Every project here is held to the same test: does this room let someone be alone, well?
A proposed campus and a built home — different scales, same starting question. Not how people gather here, but where they go when they need to be alone.
A conceptual campus near VNIT, Nagpur, from the original design research.
Most campuses are one continuous social surface. Here, four zones are designed for solitude first — the rest holds the shared program at the edges.
One social surface — everyone circulating, everyone visible.
Six zones. Private before shared.
Library, counselling cell, workshops, dance studio.
Columns and dappled shade, on the walk toward the library.
A planted screen wall filters the light along one whole side.
A quiet seat by the water, just off the outdoor amphitheatre.
Wrapped in a Corten steel jaali screen that filters light and sound at the entrance.
Huge arches, framing the view in.
The framing idea, sketched before the curve was ever drawn in CAD.
Seating lifted for a floating effect — the cave-like roof already visible here.
Set on the outer edge, restricting views inward — three entrances, each arriving differently.
What follows: four zones built to let one person be alone.
Individual pods, around one tree.
The earliest sketch: a central mass with pods branching off it, before it was ever a plan.
The ring of cabins closes fully around the tree, roofed in matching stone shingle.
17 sqm, a skylight, and just enough room for one person and one instrument.
Private cabins facing inward toward one shared tree — connected to something living, not isolated from everything around it.
A courtyard, sunk into the ground.
Through a barrel vault — the passage narrows before it opens onto the courtyard.
Below grade, the noise of the site is already gone.
Mounded lawns hide the sunken form until you're almost on top of it.
The further you descend, the more the noise falls away — reached through a barrel vault, around a sunken lawn.
The path between solitude and each other.
A structure sunk a meter below grade, reached by a slight ramp — sketched here before it was brick.
Brick walls, low light, one chair turned toward the window.
Curved brick volumes, walked past rather than through.
Sunk a meter below grade, reached by a ramp — the walk itself becomes part of arriving.
Where it opens back up.
Mud, steel, stone, glass — the palette sketched loose before the plan was drawn.
Columns without walls — shared space that still lets someone stand apart.
Even the communal pavilion keeps a curved-off corner for one person and a desk.
Where people return once they've had their own space — the counterpoint to Canton and Covert, not a contradiction.
"How the evenings look like in here" — a reading nook behind angled glass, a guitar within reach.
Behind an angled glass wall: a low cushioned platform with nowhere to be — apart from the pergola where the rest of the household gathers.
One shared deck, sized for entertaining.
Plus a nook to disappear into, not perform in.
More projects, as they're ready to show.