Aatma Manthan Museum in Rajasthan redefines meditative experience

Discover the Aatma Manthan Museum in Nathdwara, a unique space blending technology and design for a transformative meditative experience.

What must a meditative room provide? Silence, an absence of sensorial overload, a focus on nature or maybe a guiding voice? What if an entire museum could use its spatial plan, surfaces, and immersive experience to drive inward reflection? The Aatma Manthan Museum, located in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, has been envisioned as a material meditation on form where the space is the muse, and the method of arriving at stillness is movement across its zones.

Winning the prestigious BLT Built Design Awards – Interior Design of the Year last December, the project was recognised for its imaginative design of a meditative museum. The museum offers a technology-assisted meditative experience, without guidance or intentional direction by a voice.

Sanjay Puri

The moniker of the museum is derived from a combination of aatma (soul), mana (mind), and tan (body) to evoke a meditative state. Spread out over a sprawling 18,000 sq. ft. and built on a budget of ₹9 crore, the project was designed by the Mumbai-based firm Sanjay Puri Architects. Its principal architect, Sanjay Puri, says the shape of the plot presented both an opportunity and an obstacle in creating a sequential, immersive space.

Located at the base of the State of Belief, the space is not a regular geometrical one; it is an undulating, irregular expanse that requires a reimagining of the traditional meditative room.

The area had to set itself apart from the traditional museum template. “Our biggest challenge during ideation was the irregular shape of the plan, and how best to create a meditative space that would immediately offer visitors an oasis of calm from the crowds outside. We also moved away from the museum as a space for artefacts, to a more sensorial experience,” Puri explains.