Tata-Dhan Academy

The academy is a management training institute that provides professional education in rural development. In keeping with its mission, the architecture builds on a local traditional vocabulary, so that those who enter will feel instantly at home. The design began with a study of the regional prototypes of Chettinad architecture to understand its planning, scale, detailing and materiality, which was then reinterpreted to suit the spatial and functional needs of the school.

The site had some legal constraints disallowing building on certain portions, which necessitated fragmenting the layout into three components. The site plan picks up on the way villages are distributed across a region, with clusters from which interconnecting roads spring out. The individual clusters grow as radiating squares and interlocking courtyards. Halls sided with verandahs open onto landscaped courtyard maintaining transparency along one axis of every space. The vocabulary of tile roofs, random rubble stone walls, stone columns, bright cement oxide floors, and reed mats render the complex as a subtle yet striking composition of shade, light and color, interwoven with landscape.

The project won the JK Cements "Architect Of The Year" Award 2010