Pakistan Papers: Louis Kahn's Designs of a Past and Future in Islamabad and Dhaka

Architecture is more than a finished product or an artifact of aesthetic and technical complexities.¹ Architectural practice offers an intricate archive that accumulates, albeit selectively, the residual existence of several layers of a complex process: including design, construction, finance, and, above all, the negotiations among different stakeholders that set out the political, social, and economic stakes of a project. The concrete outcome as well as the intangible residue of the process can be associated with the documents left behind in various physical and virtual media, including reports, drawings, diaries, correspondence, and so on. Remnants of the design process give historians a unique opportunity to study the negotiation between the client and the architect, as one of the major components of this complex sequence.

The central character of this essay is a Philadelphia-based architect, Louis Kahn (1901–74), widely considered a peerless architect, in the last generation of Beaux-Arts-trained modernists.² In this essay, I will present the design process of Kahn's two projects in West and East Pakistan—the presidential complex at the new capital of Islamabad and the "second" capitol complex at Dacca—as an archive to understand how different stakeholders imagined, interpreted, and eventually rendered an architectural expression of the idea of Pakistan. In the year following Kahn's death in 1974, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania purchased all drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, and project files from his estate. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission then placed the collection on a permanent loan to the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn taught for over two decades, becoming legend.³ The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, established in 1978, houses collections of about four hundred designers from the seventeenth century to the present, yet Kahn's collection remains among the most visited. The collection related to his Islamabad project possesses extensive visual materials, including numerous sketches, drawings, photographs, and study models. With an overwhelming amount of materials on design process and relatively little on the contexts of projects, his collection is primarily a visual ensemble, but in the evolving design of the three major design schemes, a conflict, confrontation, agreement, and disagreement can be traced between Louis Kahn and the Capital Development Authority (CDA), a governmental organization that coordinated and oversaw the building of Islamabad. The design process serves as tangible evidence and a reflection of complex ground negotiations.

An Architectural Interpretation of "Past" versus "Future"

The political idea of "Pakistan"—a deterritorial nation free from the burden of history, a common past, or provincial cultural commonality—emerged during the 1930s, was shaped throughout the '40s, and was realized in the form of a sovereign state via the 1947 partition. The Naz̤ariyah-i Pākistān (Pakistan ideology), as conceived by its progenitors, differed from the Pakistan that evolved as a nation-state, as well as from interpretations of a "crisis-state" or a pseudo-Islamic state that followed.⁴ The core idea of Pakistan lay in the historical narration of Muslim persecution in the colonial past and the aspiration for Muslim self-expression and political emancipation in the impending future.⁵ Faisal Devji describes the political idea of Pakistan as a unique moment in contemporary history because of its conceptualization of ahistoricism, which dismissed parochial nationalism constituted on the basis of ethnic, geographical, or linguistic commonality.⁶ Christophe Jaffrelot emphasized the political idea of Pakistan as "nationalism without nation."⁷ Meanwhile, the progenitors of the political idea of Pakistan did not consider "Islam" as a fixed system, but as an ideological armature to defy a suppressive burden of history or of the past, thus suggesting "Pakistan" as an alternative idea to territory-based nationalism, so that it could be home to all Muslims of the Indian subcontinent who were minorities and faced oppression in their regions of origin.⁸

Before Pakistan was consolidated into a nation-state, the politicians of the Muslim League used Pakistan mainly as an abstracted narrative, identified by Ayesha Jalal as part of their strategy to negotiate power during the last days of British colonial rule, within...