A campus for India, shaped like a mandala

Vedanta, the largest new university in the world, will have a plan that draws from Indian spiritual traditions.

On an expanse of flat rural land near the Bay of Bengal, earth-moving is to get under way this fall for an extraordinary institution. Vedanta University — to be built with a billion dollars donated by Indian industrialist Anil Agarwal — will have a shape like no other university on the planet (see plan on page 1).
Dhiru Thadani, lead architect-planner at Ayers Saint Gross (ASG), has been spending about one week per month in India, spearheading the master-planning of the approximately 10,000-acre project. Thadani and his team have produced a remarkable, complex layout, one that suggests an elaborate mandala.
A mandala — a symbol associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions as well — is sometimes defined as a geometric pattern that represents the cosmos. The mandala that Thadani’s team has created in the state of Orissa consists of two large, overlapping circles, each half a mile in diameter. They sit within a larger oval that stretches about 1.4 miles from east to west.
Within the two circles and the 780-acre oval, there may eventually be as many as 280 university buildings, predominantly three to five stories high. Thanks to their disciplined arrangement, tight spacing, and consistent heights, the buildings will form dozens of well-defined outdoor spaces, ranging from small private courtyards to quadrangles and parks.
The patterns made by the buildings’ curved, angled, or straight walls will be intricate. Weaving through them will eventually be 100,000 students, plus tens of thousands of teachers, administrators, and others.
Thadani, who was born in Bombay (Mumbai) and educated at Catholic University in Washington, DC, is based in Washington, but has previously worked on large planning projects in his native country. He and Adam Gross, principals at Baltimore-based ASG, say they set out to make the campus “Indian in spirit.”
The western circle, containing humanities programs, has an oval open space at its center and “is organized by a series of radiating spokes representing the Indian flag and the spokes on Gandhi’s spinning wheel,” a master plan document explains. “The eastern circle — science — is organized orthogonally around a central square, representing practice and research that is grounded in the earth.”
Unlike many universities, where the arts and humanities occupy the well-loved, walkable core of the campus, while the science, engineering, and professional schools sit in less lovely, more disconnected settings, Vedanta is striving for an intertwining of disciplines — with all of them enjoying a pleasing ambience.

Fitting the local climate
For protection from the sun and from the 79 inches of rain that fall annually on this section of India, the planners called for continuous arcades, which can also keep the buildings cooler. They encountered some resistance — arcades in India are sometimes associated with housing occupied by the poor — but the logic of the arcades seems to have won out.
Prior to starting Vedanta’s planning, some of the principal figures — from India and the US — toured several campuses. The three- to five-story height of most of the buildings is consistent with precedents the team examined, including the University of Virginia, Stanford University, and the city of Bologna, Italy.
Among their practical advantages, those heights reduce the need for elevators and mechanical equipment. A key element of circulation inside the buildings will be grand staircases placed within atriums. Big rooms, such as auditoriums, will be mostly at first-floor level, to keep most traffic at the lower level. Academic buildings will be constructed mainly of concrete, with stone cladding. “There’s a lot of granite in this area,” Thadani points out, so it’s affordable. Residential buildings may have stone on the ground floor and stucco above.
The goal is for 40 percent of the buildings to do without air conditioning, relying on stone screens, cross-ventilation, and other tactics to ameliorate the hot climate. “That will not be possible in laboratory buildings,” Thadani acknowledges.
In Indian educational circles, one tendency today is for people to want buildings that look very modern, with an abundance of glass — ostensibly forward-looking structures. But across much of Asia, this mindset is producing many buildings that consume power heavily, ignore human scale, inadequately define public spaces, and seem at odds with traditional places. “From the start, we have been emphatically talking about sustainability,” Thadani notes. Emphasizing sustainability can win people over to an architecture that is generally not so flashy but is more economical, more urbane, and presumably of more lasting value.
Besides planning the campus and the surrounding township, which may ultimately have a population of 400,000, ASG is designing three of Vedanta’s first buildings — a library, a science building, and a humanities building. These structures divide a diamond-shaped open space where the campus’s two circles overlap. The firm is also programming three other buildings.
Thadani and Gross are encouraging the client to retain other architects for other buildings. However, the US-based designers hope to continue in a design review capacity once the master plan is in place. As of mid-August, the plan was nearly complete.