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
| Aug 11, 2010
City of Anaheim selects HOK Los Angeles and Parsons Brinckerhoff to design the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center
The Los Angeles office of HOK, a global architecture design firm, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, a global infrastructure strategic consulting, engineering and program/construction management organization, announced its combined team was selected by the Anaheim City Council and Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) to design phase one of the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center.
| Aug 11, 2010
GBCI launches credentialing maintenance program for current LEED APs
The Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) launched a credentialing maintenance program (CMP) for LEED APs and Green Associates, ensuring that LEED professional credentials will remain relevant and meaningful in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
| Aug 11, 2010
Construction employment shrinks in 319 of the nation's 336 largest metro areas in July, continuing months-long slide
Construction workers in communities across the country continued to suffer extreme job losses this July according to a new analysis of metropolitan area employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released today by the Associated General Contractors of America. That analysis found construction employment declined in 319 of the nation’s largest communities while only 11 areas saw increases and six saw no change in construction employment between July 2008 and July 2009.
| Aug 11, 2010
Green consultant guarantees LEED certification or your money back
With cities mandating LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for public, and even private, buildings in growing numbers, an Atlanta-based sustainability consulting firm is hoping to ease anxieties over meeting those goals with the industry’s first Green Guaranteed.
| Aug 11, 2010
Architecture Billings Index bounces back after substantial dip
Exhibiting a welcome rebound following a 5-point dip the month prior, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) was up almost 6 points in July. As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the ABI reflects the approximate nine to twelve month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the July ABI rating was 43.1, up noticeably from 37.7 the previous month.
| Aug 11, 2010
Rafael Vinoly-designed East Wing opens at Cleveland Museum of Art
Rafael Vinoly Architects has designed the new East Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Ohio, which opened to the public on June 27, 2009. Its completion marks the opening of the first of three planned wings.
| Aug 11, 2010
National Association of Governors adopts AIA policy of reaching carbon neutrality in buildings by 2030
As part of their comprehensive national Energy Conservation and Improved Energy Efficiency policy, the National Association of Governors (NGA) has adopted the promotion of carbon neutral new and renovated buildings by 2030 as outlined by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
