Gandhi’s legacy in sculpture:

Lighting masterplan

This project is a part of a lighting master plan we made in Phase 1 for Mahatma Mandir project in Gandhinagar city in Western India.

The project campus is situated in the central administrative axis at the opposite end of state assembly building. Mahatma Gandhi Garden, being envisaged as a sculpture garden presenting 19 terraces with different sculptures depicting life incidents of Gandhiji. The main concept in this project is to visually connect Assembly Building with the Salt mound (now known as Dandi Kutir a museum dedicated to life of Mahatma Gandhi). Thus, project defines a clear celebration path and meandering paths. The later dedicated to a meditative journey through the sculpture garden and the former connecting the Swarnim Park with the open air Amphitheatre and the symbolic salt mount.

Designing for Gandhi:

Mahatma mandir sculpture garden

Originally planned as a sculpture garden with nineteen terraces displaying life incidents of Mahatma Gandhi through an artistic medium of sculptures. Its infrastructure is in place with terraces, a central celebration path with water bodies and amphitheatre but the sculptures and the trees line around the celebration path are yet to be conceived at the time of writing this text.
The whole site was planned with central celebration path and surrounding meandering paths with suitable scale and intensity of light. The landscape lights were planned low scale to not to obstruct the sculptures and all ramps and steps were planned with uniform sufficiently bright diffused light.
It has been a good demonstration of master planning, however a classic example of how things get done under Government owned infrastructure constraints where designers have limited role in fixture selection process. However, lessons learnt on both sides and in the next phase of same Mahatma Mandir we were roped in from beginning and the top quality fixtures had been used with fine optics. However, again a lesson learnt that when we design, execution design shall be also done by us to avoid the wrong interpretations