New Wing of Mumbai City Museum Design by Steven Holl is a latest news in the Indian architecture Industry, when Steven Holl Architects has been selected to design a new extension to one of India’s oldest museums, the Mumbai City Museum, also known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
Steven Holl was selected unanimously from 8 finalists including Zaha Hadid, OMA and Amanda Levete, to design a new wing for the Mumbai City Museum, also known as Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
The jury included Martin Roth, director of the V&A Museum in London, Tasneem Mehta, Managing Trustee & Honorary Director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Homi Bhabha, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, Sen Kapadia, architect at Sen Kapadia Associates and founding director of the Kamala Reheja Vdyanidhi Institute for Conceptual Architecture in Mumbai, among other leading professionals of the museum world and academia.
Steven Holl is one of the world’s leading contemporary architects, his practice is famous for projects such as the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas and the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Current work includes the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Expansion in Washington DC.
New Wing of Mumbai City Museum Design by Steven Holl
A permanent gallery, located at the heart of the addition, will focus on contemporary Mumbai, celebrating its cultural and developmental milestones.
Mumbai’s oldest museum garden in Byculla will have a 125,000 sq ft new wing. The Mumbai City Museum’s North Wing addition is envisioned as a sculpted subtraction from a simple geometry formed by the site boundaries.
The new wing of mumbai city museum concept of “Addition as Subtraction” is developed in white concrete with sculpted diffused light in the 65,000 sq ft new gallery spaces. Deeper subtractive cuts bring in exactly twenty-five lumens of natural light to each gallery.
The basically orthogonal galleries are given a sense of flow and spatial overlap from the light cuts. The central cut forms a shaded monsoon water basin which runs into a central pool, related to the great stepped well architecture of India.
The central pool joins the new and old in its reflection and provides sixty percent of the museum’s electricity through photovoltaic cells located below the water’s surface.
The white concrete structure has an extension of local rough-cut Indian Agra stone. The circulation through the galleries is one of spatial energy, while the orthogonal layout of the walls foregrounds the Mumbai City Museum collections.
Steven Holl Architects will develop the design with local architects Opolis Architects, Guy Nordenson & Associates as structural engineers and Transsolar as sustainability consultants.
This is the first time that an international architectural competition has been held for a public building in Mumbai. The initiative will also create the first major public-private partnership building in the city. Construction of new wing of Mumbai city museum is expected to begin in 2015.
The selection jury comprised for new wing of Mumbai city museum :
- Sitaram Kunte – Chair of Jury, the Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai and Co-Chairman,Trustee of the Museum
- Tasneem Mehta – Deputy Chair of Jury, the Managing Trustee & Honorary Director of the Museum
- Minal Bajaj – a Director of Bajaj Auto Ltd. and a Donor Trustee of the Museum
- Shyam Benegal – a Trustee of the Museum and a prolific filmmaker
- Homi Bhabha – Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard as well as the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English
- Vishakha Desai – the Special Advisor for Global Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University
- Rajiv Jalota – the Additional Municipal Commissioner, Projects, M.C.G.M., and Trustee of the Museum
- Sen Kapadia – founder of Sen Kapadia Associates
- Anand Mahindra – Chairman and Managing Director of the Mahindra Group
- Martin Roth – the Director of the V&A Museum in London
- Aroon Tikekar – the former President of the Asiatic Society in Mumbai, a prolific author, journalist and authority on Mumbai
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