AGRA’S MUGHAL MUSEUM
Here’s a poser: if you have to design a museum about Mughal architecture, how far should you try and reflect the subject itself in the style of the building? Sprinkle on a few onion domes and sandstone jaalis? Or go to the opposite extreme and seal it all in a glass and concrete box?
The question is by no means hypothetical, as just such a project is now under construction in Agra, less than two kilometres from the Taj Mahal—a location that adds some weight to the question. One of the two principal architects involved—Alexander Schwarz, who runs the Berlin office of the international company David Chipperfield Architects—is quite clear: “I think it should definitely not be visually Mughal,” he says. That answer is unsurprising coming from him, in the light of an earlier museum project of his, which includes modernist additions to the mid19th century neoclassical Neues Museum in Berlin.
Any attempt at a pastiche of the Taj or Fatehpur Sikri would be unwise if not absurd, though historical approaches have worked in the past. The late 19thcentury Albert Hall in Jaipur was conceived as a museum to the industrial arts of its own time, and Rajasthani architecture is successfully reflected in the building’s fabric. But that was dealing with a living tradition, not a past historic style. The approach adopted by Schwarz and coarchitect Sourabh Gupta— head of Studio Archohm in Noida—has been to look at Mughal architecture, to abstract its chief qualities and embody them in a modern idiom.
This has been a theme among architects globally for some decades now. But one may ask: how do you identify the chief qualities of a past style? How do you reinterpret them? How do you convey this to an audience if not ‘visu ally’? How are they supposed to get it if they can’t see it?
“Our approach is not that of an art historian,” they insist. “One doesn’t have the stress of historic truth.” Well, good for you, chaps, that you relieve yourselves of the burden of learning, but what takes its place? They studied Mughal architecture “in an intense 10day sequence”, and came up with the perception that it is all about “light, proportion… the harmony of repetition”. It certainly has these qualities. So does the architecture of the Bauhaus and Gothic cathedrals. They may feel that such comparisons prove Schwarz’s claim that “Mughal architecture is international”. But a museum about it should show us its unique qualities as well as its universal ones. Perhaps that will be achieved by the museum’s contents. But there is reason to doubt this, as it is not clear what those contents will be. The architects gamely admit that the design process was “particularly complicated” by the fact that the client—UP Tourism—does not have a collection of Mughal artifacts to house. The museum is intended as “a platform to educate people about the Mughal Empire through its architecture and art”. But they don’t actually have any, so “we are building up on the storytelling” rather than creating “a repository of inanimate historical fragments”. A telling phrase, that, from the architects of a museum.
Turning the lack of a collection into a virtue, they conceive the Mughal Museum as an “experience” and “a vibrant public space”. The drawings also promise an airy and elegant space, enclosed by slender columns and an arresting contrast of concrete and marble surfaces. What all this does for Mughal architecture we shall see when it opens, next year.