In the vast national landscape of post-independent India, many imaginations were at play to shape a new democracy using tools and devices that would assist its people and, in turn, the nation, to match in step with a brave new world.
Architecture has always played a vital role in the history of civilisation making. It has been several things at once — a document of its times, a mirror of its makers, a time capsule. This exhibition, titled The Masterplan, aims to engage the viewer with narratives that have shaped India and its public. Speaking with the language that architects are best at, drawings and models, the ambition is to share the journey while adding to the architectural pedagogy, the makings of collective spaces, and the history of Modern India.
The exhibition creates a synergy of art, architecture and design through the exhibition. Legendary late architect CP Kukreja’s pivotal and monumental first large-scale commission – the Jawaharlal Nehru University, which was built in Delhi in the 1970s. The exhibition takes us through 4 chapters, where we witness the intersections between architecture, citizenship, and nation-building.
The exhibition, a collaboration between the CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence and artist Vishal Dar, will focus on the emergence of the first South-Asian attempt to create a vast university model at JNU, where an institution is imagined as a micro-city within the southern ridge of the Aravalli hills of New Delhi. Here, on these grounds, India would cultivate students learning to interact and dialogue with the world. The design of the exhibition is imagined as a studio inside a pavilion that is both didactic and experiential. It engages the geology and its context with the architecture that inhabits it and how the ecology and climate of this sanctuary are reflected in the devices that the architect employs to shape and align the built within the surroundings.
