A jury representing the Mumbai City Museum has selected Steven Holl Architects as the winner of an international competition to design the museum's new wing.
Designboom reports that the jury included the director of London’s L&A Museum, and that it was selecting for Mumbai’s first international architectural competition for a public building. Other competitors included Zaha Hadid, OMA, and Amanda Levete.
The winning design involves building 125,000 sf of floor space, to be developed in white concrete and bringing in exactly 25 lumens of daylight to each gallery, Designboom reports.
At the center of the plan is a massive pool that will generate 60% of the museum’s electricity through photovoltaic cells underneath the water’s surface.
According to Designboom, Steven Holl Architects will now develop the initial design together with local practice Opolis Architects. Guy Nordenson & Associates will serve as structural engineers and Transsolar as sustainability consultants. Construction is expected to begin next year.
Steven Holl released the following news on the project:
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.
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 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.
Related Stories
| Nov 16, 2010
Architecture Billings Index: inquiries for new projects remain extremely high
The new projects inquiry index was 61.7, down slightly from a nearly three-year high mark of 62.3 in September, according to the Architecture Billings Index (ABI). However, the ABI dropped nearly two points in October; the October ABI score was 48.7, down from a reading of 50.4 the previous month. The ABI reflects the approximate nine to 12 month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending.
| Nov 16, 2010
Brazil Olympics spurring green construction
Brazil's green building industry will expand in the coming years, spurred by construction of low-impact venues being built for the 2016 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee requires arenas built for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro meet international standards for low-carbon emissions and energy efficiency. This has boosted local interest in developing real estate with lower environmental impact than existing buildings. The timing couldn’t be better: the Brazilian government is just beginning its long-term infrastructure expansion program.
| Nov 16, 2010
Green building market grows 50% in two years; Green Outlook 2011 report
The U.S. green building market is up 50% from 2008 to 2010—from $42 billion to $55 billion-$71 billion, according to McGraw-Hill Construction's Green Outlook 2011: Green Trends Driving Growth report. Today, a third of all new nonresidential construction is green; in five years, nonresidential green building activity is expected to triple, representing $120 billion to $145 billion in new construction.
| Nov 16, 2010
Calculating office building performance? Yep, there’s an app for that
123 Zero build is a free tool for calculating the performance of a market-ready carbon-neutral office building design. The app estimates the discounted payback for constructing a zero emissions office building in any U.S. location, including the investment needed for photovoltaics to offset annual carbon emissions, payback calculations, estimated first costs for a highly energy efficient building, photovoltaic costs, discount rates, and user-specified fuel escalation rates.
| Nov 16, 2010
CityCenter’s new Harmon Hotel targeted for demolition
MGM Resorts officials want to demolish the unopened 27-story Harmon Hotel—one of the main components of its brand new $8.5 billion CityCenter development in Las Vegas. In 2008, inspectors found structural work on the Harmon didn’t match building plans submitted to the county, with construction issues focused on improperly placed steel reinforcing bar. In January 2009, MGM scrapped the building’s 200 condo units on the upper floors and stopped the tower at 27 stories, focusing on the Harmon having just 400 hotel rooms. With the Lord Norman Foster-designed building mired in litigation, construction has since been halted on the interior, and the blue-glass tower is essentially a 27-story empty shell.
| Nov 16, 2010
Where can your firm beat the recession? Try any of these 10 places
Wondering where condos and rental apartments will be needed? Where companies are looking to rent office space? Where people will need hotel rooms, retail stores, and restaurants? Newsweek compiled a list of the 10 American cities best situated for economic recovery. The cities fall into three basic groups: Texas, the New Silicon Valleys, and the Heartland Honeys. Welcome to the recovery.
| Nov 16, 2010
Landscape architecture challenges Andrés Duany’s Congress for New Urbanism
Andrés Duany, founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, adopted the ideas, vision, and values of the early 20th Century landscape architects/planners John Nolen and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to launch a movement that led to more than 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization project commissions for his firm. However, now that there’s a societal buyer’s remorse about New Urbanism, Duany is coming up against a movement that sees landscape architecture—not architecture—as the design medium more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.
| Nov 16, 2010
Just for fun: Words that architects use
If you regularly use such words as juxtaposition, folly, truncated, and articulation, you may be an architect. Architects tend to use words rarely uttered during normal conversations. In fact, 62% of all the words that come out of an architects mouth could be replaced by a simpler and more widely known word, according to this “report.” Review this list of designer words, and once you manage to work them into daily conversation, you’re on your way to becoming a bonafide architect.
| Nov 16, 2010
NFRC approves technical procedures for attachment product ratings
The NFRC Board of Directors has approved technical procedures for the development of U-factor, solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC), and visible transmittance (VT) ratings for co-planar interior and exterior attachment products. The new procedures, approved by unanimous voice vote last week at NFRC’s Fall Membership Meeting in San Francisco, will add co-planar attachments such as blinds and shades to the group’s existing portfolio of windows, doors, skylights, curtain walls, and window film.
