Excerpt: Museum of Humanity by Studio Apaaar is an architectural expression of love, gratitude, and overcoming inferiority. Built entirely in raw concrete, its essential and primitive language is influenced by the traditional Indian Smashan Bhoomi, reflecting humanity’s return to nature. A suspended plumb line and continuous dripping water symbolise the connection between heaven and earth, matter and spirit, and the repetitive reincarnation of the Atma.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The museum showcases an architectural language that is both essential and primitive. Constructed entirely in raw concrete, the building embodies a desire to return to nature what inherently belongs to it. The museum’s central symbolic element is a plumb line suspended from the ceiling, ideally linking heaven and earth – a detail that encapsulates the connection between matter and spirit, the finite and the infinite.
A journey showcasing love, inferiority complex it brought and how I overcame it.
It all started when society brutally declared that expressing love was a ‘sin’. An individual suddenly hands you a clean pair of glasses, changes your perspective just to say, “Love isn’t a sin, it’s a natural sentiment”, giving me a new vision to appreciate art.
Using the language of Architecture, I thought of expressing myself as a form of Gratitude. This gave birth to an enormous structure bringing its own set of challenges to construct. A miniature of the same was then planned and constructed for the sake of His words, “Emotions when Compressed, can’t Suppress their Intensity.”
Museum of Humanity is a symmetrical, balanced structure, using Architecture as a language to convey those intense emotions, as a Token of Regard to that Honoured Person.
Profoundly influenced by the traditional Indian Crematorium, Smashan Bhoomi, this space has much more to say than its visceral impression. Built with a single material Concrete, it is a gentle reminder to Humanity, of returning what they owe from nature in the form of ashes.
Rivers often hold a spiritual significance with their presence near Smashan Bhoomi. Water bodies with continuous dripping water in this Museum reminds of those sacred rivers and rekindles the age-old Indian belief of repetitive reincarnation of immortal Soul, Atma.
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