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IN HIS MIT SEMINARS IN THE 1950s, Professor Gyorgy Kepes would discuss the notion of "museum fatigue": those feelings, ranging from ennui to fallen arches, that many museum-goers experience as they trudge through the Louvre or the Prado. He would then emphasize the need for contrapuntal areas, where the eye-and the mind-could rest.
This insight came vividly to mind when, as a young architect back in India, I was asked to design the Smarak Sangrahalaya for Mahatma Gandhi at the Sabarmnati Ashram in Ahmedabad. This memorial museum, to be located next to Gandhi's own house, would contain his letters, photographs, and other documentary material about his life and the freedom movement he headed. Since more such historic documents were sure to be identified and collected through the years, I realized that the museum itself would have to grow-in the process allowing each generation to pay its own respects to the Mahatma (an idea somewhat influenced by the Ise shrine in Japan).
A building in memory of Mahatma Gandhi cannot be the same as one to commemorate Charles de Gaulle-or Jawaharlal Nehru, for that matter. They were all very different individuals. And so this museum itself, through its intrinsic form, would have to express the message of the man: human-scaled, unpretentious, modest. With this as a starting point, the building very soon designed itself-as a series of pavilions, some open and some enclosed, interspersed with courtyards and a water pool. The mood is one of calmness and contemplation, qualities that the Mahatma exemplified and that are essential to any scholar attempting to understand his ethos. Of decisive importance to the creation of this mood are, of course, the "rest" spacesthose open areas that interlock with the enclosed ones.
This question of the context we provide for the object (and the validation, or the distortion, it can cause) is central to any discussion of museum design. It has, of course, already been brilliantly articulated by the great scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy. Writing almost a century ago, he warned against the falsification inherent in the very act of putting any object "on display"-i.e., skewing it onto an...