New urbanist to design huge university in India

Dhiru Thadani, a Washington, DC, architect and member of the CNU board, will lead the planning for what is probably the biggest educational project on the planet — the building of a brand-new university in India for 100,000 students. Thadani, a principal in the Baltimore-based architecture and planning firm Ayers Saint Gross, will spend at least one week a month in India for the next two years, guiding the planning of the future Vedanta University and the 40,000-population town that will be constructed to serve it.
Both the university and the town will be built from scratch on part of a 10,000-acre expanse in Orissa, one of the poorest states in India, near the Bay of Bengal southwest of Calcutta. Anil Agarwal, a 55-year-old native of India who amassed a fortune in mining and metals businesses, has established a $1 billion endowment to build a world-class, multi-discipline university — one that he hopes will eventually be comparable to Harvard or Stanford.
From 34 firms worldwide, Ayers Saint Gross (ASG), was chosen to direct the master planning for the campus and the town and to design the university’s first set of buildings. ASG, known for devising or enhancing traditional campus designs, has worked for colleges and universities throughout the US and in Canada, the Middle East, China, and India.
Thadani, 50, grew up in Bombay (Mumbai), came to the US at 17 to attend Catholic University in the District of Columbia, and is admired in new urbanist circles for his combination of meticulousness and passion — whether the project at hand is mapping all the public spaces in the nation’s capital (an effort he worked on for many years) or the redevelopment of the impoverished Beall’s Hill neighborhood in Macon, Georgia (an undertaking he first became involved in as a Knight Fellow in Community Building at the University of Miami in 2001).

Far reaching opportunity
Work was set to begin in August with Thadani taking key individuals on a tour of five US universities that have employed ASG — Arizona State University, University of Arizona, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins.
In the US, universities often spawn an uncoordinated array of restaurants, hotels, copy shops, houses, apartments, and other buildings beyond their campuses. “We want to control that development so at least it’s got some structure, some order to it,” Thadani told New Urban News.
Applying urbanistic principles may be easier in India than in the US. “Normally in India we talk about a 10-minute walk,” Thadani said. “Walking 10 minutes from the train station in 90- or 100-degree weather — nobody would complain about that. We might be talking about a five-minute bike ride as a module.”
Thadani has spoken with the project’s backers about issues such as compactness, pedestrians, bicycles, and shade — “all the principles we would naturally incorporate into our thinking” — and “there wasn’t a disconnect,” he said. “They totally got it.” The Indians involved in the project don’t want to be wasteful, he said. “They have to think economically.” Thadani expects that there will be few cars at Vedanta University and in the town. A railway station may be situated in the campus itself.
“The entire campus will be built to the platinum LEED standard, mostly because you have to be sustainable in an Indian [economic] context,” he  said. Thadani and the other planners have begun looking at materials produced within the region, such as some “very good stone.” About 15 miles north of the future university is the Sun Temple at Konark, which was built in the thirteenth century, using stacked, mortarless stone. It has been designated a world heritage site (see photo below).
Agarwal chose to build the university in Orissa partly because his company, London-based Vedanta Resources, has profited from the region’s bauxite and labor. Agarwal, who started out collecting scrap metal at 15 and has lived in London for more than 30 years, wanted to give back to the people and a region that had helped make the company successful, Thadani said. Adam Gross, principal in charge of Ayers Saint Gross, likened Agarwal to the American businessmen of a century or more ago who founded universities such as Stanford and Carnegie Tech.
Thadani had an office in India from 1995 to 2000. “I built a lot of townships,” he said. “Fifteen thousand people are living in one of the townships I designed.” Some staff from ASG will be in Orissa full-time. The firm will be responsible for designing and developing all the buildings for the campus’s opening phase, accommodating 2,500 students. Additional architectural firms will also be brought in. “We’re documenting hamlets and little villages that exist in this state,” Thadani said. “We’re looking at the way these villages orient themselves around water bodies. A college might be based on that structure.”
Thadani said it may take 15 years for the university to reach the target enrollment of 100,000. The plan is premised on supplementing Agarwal’s $1 billion gift with $2 billion in donations from other sources.