Bengaluru’s NGEF campus carries the weight of a different kind of making. The switchgear factory sheds that once powered industrial India now stand as the site for a new institution — one that asks what it means to innovate in public, and what architecture can do to make that legible.
MIST — the Museum of Innovation, Startup & Technology — and its twin institution Innoverse occupy a repurposed factory shed within the 105-acre campus at Baiyappanahalli. Rather than separating exhibition from production, the design creates an active exchange between the two programmes. MIST documents India’s journey in technology and entrepreneurship; Innoverse operates as a live incubator for deep-tech startups. The two institutions share a site, a structure, and a logic — each shaped by what happens in the other.
The existing shed’s steel-framed volume and sawtooth roof are preserved and enhanced. Large operable windows draw the surrounding urban forest into the interior. The spatial organisation resists the conventional museum sequence — instead, visitors move through spaces where innovation is genuinely in progress, not only on display.
The project is a public-private partnership between the UnboxingBLR Foundation and the Karnataka Department of Electronics, Information Technology and Biotechnology, with a targeted completion in 2028.
