Most training centres are built like offices with bedrooms attached. At Rasayani, in Raigad district, Bharat Petroleum asked us for a residential Campus where its senior managers could step away from the pace of Mumbai and learn. The site settled the question of what kind of place it should be: 19.93 acres of woodland, a green pocket a world away from the city. We decided early that the Campus should feel less like an institution and more like a retreat.
Starting from the trees
The Master Plan was drawn around the forest rather than over it. About 40 per cent of the existing woodland is kept untouched, and new planting carries the landscape further, so that around 60 per cent of the ground stays green. Buildings take the clearings between the trees. Paths are laid so that every walk, from a room to a classroom or from the dining hall to the club, passes through shade.
Nothing above the canopy
Height was the second decision. No building rises above two floors, and the learning centre, the club and the other shared buildings are held to a single storey. From almost anywhere on the Campus it is the woodland that fills the view, not the Architecture. What remains is a family of low pavilions, courtyards and verandahs, closer in feeling to a resort than to a corporate building.
Learning around courtyards
The learning centre is a single-storey building organised around shaded courtyards. Its teaching wings open onto these courtyards, so that a break between sessions means stepping out into air and green rather than into a corridor. A 300-seat multipurpose hall serves the larger gatherings, and an outdoor amphitheatre gives the Campus a place to meet in the open.
Living among the trees
The residential side of the Campus is just as quiet. Two-storey Hostels hold 144 rooms, with executive suites for senior visitors. A club with a pool and a dining hall sit a short walk away under the trees, so that evenings on the Campus are spent outdoors as much as indoors.
- A single-storey learning centre around shaded courtyards, with teaching wings and a 300-seat multipurpose hall
- An outdoor amphitheatre
- Two-storey Hostels with 144 rooms, and executive suites
- A club with a pool, and a dining hall
A change of pace
The people who will train here spend their working lives in dense cities, with little open land and less green. The Campus is meant to give them the opposite for a few days: low buildings, deep verandahs, the sound of the forest and room to think. Materials and details are chosen for comfort and quality, so that the place itself supports the learning that happens in it. About 17,509 square metres of building sit lightly on the site. ARCH-EN DESIGN designed the Campus and its landscape, and is its Project Management consultant.
The project
Bharat Petroleum Learning Centre
Rasayani, Raigad, Maharashtra
See the project