There is a strange contradiction unfolding in global education. As technology makes learning cheaper and increasingly detached from place, conventional wisdom says the physical university campus is becoming redundant. Knowledge is a few clicks away, and students can absorb a lecture, a course, or an entire degree’s worth of information from the comfort of their homes.

India is doing almost the opposite. It is building more universities, expanding campuses, and increasingly attracting some of the world’s leading institutions to establish a physical presence within its borders. The Universities of Southampton, Liverpool, Bristol, and York, in the U.K., alongside the University of New South Wales, in Australia, are among those setting up campuses in India, a market that already serves more than 43 million higher education students, with enrollment growing significantly over the past decade.

This is not simply a response to population scale, though scale is part of the story. India is projected to add hundreds of millions of urban residents by 2050, and its young population will continue to drive demand for education and opportunity. The more interesting story is not how many campuses India is building, but what those campuses are being built for. As the market evolves, there is a growing need for strategic business and health-centric training disciplines in the country, through high-performing universities and centers of excellence. 

For centuries, universities were organized around the delivery of knowledge. Classrooms, lecture halls, labs, and libraries existed because information was scarce and had to be physically delivered to those who wanted it. Today, the internet and AI have inverted that scarcity. Information is abundant, immediate, and increasingly personalized. A student no longer needs a room, a building, or even a campus to access what a professor knows.

But education has always been about more than information. Access to knowledge as a freedom of choice was never just about access to facts. It is about what happens between people once the facts are available: the unexpected conversation after a lecture, the argument in a corridor, the collaboration between students from entirely different disciplines who would never otherwise cross paths. Innovation tends to live in those intersections, not in the lecture itself.

This reframes the architectural task. If a campus can no longer justify itself as the most efficient way to deliver information, it has to justify itself as something technology cannot replicate: a place built around belonging, mentorship, wellbeing, identity, and serendipity.

A sectional diagram of the recreation centre shows its library, gymnasium and indoor courts stacked around a central skylight, placing quiet study and active recreation within the same building, split consciously through the middle. Courtesy of Gensler and IILM.

The pattern shows up in specific design decisions now underway across the country. On the new Institute of Integrated Learning in Management University (IILM) campus currently taking shape in Delhi, a new recreation building, designed by our firm, has been organized “inside-out,” with the library pushed to the building’s edge rather than buried at its center, and careful acoustic zoning so that energetic sport and quiet study can share the same structure without one drowning out the other. A short distance away, a new academic building (also by Gensler) designed to serve more than 4,000 students has been built with open, expandable floorplates, specifically so departments can reconfigure teaching space as disciplines evolve, rather than locking the university into a fixed layout for decades. None of this is decorative. It’s what happens when a campus is designed as infrastructure for belonging and adaptability rather than as a container for lectures.

Climate is also involved in this recalibration. A campus built for a 50-year lifespan in India must account for heat, monsoon intensity, and rising cooling demand in ways a climate-controlled, information-delivery building never had to. Passive design strategies, thicker envelopes, shaded circulation, and courtyards that pull air through a building rather than fight the climate with mechanical systems are becoming as central to campus design as any consideration of pedagogy. A building that cannot survive its own climate has little to offer the students it was built for, however well it is programmed. Increasingly, resilience and flexibility are treated as the same design problem: a campus has to be able to change with its students and endure its environment, and the buildings failing to do both are the ones already being reconsidered.

India’s newer campuses increasingly resemble small cities in scale and ambition. They fold together housing, research, sport, culture, food, entrepreneurship and public life, rather than treating those as separate from the academic mission. That creates an opportunity to make the campus more porous, blurring the line between public and private, formal and informal, academic and social, institution and city. Ambitious projects cannot be built without a combined vision with the client, and at IILM we’ve been able to create a campus that is inside-out, with every space internally driven, designed from the point of view of the student and teacher experience. 

Adaptability becomes the operating principle rather than a nice-to-have. Instead of designing finished, fixed-purpose buildings, the more useful approach is to design frameworks: structures and spaces capable of evolving as programs, technologies, and communities change. A library is a useful test case. Historically a repository for books, many now assume it’s being made redundant by the same digital abundance reshaping the rest of the campus. In practice, libraries are being reimagined as spaces for focused research, group work, and interdisciplinary collision, one of the few places on campus still built for sustained attention. Cafeterias have undergone a similar shift, from amenity to social infrastructure. Ideas move over coffee as often as they move in seminar rooms.

A spillover transition space into the incubation centre creates an informal student collaboration space, inclusive of seating and workspaces overlooking the main ‘central green’ courtyard; one of several informal study spaces built into the campus landscape rather than confined to a singular function. Courtesy of Gensler, IILM & DesignCell.

There is a useful parallel in the workplace. Since the pandemic and years of remote and hybrid working, organizations globally have been investing in offices designed not simply to house employees but to pull them back voluntarily. The office that wins that argument is rarely the one with the most desks. It’s the one with the cafe worth lingering in, the informal meeting space that generates a conversation a video call never would, the amenity that makes coming in feel like a choice rather than an obligation. Universities are running a version of this, but at a larger scale and with a more captive, formative population.

The question a campus now has to answer is no longer whether students need a place to access information. They do not. The better question is whether they need a place designed for intentional interaction: a physical setting that fosters community, shared discovery, and the kind of self-formation that happens only in proximity to other people. India’s answer, playing out in steel, brick, and concrete across the country right now, is an emphatic yes. The classroom hasn’t failed. It has simply stopped being the only thing worth designing for.

Featured image: The main pathway that runs through the campus is a central spine connecting teaching, dining and amenity spaces across the campus, designed so students move between activities rather than retreating to a single building. Courtesy of Gensler and IILM.