[Jason]

The former Freemason Lodge, now the Sindh Wildlife building, is poised to become a museum with a library, a small park, a lecture room, canteen and washrooms for visitors and the staff.

“It will be a museum with all sorts of additional requirements. The Sindh Wildlife Museum will be on the ground floor, the library on the first floor and a semi-public space with a park and exhibition items and a lecture hall,” Christophe Polak, who is looking after the restoration work of the heritage building, told The News on Wednesday.

In an exclusive interview with The News, Polak said he had not been able to find a picture to know how the Free Masons Lodge looked like in the past. “I have been working on this project for more than three years. We have weekly meetings on the site every Tuesday,” he said. “We started with documentation of the building partly out of our interest and partly because Secretary Department of Antiquities Kaleemullah Lashari had requested that we should remain in touch with him,” he added.

“We took photographs of the building to find what was original in the building and what appears to be added at later stages. All of this got mapped. There is a bit of guess work also that is part of conservation,” he said. Polak is a Belgian architect who did his Masters in Urban Planning from Rijks University of Ghent, Belgium in 1996 and Masters of Architecture in Human Settlements from K.U. Leuven, Belgium in 1998.

He said he has three sets of drawings; first, how the heritage building is at present; second, an assumption how it was in the original shape; and third, “what we are proposing”.

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