Azim Premji University, Bengaluru | CCBA Designs | Christopher Benninger | Tallest Hostel Building

The Azim Premji University is being built on a thirty-six hectares site in the periphery of the Bengaluru metropolitan region. The university is an integral component of a national strategy by the Azim Premji Foundation, a philanthropic organization, to improve primary education in India. The vision is to have a deep, large scale and institutional impact on the quality and equity of primary education in the most challenging regions of India. By partnering with government to engage teachers, teacher educators, school leaders, rural development officials, senior government functionaries and policy makers at the state and the national level to catalyze institutional and policy shifts that impact at the grass root level. The university is carrying out evidence-based research, working with fifty district level institutes and eight state governments. The university has a clear social purpose to make significant contributions towards a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society, through the development of talent and the creation of knowledge. It is doing this by creating socially committed professionals, facilitating better practices, exploring new knowledge and acting as a national resource. Accordingly, the university is running undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education programs.
These visions are realized through degree and diploma programs. In the future as many as twenty thousand students will be on campus, of which sixteen thousand will be residential students, along with their teaching, research and support staff. To facilitate this, a campus is being built composed of student residences, employee residences, dining facilities, sports and recreation facilities, classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories, conference rooms, faculty study rooms, an auditorium, art studios, music rooms, an amphitheater, a library, essential utilities and a welcome center. A number of rights-of-ways, reservations, statutory access paths and an existing temple temper the plans’ structure.
The academic area at the entrance to the campus includes the library, auditorium, classrooms, faculty study rooms, laboratories and lecture halls. These activities are linked with each other through a system of covered arcades and courtyards, around and within which various functions are located due their mutual synergies and complementarities. The strategy is to keep the ground level as a vehicle free, pedestrian domain. Walking paths within plazas, under arcades, through enclosed garden courtyards and down a central promenade create kinetic experiences tempered to enhance curiosity, interest and leave visual memories. A hierarchy of social spaces facilitates various kinds of idea exchanges, from one-on-one discussions, to group discussions, debates, lectures and dramas. An individual can find their own place to contemplate, or discover a corner to question a friend. They can sit in a breakout space freely exchanging opinions, criticisms and new ideas. Thus, it is the informal learning spaces that compliment and amplify the formal places. The human mind is wandering and creative, but is also must be focused and analytical; the learning spaces must all reflect this seeming contradiction. These became the explicit and the implicit factors generating the designs.
___________________________________________
Professor Christopher Benninger is the founder, mentor & principal architect of CCBA Designs.
With a post graduation in urban planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & post graduation in architecture from Harvard University, Prof. Benninger emigrated to India in 1971 where he co-founded Faculty of Planning CEPT University as a Ford Foundation advisor. He later shifted to Pune in 1976, where he founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities (CDSA). In 1995, Christopher along with Mr. Ramprasad Akkisetti started his architectural practice ‘Christopher Charles Benninger Architects’. This was renamed to CCBA Designs Pvt. Ltd. in 2005 a name under which it continues to flourish till today.
Winning the Indian Institute of Architects Annual Awards for excellence six times, a feat unmatched by any other architect, Prof. Benninger is one of India’s great modernists. His undeniable talent and dedication to planning, urban design and architecture has created an array of renowned and award-winning projects both in India and abroad.
His portfolio includes creating urban development plans for prominent places like Goa, Thane, six cities in Sri Lanka, and five cities in Bhutan, along with numerous masterplans, award-winning institutional buildings, and benchmark housing developments. Under Prof. Benninger, CCBA Designs has the ability to produce outstanding work across all scales and typologies, irrespective of location.

[@MadhavMadhav-dq3od]

Very good

[@NaeemKhan-hy7ou]

Nice🎉🎉

[@anandmkurien]

1:08 says the university will have 20,000 students on campus. The two hostels can house only 5000 students, not 20,000.

[@lakshmivenugopal8984]

Very Nice🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉