New Kiran Nadar Museum of Art & Cultural Center Winner Announced
Adjaye Associates chosen for new cultural powerhouse that is anticipated to become the leading privately-funded institution for the arts in India
Mrs Kiran Nadar and Sir David Adjaye OBE RA announced today [9 May 2019] at the Venice Biennale that Adjaye Associates has won the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art & Kiran Nadar Cultural Center International Design Competition. The global search to find an outstanding team to design a contemporary art museum combined with a cultural center for dance, music and creative education was led by competition specialists Malcolm Reading Consultants. This new destination, to be known as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art & Cultural Center (KNMACC), has a joint vision focused on education, young people and the power of creativity.
The new building, in New Delhi NCR, will enable KNMA, which has a world-class collection of Indian Modern and contemporary art, to build on its remarkable success to date. The competition launched in the second half of 2018 when a long-list of 47 leading studios from 15 countries was invited to participate in the contest’s first stage. At stage two, a shortlist of five practices was asked to create concept designs. They were (in alphabetical order):
Adjaye Associates (UK)
Ennead Architects (US)
Selldorf Architects (US)
Snøhetta (Norway)
Thomas Phifer and Partners (US)
Adjaye Associates was the unanimous choice of the international jury (see full details below). The team’s ‘veil of triangles’ design, a reference to the sacred geometries of trees and mountains, was praised for being both elegant and iconic; in the words of the jury, it was ‘a visually and emotionally engaging building that was alive, dancing and timeless’.
The full jury was comprised of:
Kiran Nadar, Chair, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Executive Director and CEO, HCL Enterprise
Shikhar Malhotra, Vice Chairman, HCL Healthcare
Malcolm Reading, Competition Director (Jury Chair)
Glenn D Lowry, Director, MoMA, New York
Chris Dercon, Art Historian, Curator, and former Director, Tate Modern
Scott Newman, Partner, Cooper Robertson
Each of the five shortlisted practices received an honorarium of £25,000 plus expenses for travel to India.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
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