Semester 6, 2025Architectural design studio

Shivajinagar, Bengaluru

The institute at dusk, set into the dense blocks of Shivajinagar beside the mosque, with the bazaar in the galli below.

An empty school in Shivajinagar becomes a culinary institute. The question I kept asking: if you replace every part of a building, is it still the same building?

01Site

An empty school in the middle of the bazaar

The site is tucked into one of Shivajinagar's narrow gallis, off Chinnaswamy Mudaliar Road, right next to the Abdul Gafoor Masjid. There's a G+2 load-bearing school on it. The brick walls are still solid, but nobody has used the classrooms in years.

The rest of Shivajinagar is busy. It used to be called Blackpally, it got pulled into the Bangalore Cantonment, and the Marathas, the Mughals and the British all left something behind. The bus stand is close, there's a food street about a kilometre away, and everything around the site is busy. This one corner just went quiet.

Fig. 1The gallis around the site.
Fig. 2The streets right around the school.
Fig. 3The school as it stands today, in its compound off the galli.
02The paradox of identity

If you replace every part of a building, is it still the same building?

Fig. 4My concept sheet.

That's the Ship of Theseus. Replace a ship plank by plank and ask whether it's still the same ship. I asked the same thing about the school.

Turning it into a culinary institute changes it in five ways. For each one I had to decide what to keep, what to break and what to add. Click through them.

I kept the old load-bearing floors and ran a new steel frame through them and over them, so the old and the new hold the building up together. Once the new frame is standing next to it, you look at the old structure differently too.

The site before: the dormant school inside its compound wall.
The site after: the new institute grafted onto the school.
The schoolThe institute
⇆

Drag across it. Same site, before and after.

03Mini game

Swap out the school, one part at a time

04Design development

How it got its shape

Form development, step 1: the dormant school.

Scroll and it builds up. The old school stays, the steel goes in, and the new floor plates curve out over the galli. Then the ground floor opens up and fills with stalls, and a folded roof goes over the top.

The kitchens are all glass, so the cooking is on show from the galli.

The souk from the galli. Modelled in Revit, rendered with AI.
05Sections and elevation

Cutting through it

Fig. 5Sectional perspective through the old school and the new insert, looking west. Old brick in red, new concrete and steel in blue.
Fig. 6Section AA'. Old brick in red, new steel in blue.
Fig. 7Section BB'.
Fig. 8Section CC'.
Fig. 9Elevation 1.

The cutaway shows the whole stack at once: the old school at the bottom, the steel frame and new floors threaded through it, and the folded roof over the top.

Fig. 10Cutaway isometric of the institute.
06Wall section

One slice, from the footing to the roof

Fig. 11Wall section, 1:75.

This is a slice through the new edge. Steel frame, floor plates, glass, and a planter along the edge of every slab.

  1. 1Standing-seam aluminium on 100 mm insulation, folded steel rafters
  2. 2Folded roof edge
  3. 3Unitised curtain wall, 50 × 150 mm cobalt mullions, double glazing
  4. 420 mm tiles, 30 mm screed
  5. 5175 mm RCC slab
  6. 6Steel edge beam
  7. 7450 mm concrete-filled steel column
  8. 8Glass railing, 1.1 m
  9. 91 m planter: soil, filter fabric, drainage board, waterproofing
  10. 10Sandstone coping
  11. 11Granite paving on 100 mm PCC (souk floor)
  12. 12RCC pad footing on 100 mm PCC
From above. Modelled in Revit, rendered with AI.

Next site · Cubbon Park, Bengaluru

Natural Thresholds