Japanese Design Elements Shape New IIT Hyderabad Campus

In 2007, during his trip to India, Japan’s then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that Japan would design a new campus for IIT in Hyderabad. As soon as this announcement took place, experts from The University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science started working in 2011 on its design, which is ready this year.

The new IIT Hyderabad(IITH) campus is approximately 2 square kilometers and located around 60 kilometers from the city of Hyderabad. The Japanese team closely collaborated with their Indian counterparts in designing six key complexes: International Guest House, Sports and Cultural Complex, Technology Incubation Park, Convention Center, Research Centers Complex, and Knowledge Center, all set to represent the innovative spirit of the university.

“Working on the Knowledge Center was particularly interesting”, says Yoshiyuki Kawazoe, who worked on the design. “This center is meant to serve not just as a library but also as a repository for all kinds of knowledge an idea proposed by our Indian counterparts. I thought of creating a space that resembles a valley. By adjusting the structure of the lower floors, I created a space in which the floor height decreases as one moves toward the center. In this way, visitors have a panoramic view of the various forms of knowledge housed in the building”.

One design, for the Technology Incubation Park, proved so popular that two buildings bearing the same design have also been constructed. The Technology Incubation Park is intended to support start-ups based on research conducted at the university and to bridge the gap between academia and industry. The well-known Japanese automobile manufacturer Suzuki is currently setting up a lab at the center to encourage industry–academia collaboration.

Although the design work was carried out in Japan, the experts involved visited IITH multiple times to assess conditions and check progress. “One of the challenges for us was adapting to the construction culture in India, which is quite different from that in Japan”, notes Kawazoe. “For example, wood is a key construction material in Japan, but timber is scarce in India, meaning we had to change our approach to rely on stone instead of wood. At the same time, I think we were quite successful in incorporating some distinctly Japanese elements into the architectural style such as the emphasis on the intermediate spaces between the exteriors and interiors of buildings”.

With the help of Kawazoe and his colleagues at The University of Tokyo, the new IITH campus is shaping up to become a world-class center for education in science and technology. Furthermore, various initiatives for academic exchange between Japan and India are already underway on campus, such as a partnership for research on AI between IITH and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

“I am proud to have helped one of India’s leading universities build this wonderful campus. We have paved the way for further exchanges, some of which are already underway, and I am sure that the relationship between India and Japan will only grow stronger over the next 50 years.

Working on the IITH campus’s design helped me to appreciate the intimate relationship between architecture and climate, building materials, and society. This relationship differs between places, and so the approach to create a beautiful space also changes. This notion will be a great inspiration for my future activities. The more I work in different parts of the world, the more I realize the depth of architecture, and my interest in architecture only grows”, concludes Kawazoe.