The ITO campus enjoyed the intensity of its urban engagement, where the evolution of School of Planning and Architecture overlapped with the development of the city. However,the now evolved SPA with its new campus would add to the institutional, residential and commercial collage in Delhi’s south central ridge and would brace itself to witness yet another state of dynamism of such a juxtaposed urban setting.
Highlighting the important distinction between Urbanism and Urbanization, we propose the Urban Ground. This is a model of urbanism that attempts to dilute the extremities between the natural and the human imposed context.
At the Macro-level, the urban ground respects the once nature dominated skyline and simultaneously the need for human intervention. At the Meso-level, acknowledging the pressures exerted by the site’s morphology, the Urban Ground acts as an extension of th e existing terrain, both as a blend or an additive layer.
This ground can be understood as a surface at the Micro-level, that negotiates topography and accommodates functional deployments, performing as a roof, a ground, and occupiable space, depending on its own gradient and the variation in its thickness.