Institutional / Laboratory
CompletedNational Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS)
A competition-winning research campus designed to place spontaneous scientific exchange at the centre of institutional life.
A major biological research campus designed as a collaborative laboratory environment.
Overview
The NCBS campus is a research facility developed through a competition-winning design, integrating laboratory infrastructure within a cohesive institutional layout. Completed in 2013, the project coordinates architecture, engineering, and construction teams to deliver a high-performance research institution.
Design Intent
The campus is approached as a scientific commons: a place where specialised laboratories, collective meeting spaces, and everyday circulation reinforce one another rather than remain separate institutional zones.
Site / Context
Set within a larger academic landscape, the project uses courtyards, planted edges, and shaded links to connect technical research spaces with a more open campus life.
Program / Brief
Laboratory infrastructure, faculty spaces, support functions, and shared institutional facilities are organised to encourage interdisciplinary contact while maintaining the performance requirements of scientific work.
Material / Spatial Strategy
The architecture privileges clarity, robust construction, and environmental moderation, using repeated structural and spatial systems to support both current use and future adaptation.
Outcome
The result is a research campus whose identity comes less from singular form than from the sustained relationship between science, movement, climate, and institutional legibility.
The building should make it easy to encounter someone else's work on the way to your own.
Credits
- Team
-
- Structural: Mahendra Raj Consultants
- Electrical: Electrical Consulting Engineers
- Plumbing & Fire: Techno Engineering Consultants
- HVAC: Udayan Chaudhary & Associates
- Lighting: Umesh Balu
- Construction: JMC Projects (India) Ltd.
- Photographer
- Pallon Daruwala
Project Inquiry
Interested in discussing a related project?
Share a brief with the studio.