The vertical campus

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has opened the door to international collaboration, encouraging foreign universities to establish campuses and co-develop programs with Indian institutions. Cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru are emerging as key hubs for transnational education (TNE).

These reforms are creating a competitive landscape where local institutions seek global partnerships, and international universities must adapt their teaching, research, and student experiences to regional contexts.

BDP’s design for the University of Southampton’s Delhi campus reflects this new direction. In close collaboration with the university, our UK education experts and local New Delhi studio repurposed an existing office building into a flexible, state-of-the-art learning environment. The design fosters collaboration, adaptability, and vibrant interaction between students, academics, and industry to deliver a global educational experience.

This new opportunity also poses a challenge: how can universities maintain consistency in teaching, learning, and research standards across different cultural and geographic contexts – while also building a student experience that reflects their core values?

Meeting this challenge will require innovative models for international collaboration and campus design. The concept of a vertical campus, a shared, multi-institutional environment embedded within global cities, offers one possible solution. These hubs could serve as scalable platforms for delivering a consistent academic experience while ensuring collaboration between universities, local partners, and urban communities.

Traditional university campuses are typically arranged across expansive horizontal layouts, where green spaces and public realm serve as connective tissue between buildings. Anchors such as gyms, libraries, and food halls are strategically placed along primary circulation routes to encourage movement and interaction. Academic departments often occupy distinct buildings, each with integrated spaces for innovation and knowledge exchange.

By contrast, the vertical campus reimagines this model within a compact, urban footprint. Anchors are concentrated at the ground level to attract footfall, creating a vibrant public realm. Green spaces and knowledge exchange zones spiral upwards, linking the active base with progressively more private departmental levels. Shared innovation hubs are strategically interspersed throughout to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. At the top, a destination library acts as both a beacon and a draw, encouraging movement through the building and providing panoramic, inspiring study space.

This model also supports a unique opportunity: housing multiple international branch campuses (IBCs) within a single vertical structure. Each IBC retains its identity but is linked through shared lecture theatres, teaching labs, collaborative zones, and green spaces, giving a sense of community, collaboration, and intellectual exchange.

One of the central challenges of housing multiple IBCs within a single structure lies in curating a coherent and inclusive student experience. The vertical campus addresses this by proposing a distributed network of shared social and academic spaces. common floors that promote cross-institutional collaboration, interdisciplinary learning, and a sense of collective identity.

These spaces could support specialist functions, such as multidisciplinary teaching labs, open study environments, or innovation incubators, positioned strategically to maintain spatial equity. The vertical campus thus becomes more than a site of co-location; it becomes a platform for rethinking how universities relate to each other and the city at large.