In 2014, I was approached by the Dallas based philanthropist Dr. Vinay Jain to participate in an invited competition to design the Shraman Foundation of South Asian Art. Our design process is documented by two entires in the Design Journal - with Part I focusing on the site organizational strategies, and Part II on the development of the foundation / museum.
Following the evaluation in Part I, the six schemes were further developed as schemes A3 – F3, each with a distinct design approach. EC3 + Reed Hilderbrand made the following presentation to the Shraman Team in Dallas in January 2015, using massing models and diagrams only to identify the opportunities and challenges of each scheme.
The design team have intentionally refrained from identifying a favorite scheme in order to let the Shraman team come to their own conclusion. After much deliberation, scheme A3 (with foundation on lot 3, open space on lots 1 and 2) was chosen as the preferred design approach; EC3 + Reed Hilderbrand named one of two finalists for the competition …
PostScript: After the competition in 2015, Shraman entered into a dispute with the city of Dallas regarding the right-of-way to construct a public tram system through the site (lots 1+2). In April 2018, EC3 was informed that Shraman has finally come to the decision to sell the larger lots and build the project on the smaller lot 3 - Scheme A3 has prevailed as the winning scheme.