Broadly the project adopts a four-pronged strategy:

• To reinstate the relationship of Minto Hall to the site within a configuration that derives from the potentials of the site topography.
  It is important to enable the reconstruction of past histories from suggestive fragments, within the overall strategy – the history of Minto Hall as a prestige and power symbol (as evidenced from its delineation in the landscape), the history of the lake and what it means for conservation today. Thus fragments of memory remain etched as distinct, and also overlapping in the new configuration.
  We propose to locate the main convention centre within Minto Hall in order to reinstate its relevance as a place for democratic discourse.
• The ground plane outside Minto Hall makes a break with the past in its dislocation (and sinking down to a lower contour) to create the urban plaza, which could be used as an open air convention space. Thus from a singular object in the landscape which dominated the terrain, the removal of the floor plane distorts that singular force by dislocating the plane of authority and bringing it into a relationship with the other elements of the plaza. Part of the excavated earth is to be placed in the existing Gandhi Park, gently building up towards the main road.
• The plaza locates itself as an open to sky insert of space below ground between Minto Hall, Gandhi Park (with modified peripheries) and the podium. The media centre is located within the plaza, yet floating above it. Its deliberate insertion within the plaza results in it looming large and commanding vistas on the one hand, and on the other, almost disappearing from the upper level. The roof of the media centre reconstructs the green (as a fragment of the original landscape).
  The plaza is punctuated by islands of existing trees and is cut across at upper level by a covered celebratory walkway to the main convention centre (deliberately situated off axis)
• The convention hall users are dropped off at the walkway and vehicles move further up to an underground basement parking, the roof of which is green (and continuous with the upper landscape). The Minto Hall surrounds and Gandhi Park are thus seen as a continuous landscape (although differentiation in contour will subtly separate the park from the convention campus physically for security reasons), and the walkway gently rests on the green landscape as a slender bar.

Gandhi Park-

1. The allocation of a space to the public must be retained, in spite of the change in use of the Minto Hall precincts as a semi-public (and restricted) zone.
2. As an overall strategy Gandhi Park is seen as an extension of the landscape of Minto Hall.
3. Thus the elements of the park are marginally realized to reflect the strong axial thrust of Minto Hall. A new grid of trees is superimposed (while the old are retained.)
4. A second landscape ‘bar’ signifying movement (similar to the first celebratory walkway leading to Minto) is placed on the grassy contours of the park.

Minto Hall:

1. We propose an adaptive reuse of this heritage structure, the decision for which derives from the inherent qualities of its plan–form and structure. The approach is sympathetic but not overprotective.
   We also propose to free up the colonnade in accordance with the original 1909 plan to create a semi-open layer between the enclosed inner spaces and the outside.
2. The second strategy for the site is the making of the urban plaza, which is a dislocation of the ground plane to a sloping lower one. This derives from and ensures a sense of continuum of the horizontal landscape space at the Minto Hall level. This visual continuum is only interspersed by the gentle placing of the ‘bars’ of movement on the green landscape at the upper level.
3. The media centre which hangs within the plaza and floats above it, and the slender vertical podium form the other elements of the plaza, which become points of reference from everywhere. At ground level only the walkway (bar) cuts across the plaza to link to Minto Hall.
   Thus this new urban space is defined by points in space making vertical and horizontal thrusts above and below original ground, which by its positions reinforce each other and direct visual movement to the lake.
4. This critical point definition of periphery with a certain open endedness for chance encounters has a potential for the contemporary Indian urban space and experience.
5. The media centre (the notion of media as a ubiquitous and virtual power bank) has the quality of appearing and disappearing by virtue of its position as a floating glass box with a ‘greened’ roof plate (at the same level as Minto Hall). It sits within the plaza and floats within it commanding a visual vista through the plaza. The ‘greened’ roof of this is a remnant of the original landscape (which has now been cleaved into). Gandhi Park reorients itself to read as part of this continuous landscape (even though it is public).
6. The sides of the plaza are made of reinforced concrete planes which fold in and out to retain the earth on both sides; the folds enabling a more efficient structural design. These concrete surfaces of the plaza, which break plane by sloping forward, indenting back and shifting, are evocative of scaled-down dam walls – a deliberate reference to Bhoja’s dam walls which created the lakes.
7. This sloping wedge of space carved into the site linearly, from Minto Hall to the lake forms the open-to-sky exhibition gallery for the history of Bhopal.
8. The hotel floats as a block of North facing room above the main horizontal thrust of space, which is the concourse for interaction leisure and entertainment.