Indian National War Museum
1840-ADE-DEL.IN-2016
Architect: Studio MADe
Client: Goverment of India
Status: Competition (2016)
Location: New Delhi, India
Coordinates: 28.617777, 77.232422
Climate: Humid subtropical, Temperate
Material: Concrete
Environments: Urban, Park
Visualizer: Studio
Scale: Large
Types: Cultural, Museum

We intend to give back Princess Park to the city by restoring its connection with its adjacent roads. And an underground tunnel connecting to India Gate grounds can be much more than just functional, serving instead as an active space of memory – as a memorial promenade whose walls act as a canvas for acts of bravery and sacrifice. This integrated response between the park, the museum and the memorial can forge a new urban connection.

Museum’s central idea

The museum is a floating pavilion, tied together by beams – with the ground plane left free for public movement, gatherings, and displays of military tanks and fighter aircrafts. This porosity serves as a counterpoint to the fortified character of its immediate precincts. We have avoided simply placing “objects” in a park – instead, choosing to situate the museum and its entrance pavilion such that they delineate urban edges along the Copernicus and Tilak Marg. They do allude to the ‘walls’ in their immediate vicinity, but are floating and dematerialised through jalis and canopies of trees.

Layout and growth system

The military barracks on-site shared certain relationships with their internal streets and trees. These are maintained by a new and rhythmic system of parallel bays made of habitable service walls. The dense texture of the old city is abstracted such that one discovers an inner world of courtyards, corridors and inward-facing balconies, as one traverses the museum. The elements of the proposal are organized in a sequential loop – from entrance pavilion to museum, culminating in a memorial tunnel that leads to the India Gate gardens. This urban tension with the India Gate is accentuated by a vertical element that arises from the museum’s horizontal “texture”.

Team: Madhusudhan Chalasani, Mario Galiana Liras, Germán Müller, Fernando Royo, Jesús Garrido, Mario Yañez Aller | Post date: 16/03/2017 | Views: 13.138