“The COEs are an extension of the Council’s Training and Research Centres. It will be an open, accessible to all place, for everyone to make their own; where Culture, Architecture and all its allied fields can come together.”
— Architect Habeeb Khan, previous President of the Council of Architecture
About 14 km from the city centre, in the south of Bengaluru, inside Bangalore University’s campus, is a plot of land with its natural contours, nothing built on it yet, sprawling with wide-canopied trees that have been growing for aeons. Nothing was built here, as of yet.
That is, until the Council of Architecture (CoA), in March 2022, announced an Architectural Design Competition for its Centre of Excellence (COE) at Bengaluru, CoA-COE-B.
It is this something that our team at ArchitectureLive! went into a deep dive to understand the current reality of.
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What is this supposed Centre of Excellence?
For decades, after its formation, the CoA did its work from its headquarters in New Delhi, but also had Architectural Centres that were the extensions of the academic wing of the CoA in various geographical regions of the country. The Centres acted as a platform for conducting organised research in emerging fields of architecture and disseminating knowledge through quality publications. They also provide motivation and support to students of architecture through awards programs, competitions, exhibitions, and public juries.
CoA’s realisation of the need to convert these into a genuine Centre of Excellence was to be able to regulate the profession not just from above, but by gathering points at ground level. In the language of the official competition dossier,
The Centre of Excellences (COEs) provides a forum for interaction among scholars, academicians, professionals, co-professionals, beneficiaries and stakeholders through workshops, seminars, and joint research projects, etc. The CoA-COE of Bengaluru will act as the national resource centre for the profession to nurture and advance the culture of design, education and innovation in the country.
The objectives were stated with unusual specificity. The centre would curate and conduct training and leadership courses for aspiring teachers, young graduates, and teachers-in-service. It would provide mentorship to institutes of learning for evolving curricula. It would accept and carry out sponsored research projects from national and international agencies. It would publish architectural books, research monographs, and the thesis work of graduate, postgraduate, and PhD students. And, practically, importantly, it would provide a facility for the registration and renewal of registration for qualified architects through an extension counter of the CoA, specifically for South India.
To house all of this, the brief by CoA envisioned a building of approximately six thousand five hundred square metres of carpet area (administration area, Resource Centre, Archives of Works from Significant Practices, Convention Centre, including seminar rooms, two conference rooms). The site was a two-acre plot at Jnanabharathi campus, with an FSI of two and a half and a permissible ground coverage of forty-five per cent.
In March of 2022, the Council opened this brief to a competition.
A seven-person team appointed by the COA administered this competition. With the competition now open to all architects registered with the Council under the Architects’ Act, it would run in two stages. Stage one, where teams would submit a concept and stage two, where they would develop comprehensive proposals with a budget. The jury was a mix of architects and professionals from allied fields.
The number of submissions that came in can be considered remarkable. Nearly fifteen hundred teams from across India signed up, over two hundred submitted entries for stage one, forty made it through, and finally, five were shortlisted for the final round.
The Council must be applauded for organising such a competition, not just the scale, but also for the process, as it remained open to anyone and everyone who was an architect, instead of being an invited competition. The Bengaluru competition process presents a template that can be lauded as a success: an open national competition, a philosophically serious brief, and an independent jury (with people from allied fields as well).
On August 2, 2022, the Council announced its winner: architectureRED, a Chennai-based firm established in 2008, led by architects Biju Kuriakose and Kishore Panikkar, for their proposal titled “A Place in Between”. The jury assessed that the winning entry was the most meticulous—the one that covered every aspect of the brief.
Following the announcement, architectureRED was formally appointed to prepare full design drawings and oversee periodic supervision of construction.
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It is now early 2026. The Centre has not yet been built.
The design development phase is understood to be ongoing. But between the announcement of a winning design and the pouring of a foundation, a great deal has caused a hindrance. The most consequential impediments have come not from within the project, but from the campus around it.
The same Jnanabharathi campus that holds the CoA’s two-acre plot has, over the past two years, become the site of one of Bengaluru’s more contentious environmental battles. Bangalore University proposed the construction of a new administrative and teaching block under the PM-Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (PM-USHA), funded by the University Grants Commission. To implement the project, the university had initially identified 1.5 acres on survey no. 6 of Nagarabhavi village. The original proposal sought clearance for the felling of over 419 trees on the campus.
The public response was swift and substantial. Following the notice, Bangalore University received nearly 25K objections from
In response to it, the Greater Bengaluru Authority’s Tree Experts Committee (TEC) conducted a detailed site inspection with BU officials, revealing that 228 trees could remain on site, as they did not obstruct construction. Among the remaining 192 trees in the construction zone, 54 were suitable for translocation to survey no. 59 in Kenchanahalli village, near BU’s lake viewpoint, while 138 trees were deemed unfit for relocation due to root ball and survival challenges, and approved for felling.
By November 2025, it had escalated further. The Greater Bengaluru Authority issued a fresh proposal to remove 352 trees from the Jnanabharathi campus (as was proposed by the Registrar, Council of Architecture, New Delhi, for the removal of another 352 trees). This was a number that alarmed conservationists who had believed the earlier reduction to 138 was a hard-won settlement.
The Karnataka High Court intervened, restraining the cutting of trees inside the campus after a Public Interest Litigation was filed by Swayam Jagruthi Trust and petitioner Parvathi Sriram. The PIL came before a division bench headed by the Chief Justice on November 21, 2025. The petitioners urged the court to stop all tree-cutting activities and declare the Biopark and Bio-reserve forest area a Heritage Site. The court directed the respondents to submit an Environmental Impact Assessment report on short notice.
To put it all very precisely, CoA’s Centre of Excellence and Bangalore University’s academic building (under the PM-USHA scheme) are distinct projects, on different portions of the same campus. The controversy over tree-felling is, strictly speaking, not about the CoA’s two-acre plot. But they are entangled in ways that cannot be ignored: by geography, by public perception, and by the fact that any construction activity on the Jnanabharathi campus now takes place under civic and legal scrutiny that did not exist when the competition was announced in 2022.
When ArchitectureLive! spoke with Biju Kuriakose of architectureRED, and Prof. Subramani Prabhagaran, the Deputy Director of TRC Bangalore, and CoA representative for this project, they were measured but direct.
Prof. Prabhagaran clarified that the figures referenced in recent communications reflect the total number of trees on site, and not the number proposed for removal. From the very outset, the design has been guided by a commitment to minimise disruption to the existing landscape. This has been a complex and demanding process. He also alluded us to the significant reimagining of the program under the current President of CoA, Abhay Purohit.
We believe this is a constructive and forward-looking shift; one that substantially enhances the purpose and potential of the campus. In response to this expanded scope, the built-up area has also increased. The project now stands at approximately 1,20,000 square feet, as compared to the earlier 85,000 square feet envisaged at the competition stage.
The proposal has been carefully developed to retain a majority of the existing trees, with only minimal and necessary interventions. Smaller trees are proposed to be transplanted within the site itself. In fact, the Council of Architecture had, at an early stage, committed to providing the necessary support for such transplantation efforts.
His comment offered an insight into CoA’s seriousness about the project.
This remains a critical institutional project for the architectural fraternity in India. As architects, we remain committed to realizing a campus that is state-of-the-art, not only in its facilities, but also in its social, economic, and environmental responsibility.
Kuriakose also remarked that CoA has remained a committed and supportive client, as they have been helping in trying to push the project forward, regardless of the external forces that have complicated the path to construction, despite the years that have passed since the competition result and the turbulence around the campus. The obstacles, as he characterised them, have not come from within the relationship between the architect and the client, but from the environment around it, the overlapping jurisdictions, the environmental proceedings, the institutional complexity of building on a university campus caught in its own controversies.
At present, the full set of tender drawings has been completed, and the project is ready for submission to the Tree Committee. Over the past year and a half, we have engaged extensively with multiple authorities, including the Forest Department, through several rounds of discussions to present the design and its environmental considerations.
As architectural competitions have a well-documented history of producing winning designs that are subsequently diluted, delayed, or quietly abandoned, often by the very clients who commissioned them. That does not appear to be the story here, at least as told by the architects who won.
And so we come back to the site. Nothing has been built here yet.
But, right now, what we have are the designs by architectureRED for the site, and outside are the citizens fighting for what must remain.
