RUDRAPUR UNIVERSITY

2014, Rudrapur, India, with SPA Design

The project site sits at the foothills of the Himalaya mountain chain in Northern India. The Greenfield site, where the developer wanted to establish a university for the mountainous state is surrounded by agrarian land and small settlements. Although we were constrainted by the small size of the site, we felt that future development around the site was inevitable. We thus proposed a central core for future development of an eventual university town, a square 90m by 90m in size at the heart of the development from which the various program elements would emerge and consolidate into the surrounding landscape.

Furthermore, we proposed to terrace towards the surrounding landscape to break the scale of the otherwise dense development and to open the rooms to the views of the mountains. A canopy above the building follows the form of the campus and we proposed for its surface to carry solar panels that would suffice at least 60% of the energy requirements of the building.

We arranged activities like canteen, cafeterias and workshops towards the square in order to enable possibilities of chance encounters and observation. Our intention through this was to seed urban qualities in a rather suburban location.