Archinect - News

Adjaye debuts preview of India's new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art project in Venice

2023-05-17T00:01:00-04:00

As part of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, David Adjaye will be on hand to present an architectural model of the new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) project in New Delhi.

The model will be staged inside the Arsenale as part of the Curator’s Special Projects Mnemonic section, which runs from May 20th until the close of the Biennale.

Once it is completed in 2026, the museum building is expected to become India’s largest cultural center. Offering space for the museum’s collection of over 10,000 modern and contemporary works, the project is being undertaken in collaboration with S. Ghosh & Associates and will consolidate its currently disparate locations in New Delhi and Noida into a 100,000-square-meter (one-million-square-foot) new home on a plot adjacent to the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Architectural model of the new KNMA, New Delhi. Courtesy David Adjaye Associates and KNMA

The museum’s founder and namesake explains: “Our presentation at the Biennale Architett...

Architect Gita Balakrishnan embarks on 1,000-mile walk to spread awareness on importance of design

2022-02-15T16:39:00-05:00

Kolkata-based architect Gita Balakrishnan has embarked upon a 1,700-km walk from Kolkata to New Delhi on Sunday to spread awareness on how good design can play a substantial role in changing lives. Doing 30-35km per day, she plans to reach Delhi in two months on April 16.

The walk aims to shed light on the role the architecture and design industry plays in society and the issues it seeks to address. The initiative was conceptualized by the Ethos Foundation, which Balakrishnan founded in 2002 as a means to connect students and professionals in the AEC industry, in collaboration with the Council of Architecture (CoA) and the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA).

Balakrishnan will travel through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. She is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and she completed her practical training at the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University.

New Delhi mandates odd-even car rationing to fight world's worst air pollution

2016-01-04T15:45:00-05:00

For the first two weeks of the year, private cars with even-numbered license plates are allowed on the roads only on even-numbered dates, and those with odd-numbered plates on odd dates. The restrictions have noticeably reduced traffic in a city with 9 million cars, more than double that of a decade ago. In 2014, the World Health Organization found New Delhi’s air to be the dirtiest of 1,600 cities it studied. Scientists blame the high levels of pollutants [...] for thousands of deaths a year.

Previously: Delhi’s air pollution is worse than Beijing's. A new app measures the air quality in real time.

The disappearing barsati, or rooftop dwellings, of Delhi

2015-12-21T17:33:00-05:00

Buildings in Delhi’s residential areas were restricted to two storeys, with construction permitted on only a fraction of the space on the third floor, so on top of homes, families built small dwellings for their own use, as accommodation for domestic staff or to rent out cheaply. Exposed to the elements, the single room on the top floor became known evocatively as the barsati – derived from the Hindi word for rain, barsaat.

"These apartments – generally, a small shack with a large terrace – afforded a new generation of urbanites cheap living space near the centre of town... But it’s a typology that, as land values rise and the population grows, is fast disappearing. While there are no official figures, anecdotal evidence suggests that in the 1980s, 75% of small rentable properties in many residential suburbs were barsatis – the same areas today have only a few dozen such properties, but many more apartment blocks."

In new exhibition, Sir Peter Cook reflects on architecture's possibilities

2015-09-08T12:42:00-04:00

Cook’s artwork of over four decades is being exhibited for the first time in India. [...] “I want to make it uncomfortable — for the philistine, for the boring architect, for the person who wants his building to be predictable,” says Cook [...] “Architecture is what you do with the potential of life.”