Benazeer Palace
Adaptive Re-use: Literary & Cultural Center
Bhopal, India
90,000 sq. ft
Design Dissertation (B.Arch.) | 2016
For my final design dissertation, I chose to work on adaptive re-use of a dilapidated palace situated in the central Indian city of Bhopal, called the Benazeer palace, and convert the space into a literary and cultural center. As much as I took up this topic for its untapped design potential, it was the city’s history that inspired me more.
Bhopal is my place of birth and where my forefathers have resided for generations. A princely state in British-colonized India, Bhopal has a striking feature of being ruled by four female Muslim rulers consecutively for more than a century until 1926- women who broke barriers, refused to follow the ‘purdah’ tradition, learnt martial arts, fought battles and also drastically improved the economy.
However, today the city holds no reminiscence of its trailblazing past. The ruins of the structures made by these rulers are a physical manifestation of the attenuating status of women in society today. With a shocking 20% gap between the literacy rate of men and women and most women forced to marry early, I was oblivious to the prevalence of these statistics until I realized that despite coming from a family of well-educated people, I was the first girl in the family to move to a new city alone to pursue higher education.
My design dissertation was thus an attempt to revive not just the run-down palace, but the activities- literary and commercial, which helped people, especially the women, to aspire and participate in work outside of their designated domestic responsibilities.
The Taj Mahal Complex comprises of the Taj Mahal Palace (now being converted into a heritage hotel) , Taj-Ul-Masajid (mosque) and Benazeer Palace. It was constructed by Shah Jahan Begum in 1875. Taj-Ul-Masajid is the largest mosque in India and used to be the largest Mosque in Asia at that time. Benazeer Palace, built in 1877, was used as a summer palace overlooking the Motiya Talab, one of the three cascading lakes built around the same time to harvest the run-off from the neighbouring Eidgah Hills.
