The Stone Archive
A public room for a private collection
Location
Bandra West, Mumbai
Typology
Cultural
Status
Completed
Completion
2024
An archive is a building designed to outlive the people who fill it. We took that literally and specified for two hundred years.
A basalt-clad archive and gallery holding 40,000 architectural drawings, with its entire ground floor given back to the street as covered public space.
Project data
- Typology
- Cultural — archive & gallery
- Collection
- 40,000 drawings
- Gross area
- 5,400 m²
- Public ground plane
- 1,180 m², unticketed
- Cladding
- Deccan basalt, dry-jointed
- Archive stability
- ±1 °C, ±3% RH
- Design life
- 200 years
- Completed
- November 2024
- Coordinates
- 19.0596° N, 72.8295° E
Forty thousand drawings and nowhere to keep them
The Deshmukh collection had spent thirty years in a flat in Shivaji Park, degrading quietly in monsoon humidity. The family's condition for donating it was that the building housing it be open to the public without a ticket.
That single condition set the section. Archive above, sealed and climate-stable. Public below, open on three sides to the street.
A heavy box on an open plinth
The archive volume is deliberately mute: a windowless basalt mass, 34 metres long, carried on eight columns. It has the proportion of a lintel because that is structurally what it is.
Beneath it, the ground plane is entirely free. There are no doors at street level — the covered space is continuous with the pavement, and it stays open at night. In two years it has become a cricket pitch, a wedding venue and, twice, a polling station.
Deccan basalt, laid dry
The cladding is Deccan basalt from a quarry ninety kilometres east, cut in 900-millimetre courses and hung on a stainless system with open joints. No sealant appears anywhere on the elevation. Sealant fails in twenty years; the stone will not.
Inside, the archive envelope is a separate concrete box within the stone, thermally isolated. The two structures touch at only sixteen points.
The most valuable thing in the building is not the collection. It is the empty floor underneath it.
— Ira Naravane, Founder
The building as a study model, not a render.
Every scheme begins as stacked volumes on the studio table. This is that model, rebuilt — it turns with the page, and it shows the argument of the building rather than a marketing image of it.
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