A Sense of Openness

With next week's opening of MAP, Bangaluru, also called Bangalore and known as “India's tech city,” will have its first major private museum for art, photography and popular culture. The client for the new museum, Abishek Poddar, made his fortune with mining explosives and accessories. He donated $7 million and 7,000 pieces from his collection for MAP. 

The building was designed by the office of Nisha Mathew and Soumitro Ghosh, which was established in 1995. Ghosh, who served as project architect on MAP, had previously worked with Balkrishna Doshi. Before MAP, Ghosh was known for his transformation of the Bangalore Central Jail into Freedom Park and the Max Mueller Bhavan of the Goethe Institut, the German Culture Center in Bangalore.

The architect clad the facades with stainless steel panels, embossed with a structural cross pattern for stiffening. The structure has a small footprint and enlarged upper levels. To create column free galleries the structure is worked out as a box. Built in steel framing, its columns shift to the outer surface of the box.

The building includes four galleries, a library, and a laboratory for research and caring for the collection. The collection displayed inside the new venue's temperature- and humidity-controlled galleries combines paintings, sculptures and graphics, textiles, tribal art, and Bollywood memorabilia. 

MAP blurs the boundaries between high art and everyday creativity. The photography collection is one of the most extensive in India, with a focus on the period from the 1850s to the present.

Divided into five floors, the museum also includes a learning center, a 130-seat auditorium, a research and conservation facility, and a terrace cafe. From the rooftop, views can be had across the city of eight million that is adding “culture” to its reputation as a booming IT city.