Sustainability NOW: The Eco Museum

Rahul Gore has studied architecture at Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) in Ahmedabad and completed his Master’s Degree in Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In January 2001, Rahul Gore along with Sonal Sancheti set up _OPOLIS, a multidisciplinary design practice. Since then the firm has grown from strength to strength winning several national as well as international awards and has been widely published. Opolis has recently completed the Bihar Museum, Patna project – won as an international competition along with Maki and Associates, Tokyo. _OPOLIS in collaboration with Steven Holl Architects, New York won the competition for Extension to the Bhauji Daji Lad Museum at Byculla, Mumbai. He is a visiting juror at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture in Mumbai. Rahul is an avid traveler, a sports and fitness enthusiast and loves his game of tennis, his runs and work-outs.

Batul Raaj Mehta is the founding partner of Batul Raaj Mehta & Associates (BRMA), a museum and cultural planning firm. As a museum planner, interpreter and strategist, she has prioritized audiences, their engagement, and ease of institutional operations. Her education as an architect (CEPT, Ahmedabad, India), further specialization in heritage management (BTU, Cottbus, Germany) and work in Germany, UK, Canada, Italy, UAE, India, and Bangladesh allows her to efficiently overlay spatial experiences with cultural and historical narratives. She established and led Lord Cultural Resources — South Asia from 2009 to 2015; her marquee project then was the Bihar Museum which she led from concept to opening day. BRMA has consulted on some of the largest museums and cultural projects in India and internationally for concept development, institutional planning, facility planning, research, collection analysis, architecture reviews, content development, operations & management, and exhibition design. Besides Bihar Museum, the BRMA team has consulted on the Statue of Unity, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Science City, Patna, and ongoing projects like the Science Gallery Bengaluru (part of the Science Gallery International Network), the Koba Jain Museum, Gujarat, and the historic Patna Museum, Patna. She is also a visiting critic at CEPT and NID and has been profiled by Architectural Digest as a game changer in the field of arts.

Ajay Raghavan is one of top employment lawyers in the world. He was a senior partner at India’s leading law firm, Trilegal, where he built one of the most successful legal practices in the country. After being deeply influenced by what was happening with the planet, Ajay decided to move away from the law to focus his attention on sustainability and climate change. He is incredibly passionate about art, science, sustainability and wellbeing and is working on impacting all of them in every way he can. Ajay is a strong believer in empathy, design thinking and collaborative frameworks. He has co-founded two initiatives, Bangalore Creative Circus & the Initiative for Climate Action, both focussed on creating platforms for transformative change in the city of Bangalore. He’s a big fan of street art and football and follows both religiously.

Sarosh Anklesaria is an architect, educator, and the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Anklesaria is interested in an expansive notion of architectural agency, that synthesizes problems of socio-ecological pertinence and questions modernist machine paradigms. Current design research has been supported by the Richard Rogers Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Taliesin Fellowship, and will be published for the forthcoming Venice Biennale How will we live together (2021). Anklesaria is working on a book that will offer critical appraisals of Le Corbusier's City Museum in Ahmedabad as well as a speculative design project that connects the three built museums of Le Corbusier through an itinerant pavilion. The project, supported by the Art Omi Residency problematizes questions of labor, display, and architectural conservation through acts of building and unbuilding. Anklesaria holds a diploma in architecture from CEPT University, Ahmedabad and a post- professional Master of Architecture from Cornell University.