Museum of Humanity
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, the 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 to 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 recall those sacred rivers and rekindle the age-old Indian belief in the repetitive reincarnation of the immortal soul, Atma.
