Steven Holl Architects will soon begin work on a new 125,000-square-foot wing at the Mumbai City Museum, also known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The firm was named the winner of the contest from a shortlist of eight finalists
Steven Holl considered the existing site conditions and developed a design strategy centric to the concept of “Addition as Subtraction”, with white concrete and sculpted diffused light in each of the 65,000-square-foot gallery spaces. The sculpted “subtractive cuts” will fill the galleries with exactly 25 lumens of natural light.
The central cut will form a shaded monsoon water basin which flows into the main pool. The pool is designed to reflect the old and new components of the museum in its reflection, as well as provide sixty percent of the museum’s electricity through photovoltaic cells which are located beneath the water’s surface.
Local design firm Opolis Architects, structural engineers Guy Nordenson & Associates, and sustainability consultants Transsolar will join Steven Holl Architects in developing the project collaboratively through its building stages. Construction is expected to begin in 2015.
The international competition’s jury was made up of Martin Roth, director of the V&A Museum in London, Tasneem Mehta, managing trustee and honorary director of the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum; Homi Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard; Sen Kapadia, of Sen Kapadia Associates, an architect and the founding director of the Kamala Reheja Vdyanidhi Institute for Conceptual Architecture in Mumbai; and other prominent professionals in academia and the museum industry.
View Steven Holl Architects’s latest renderings for the John F. Kennedy Center addition in Washington, D.C. here.
