The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta was the first in a series of business management institutions to be sponsored by the Government of India in the early 1960’s to enhance the efficiency and transparency of commerce and industry, with an aim to increase the country’s national production capacity. This campus was followed by the institute of management in Ahmedabad designed by Louis Kahn, and a third campus in Bengaluru designed by Balkrishna Doshi and Joseph Allen Stein. All of these institutes are independent of one another and are autonomous.

Located on a marshy site in southern Kolkata, land was created by dredging earth out of seven lakes, creating higher ground levels for construction. Public works engineers set out to build the campus from simple designs that grew through ad hoc additions over the decades, with no clear plan or order. Thus, the key strategy of this design was to gift this center of advanced education an identity and a sense of place.

In 2007 the institute realized the need for a master plan and for dramatically increasing its student capacities. The planning began that included hostels, executive training facilities, additional academic areas and major infrastructure additions. The residential complex, illustrated here, includes a large dining and recreational facility on three levels. Four hundred students can eat at one time on the lower two floors and the upper hall is used for games, events and parties.

An executive hostel with twenty-seven suites and one hundred and sixty-four single rooms on the upper three levels has classrooms, syndicate rooms, lounges and dining facilities on the ground level.

There are two residential quadrangles, each composed of one hundred and seventy-four single seated rooms, which share common sanitary facilities on three levels, and study spaces, games rooms and lounges on the ground floor.  Three hundred and forty-eight postgraduate students are accommodated.

The construction language employs simple plastered facades and Kota stone flooring. Vertical silo stair towers, connecting single seated rooms, each with its own balcony, hold the four corners of the stepped hostels elevations.  Each of the hostel wings is composed of stepped sections, with private balconies stepping back up the exterior walls. Inside, open passages project into sky-lit atria, reaching out, one over the other, as they ascend.

The residential neighborhood opens through landscaped terraces and gardens onto placid lotus ponds in a verdant landscape. The residential neighborhood is connected to the academic quadrangle by an iconic tubular steel pedestrian bridge, crossing a forty-three meters wide water pond.

In the master plan a central island was identified as the academic quadrangle, where a library, classrooms and other facilities existed. A dilapidated school was demolished and moved, making way for a new academic quadrangle using the existing library to anchor one side of the proposed large space. A major lecture hall complex is being built opposite the library with two connecting wings formed by extensive academic areas, inclosing the four-sided quadrangle. All of these structures use multi-level arcades, protected from rain, to inter-connect five levels of syndicate rooms, conference rooms, classrooms, teaching amphitheaters, faculty offices, computer laboratories and amenities.  This iconic academic quadrangle gifts the campus a sense of place.

Thus, there are two distinct neighborhoods in the campus: an island academic quadrangle and a residential neighborhood, reached by crossing a new bridge designed by the architects as an integral part of the project.