Site Specific: Pune College of Engineering
Localground - Pune, India, 2012
In 2012 Indian practice Localground, led by principal architect Khushru Irani, added a new deep, inhabited façade to the exterior of an existing educational building in their home town of Pune, India.
Exceeding its economic and programmatic parameters this project grafts a kind of ‘civic loggia’ to the exterior of the existing building. The project simultaneously improves the conditions of the building’s original programme while enriching the relationships between the institution, the street outside and the trees that line the space between them.
lg This project added a new façade to the exterior of the existing building that houses the College of Engineering in Pune (COEP). The existing building houses a library on the ground floor and an auditorium on the upper two levels. The new construction dove-tails onto the side of the existing building, creating a study room on the ground floor, a large lobby for the auditorium on the first floor and a students’ centre on the second floor.
The additional work has been inserted between the two existing staircases which bracket each end of the building and which were retained to give access to both ends of the new addition. The floor heights were governed by the floor levels of the existing building.
On the ground level we created a long study room which is accessed directly from the campus path that runs along it to the west. This new room is glazed giving both it and the library behind it increased acoustic isolation. The level of the slab of this room had to match the level of the narrow verandah slab that was used to access the auditorium on the first floor. The vertical fins on the ground floor were planned so as to shade from the afternoon west light, as well as create a visual screen preventing distraction from the foot and car traffic that passed outside the study hall. Additionally the mature trees at the front, which act as a kind of colonnade to the building, were protected by creating protective, raised planting areas around them.
At the first floor level we made the extended floor slab into a large verandah that now acts as a lobby to the auditorium. It is also where meetings and informal gatherings take place and where the college admissions process is facilitated.
At the second floor level we designed a simple lean-to roof, attached to the existing building to the east and sloping onto the new façade to the west. This room is used for by the students as a multi-purpose hall and has large sliding glass doors opening out to a long narrow verandah that runs the length of the building.