Climate, Culture, and Modernism: The Postcolonial Campus as Architectural Laboratory
CEPT University Foundation Hall, Lecture Hall and Kund / CCBA Designs. Photo © Ashish Bhonde, Ramprasad Akkisetti
In the decades following independence, some of the most ambitious architectural experiments in the world did not emerge through museums, monuments, or government palaces. They emerged through universities. Across South Asia and Africa, newly formed nations turned campuses into testing grounds for entirely new ways of imagining collective life. These campuses functioned as more than educational institutions. They became territories where states tested how modernity might be organized, for citizens to gather, institutions to function, climate to shape architecture, and imported ideas to transform local realities.
