• Limit the main palette to three or four materials, and repeat them rather than adding new ones in each room.
• Design shade and ventilation first: keep balconies open as verandahs, plan openings on two sides where possible.
• Plan the home on a simple grid — 3000 or 3600 mm — and align furniture, ceilings and openings to it.
• Choose one feature element per room at most; let the rest of the room be quiet background.
• Plan storage for what the family owns and uses, so that surfaces stay clear without daily effort.
• Use louvres, jaalis or shutters on west and south openings so windows can stay open while shaded.
• Prefer finishes that can be renewed simply — lime, whitewash, oiled timber, oxide floors — over finishes that must be replaced.
• Keep the scale human: eaves, doors and windows sized to the body, not to impress visitors.

Frequently asked questions

Who designed the museum at Sabarmati Ashram?

The Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at the Sabarmati Ashram was designed by the Indian architect Charles Correa and opened in 1963. It is one of his best-known early works, built of brick piers, tiled roofs, stone floors and wooden louvres around courtyards and a water court.

When did Gandhi live at Sabarmati Ashram?

Gandhi lived at the Sabarmati Ashram from 1917, when the community moved there from Kochrab, until 12 March 1930, when he left on the Dandi March. He did not return to live there.

What is Hriday Kunj?

Hriday Kunj is the cottage at the Sabarmati Ashram where Gandhi and Kasturba lived. It is a simple single-storey house with whitewashed walls, a tiled roof and a verandah, and it is preserved with a few of Gandhi's belongings, including a writing desk and a spinning wheel.

Why is the Sabarmati Ashram important in architecture?

It shows two kinds of simplicity side by side: vernacular cottages built purely for use and climate, and a modern museum by Charles Correa that adopts their scale, materials and openness rather than competing with them. It is widely studied as an example of humane, climate-responsive modern Indian architecture.

How can I make my flat feel simple and calm like the ashram?

Reduce the number of materials, keep one floor finish through the main rooms, paint or lime-plaster walls in one warm colour, keep the balcony open and shaded, plan enough closed storage to keep surfaces clear, and add only one feature element per room. Low seating and natural fabrics complete the feel.