Sanskar Kendra: Revitalising Ahmedabad’s legacy

City museum at Sanskar Kendra is an institution to nurture and restore the values, ethos, pride and aspirations of the city and its citizens. A cultural node of a city with living heritage, the museum is conceived as an event - an experience that recreates the pulse of the vibrant city of Ahmedabad and its enterprising people.

Ahmedabad is, arguably, the only city in the world after Paris to possess four architectural edifices of the internationally-acclaimed modern master Le Corbusier.  Sanskar Kendra, one of them had hardly been maintained and the property had fallen prey to all kinds of encroachments and vandalism.

Structure and finishes had eroded due to neglect and abuse. Also eroded in the process of commercialisation were the socio-cultural values of a traditional city. It was our initiative to restore and revitalise the building with a new use, sympathetic to the cause of the building and become a venue for social interaction.

Compared to conventional museums where antiquity of the object is of primary importance, the city museum emphasises on representative value and appropriateness of artefacts to the theme. This has been the overriding criterion for the selection of artefacts.

To capture the nuances of the city of Ahmedabad, the city museum is consciously conceived as a linear journey through overlapping and interconnected facets of city-life ranging from art to industry, craft to culture, history to architecture and individual to institution.

The building is an object of display in itself. It has been restored as a heritage building. Display systems, respecting the vocabulary of modernist architecture, refer to the modular scale of Le Corbusier. Using Wall planes as the backdrop, the intermediate display elements are placed in the middle as freestanding and dwarfed so as to humanise the scale without altering the volumetric perception of the space.

The city museum concerns with varied facets of city life. The unbroken chain of individuals, industry and institutions has been fundamental to city of Ahmedabad.  As a result, economy, culture, craft, art, architecture or its administration and politics has been intertwined. City museum is consciously designed to bring out these interrelated facets of city by the display arranged as a narrative, in a sequential manner along the linear path of movement passing through all the exhibits of the museum.

This ensures clear direction of movement throughout the museum, without missing out on any displays. The museum has the following sub themes exhibited through representative artefacts and are displayed as installations to almost feel and experience.

The aspects depicted are history and antiquity with display elements like royal decrees, coins, documents, maps, etchings, photographs; industry and commerce with power loom, share certificates, cloth labels, mementos, photos; independence struggle explained through rare photographs, event chart, Map; Contemporary Arts displayed through Paintings, Sculptures, Lithographs; Textile Craft represented with Brocade work, mushroo, embroidery, block printing specimen; photographic explorations through photo archives, Old Camera models, Photo prints; Gujarati Literature represented with Photographs, Manuscripts of its litterateur; Communities and Culture are represented with worship elements of Shaiv, Vaishnav, Swaminarayan, Jain, Sikh Parsi, Christian, Jew, Muslim faith.

Not remaining a mere collection of objects, the city museum is conceived as a cultural node of a living heritage. By far sanskar Kendra remains to be the first and only city museum in the country truly manifesting multi-faceted dimensions of living city over time.

Realised through active participation of its people, professionals and authority it truly brings back the spirit of the city which all through its history has been a city For, By, and Of its people.
How many of us have seen the museum installed since ten years. It may be apt to refresh the city's 600 years journey by visiting museum for sixty minutes. Especially when in this era of economic sustainability it is still absolutely FREE...