JSW Cultural Museum of Assam has been designed as a celebration of Assamese art and culture located in the foothills of the mighty Brahmaputra. The JSW Cultural Museum of Assam acts as a cultural compass in Guwahati, the gateway to Northeast India. It is envisaged as a living cultural landscape woven around acts of devotion, literature, performance and the art of weaving.

Responding to site condition and context the building recalls the swirling topography of Brahmaputra and embodies the vernacular intelligence of Assam’s iconic stilt house architecture. Hovering as it does over the ground, the building animates the sinuous rhythms of floodplains and hills through its undulating form. The programmatic aspect of storytelling borrowed largely from the Vrindavani Vastra, an iconographic text woven by saint-reformer Srimanta Sankardeva in the 16th century aspires to bring together warp and weft of a giant timber ribbed loom, unfolding the building like volumes woven in space.

Decoded to a Jali system of corbelled brickwork the abstract geometry of Gamosa, Assam’s iconic textile lend layers, shadows and movement to the walls that change playfully as the sun traverses through the day.

Spatially, the building experiences reveal themselves through a choreographed procession of courtyards, galleries and thresholds where culture can be seen, heard, felt and experienced.