Patel Stadium receives 'Keeping It Modern' architecture conservation grant from the Getty Foundation
The Getty Foundation has announced that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium, in Ahmedabad, India—a 2020 World Monuments Watch site—is among 13 significant 20th-century buildings that will receive $2.2 million in Keeping It Modern grants.
With Getty support, World Monuments Fund specialists from both the U.S. and India will collaborate with a team of local experts to create a detailed plan to conserve the stadium while increasing local knowledge regarding the care of exposed concrete buildings. Other twentieth-century buildings in Ahmedabad will also benefit, as the Patel Stadium conservation effort will assert a new model for the cultural and economic importance of the restoration of modern architecture.
Completed in 1966 by acclaimed Indian architect Charles Correa, the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad helped define the architecture of post-independence India. It was one of the largest cricket stadiums in the world at the time, able to hold up to 50,000 spectators, and is still in use today for sporting events and cultural festivals. The stadium’s distinct, cantilevered framing takes its structural power from an elegantly zig-zagging exterior wall that provides added reinforcement. This solution was reached with the help of Mahendra Raj, a pioneering engineer who helped India’s top modern architects turn their design visions into reality.
Even though they used the best available technology of the time, the steel-reinforced concrete is now showing visible signs of strain. Without urgent intervention, the structure will continue to weaken and likely fail. The site has been placed on the 2020 World Monuments Watch, a selection of at-risk cultural heritage sites that conjoin “great historical significance with contemporary social impact.”
Keeping It Modern was developed by the Getty Foundation to complement the GCI’s’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI). CMAI will continue to pursue model field projects, offer training programs, and disseminate publications related to modern architecture conservation.
- Find all current and past Keeping It Modern grantees here.