Foster + Partners has just been chosen by an international jury, which included Indian artist Subodh Gupta and V&A director Martin Roth, to build a revision of the Patna Museum, an aging remnant of India’s British colonial days in the country’s northern state of Bihar. The current home of local historical artifacts will be replaced by a new £45 million ($70 million) building, the Art Newspaper reported. (There is some irony that India has picked England's most famous contemporary architect to restore the glory of the colonial architecture.)
We don’t have images of Foster’s design yet, but it’s been described as having “an irregular, wave-like roof, with dozens of mature trees piercing through the structure” that would act as a canopy to the building complex below. To tout the museum’s collection of archaeological artifacts, textiles, instruments and sculptures — the most prominent being the iconic Didarganj Yakshi, a voluptuous, third-century B.C. life-sized woman discovered in 1917 on the Ganges riverbank — the new museum will include nine thematic galleries covering the 15th century and earlier; four devoted to Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and tribal art; and three devoted to its collection of coins, paintings, and terracotta.
Although Foster came out on top of a formidable shortlist that included Daniel Libeskind, Oslo’s Snøhetta, and Vienna’s Coop Himmelblau, Foster has one serious disadvange — his own hefty fees. Coming in second was Tokyo’s Maki architects, headed by Pritzker Prize-winning former Metabolist Fumihiko Maki, the man who brought us the brilliant glass of MIT's Media Lab, and who has World Trade Center 4 and the UN addition coming down the pipeline in New York.
The new Patna Museum is slated for completion in 2015.