TAKSHASHILA 2.0

PROPOSAL FOR A UNIVERSITY

This semester, we were given the task of designing a university. But we knew from the beginning that a university is not just a collection of buildings fulfilling functional requirements. A great building—one that endures beyond its time—must be more than that. It must inspire.

History has shown us that architecture, when imbued with meaning, transcends mere construction. It becomes a vessel for culture, knowledge, and identity. A university, in particular, must be a space where ideas flourish, where traditions evolve, and where the past meets the future in seamless continuity.

Architecture is not static—it is a dialogue between time, place, and people.

And so, in our design, we have built upon the legacy of ancient university of taxila. Not as an imitation, but as a continuation. A university not just to be used, but to be lived. A place that will inspire, even a millennium from now.

SEMESTER - X

trans[PORT] air[PORT] re[PORT]polis

You see a map of global trade. You see the bright, pulsating lines of shipping lanes the arteries of our global economy.

One of the busiest of these, the Strait of Malacca, converges just here.

Now, imagine a map of global biodiversity. You see the remaining fragments of pristine ecosystems the lungs of our

planet. One of the most critical of these, the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, exists precisely here.

These two maps one of geostrategy, one of ecology are not just adjacent. They are superimposed. They occupy the exact same ground. And caught between them are the Shompen people, for whom this land is not a resource to be developed or preserved, but a living tapestry of kinship and culture.

This is the inescapable contradiction of Great Nicobar. It is a site of immense strategic ambition and profound ecological and cultural sanctity. And the default path forward the one we see repeated across the globe is a fracture.

A future where infrastructure overrides ecology, where tourism erodes tribal privacy, and where the island becomes just another contested territory.

My thesis begins with a single, urgent question: What if we refused this fracture?

What if we dared to imagine an urban prototype not of conquest, but of synthesis?

This project, 'Island Futures: Urbanizing Nature,' is my answer. 

It is a proposition that strategic infrastructure, ecological systems, and indigenous sovereignty are not competing interests, but the three essential, co-dependent pillars of a truly resilient future.

You will see a port that is not just a machine for logistics, but a cultural apparatus that makes the invisible flow of global capital a subject of critical observation. 

You will see an airport that is not a monolithic object, but a disaggregated landscape woven into the forest. 

And most radically, you will see a tourism model that is not an extractive resort, but a distributed, citizen-led urban system a'Re:Port Polis' where infrastructure for hosting is owned by the people. 

This is more than a plan for an island. It is a critique of conventional development and a blueprint for a new architectural praxis one where our role expands from being form-givers to being facilitators of complex negotiation, giving form to co-existence.

The ultimate success of this prototype would not be to replicate Singapore, but to create a place where, in 50 years, the Shompen are still the guardians of their forest, the turtles still nest on the beaches, and the island has thrived on its own terms.